Trade Ideas vs Scanz: one tiers by feature, the other by scans

Both are bought to watch the US stock market tick by tick and say the moment something meets your conditions, and their retail plans sit between $89 and $254 a month. The two pricing pages divide that range along different lines. Trade Ideas sells the whole scanner on its cheaper plan and keeps testing, Holly's signals and automation for the dearer one. Scanz gives every plan the same scanning features and divides them by how many scans run at once, how many are saved, whether alerts exist and whether you get the desktop app. Before comparing any price, put each plan in the other one's terms.

Which plan is the comparable one

Scanz Starter, $89 a month, is the lowest figure on either page, and it is not a Trade Ideas alternative. It runs one scan at a time in a browser or on mobile web, keeps one saved scan of each kind and one watchlist of 20 symbols, and has no alerts. That is enough to learn the product. It is not enough for the job both are bought for, several conditions streaming at once while you watch something else.

The like-for-like pair is Scanz Pro at $199 against Trade Ideas Standard at $127. Pro adds simultaneous scans, unlimited saved scans, alerts and watchlists, custom columns and the desktop app. Standard is the full Trade Ideas scanner: more than 500 alert and filter conditions, ten charts on screen, price alerts and real-time paper trading. Month to month, that is $72 a month in Trade Ideas' favour, $864 a year.

The annual comparison is one-sided. Trade Ideas prints both: Standard is $1,068 a year, an effective $89 a month. Scanz says annual billing is offered inside the app at a price its pricing page does not print. So the only annual figure a reader can compare is Trade Ideas' $1,068 against Scanz Pro at $2,388 on monthly billing. And Trade Ideas' effective annual rate lands on exactly the same $89 as Scanz Starter's monthly one, for a far larger product, paid up front.

What each one scans for

The two describe their scans differently, and the difference is the choice for some readers.

Trade Ideas builds a scan from more than 500 data points and streams matches into alert windows as they trigger. The card's coverage is US equities and ETFs, with news flagged as a capability.

Scanz has four kinds of scan, each in its own workspace. Data scans filter on more than 65 real-time criteria from one-minute to daily, across pre-market, regular and after-hours sessions. Signal scans stream fourteen kinds of event, among them new highs, crossovers, relative-volume spikes, float rotation and block trades. News scans and SEC filing scans filter the headline and filing stream for every US ticker by keyword. Its card names OTC markets alongside Nasdaq, NYSE and AMEX, and puts a Level 2 book with time and sales, charts and trade prints on all three plans.

Two of those are blanks on the Trade Ideas card, not absences. It does not mention OTC stocks either way, and it does not mention a Level 2 window. If you trade OTC names, or read the book in the same window as the scan, ask Trade Ideas before buying rather than taking the silence as a no. Neither card describes earnings or valuation filters. Both are tools for price and volume, not for the businesses behind them.

Nothing on Scanz picks a trade: a Scanz signal is an event you configure. Trade Ideas Premium adds Holly, which issues named buy and sell alerts with entry, stop and target levels, on a record the vendor publishes and nobody outside a subscription can check. Its card flags that as a recommendation feature. If you are buying the scanner, Holly is not part of this comparison.

Testing a scan, and acting on one

Testing. Scanz has no backtester at any price. Trade Ideas has the OddsMaker, on Premium only, at $254 a month or an effective $178 billed annually. At Standard neither product can tell you whether a scan you built has ever matched anything worth matching. Above that, only Trade Ideas can, at double its entry price.

Paper trading. Trade Ideas Standard includes real-time paper trading. Scanz has none.

Orders. Trade Ideas routes orders to Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, E*TRADE and Alpaca through its Brokerage Plus module, with partner arrangements at Centerpoint and Cobra. Auto trading sits on Premium. Scanz places no orders below Ultra. Broker integrations, hotkeys and risk limits are listed as coming soon, and the only execution path today is the automated trading hooks on the $999 Ultra plan, sold through sales.

Code. Neither has a public data API on its retail plans. Scanz's API comes with Ultra and is not documented in public. Trade Ideas has no API, no webhooks and no scripting. On both, the alerts stay inside the application.

Where it runs

Trade Ideas is a Windows desktop application. The browser build is real but is not the full platform, and the vendor's advice to Mac users is Parallels or a cloud Windows box. Scanz Pro includes a desktop app for both Windows and Mac. Scanz Starter is browser and mobile web only.

Trials, refunds and the data line

Scanz has a 7-day trial on Starter and Pro that needs a card and converts to a paid month on day seven. After that, its refund policy, effective 10 March 2026, makes every charge final, renewals included. Trade Ideas' pricing page, read on 24 October 2026, offers no trial. Its free account reaches the browser Web Dashboard on 15-minute delayed data, with live access for a limited time, and its billing policy still provides for occasional paid "Test Drive" events whose fee is final. The same page now names the plans Standard (Core) and Premium (Apex), and lists Premium's signals as "1st Gen AI Signals", although the site's menu still calls them Holly AI Signals.

Both put real-time US data inside the plan price. Trade Ideas' billing policy says it pays the exchange fees for non-professional users and that a professional subscriber pays the additional exchange fees, without printing the amount. The Scanz card does not say what a professional pays on top: Scanz does not name its exchange feeds, and its terms carry the usual non-professional representations, which is a blank, not a zero. The guide to real-time data fees explains why that line can change the total.

What these figures rest on

The Scanz card was verified on 23 October 2026. The Trade Ideas card's pricing and capabilities were re-verified on 24 October 2026, with the same prices; its coverage dates from 13 September 2026.

The recommendation

Trade Ideas Standard if you trade from Windows and want several live scans with alerts and paper trading for the least money. That is $127 a month, or an effective $89 billed annually, against $199 for the Scanz plan that does the same.

Scanz Pro the moment you work on a Mac, or what you scan for is a headline or an SEC filing, or an OTC name, with Level 2 in the same window. Those are the things its card documents and the Trade Ideas card does not. Try it for the seven days before the first charge, because after that nothing is refunded. Skip Starter unless one scan at a time without alerts really is the job.

Trade Ideas Premium, at $254 or an effective $178, if you need to test a scan before trusting it. Scanz cannot do that at any price.

For Trade Ideas against a platform that tests scans on every plan, see Trade Ideas vs TrendSpider. The rest of the category is on the charting platforms and screeners page.