Trade Ideas vs TrendSpider: testing the scan is what decides it

Both of these are bought for the same job, a scanner that tells you when a US stock meets your conditions instead of a screen you re-run, and the cards above put them a few dollars apart at the bottom. They are not a few dollars apart for the same thing. Trade Ideas divides its two plans by feature and puts testing behind the top one; TrendSpider gives every plan the same features and divides its four by the shortest bar it will scan or test. Which of those two units your trading uses up decides the bill.

What each one scans against

Trade Ideas builds a scan from more than 500 alert and filter conditions and streams matches into alert windows the moment a condition triggers. Its card records no bar-size floor on either plan: TI Standard at $127 is the whole scanner, with real-time data, ten charts on screen, price alerts, paper trading and the TI Wave overlay. What TI Premium adds is everything around the scan, chiefly Holly. Holly reselects a strategy set every night against simulated backtests of past data and, during the session, issues named buy and sell alerts with suggested entry, stop, target and exit levels. That is why its card is flagged as making recommendations. The track record is the vendor's own and cannot be checked from outside a subscription, so treat the scanner as the thing being compared here.

TrendSpider starts from a chart that draws itself: trendlines, Fibonacci levels and chart patterns detected automatically across several timeframes, with a scanner that finds setups without the screen being written by hand. The scan runs in real time over a universe, but only on the bar size your plan allows: two hours on Standard, five minutes on Premium, one minute on Enhanced and Advanced. Its AI is flagged on its card as a research feature, not as a recommendation engine.

So a daily or two-hour swing scan is an $82 purchase on TrendSpider and a $127 one on Trade Ideas. A five-minute scan is $137 against $127. A one-minute scan is $183 against $127. Those are monthly list prices on both sides, because that is the only basis on which the two cards can be compared; more on that below.

Where each plan stops

Trade Ideas' cap is a feature line. At $127 there is no backtesting, so there is no way inside the product to check whether a scan you built has ever matched anything worth matching. The OddsMaker backtester, Holly, smart risk levels, the RBI/GBI window and auto trading all arrive together at $254.

TrendSpider's cap is resolution, plus the size of a test: 2,000 candles on Standard, 10,000 and 150 symbols per test on Premium, 20,000 and 250 on Enhanced, 30,000 and 510 on Advanced, which is also the plan whose card note gives 100 bots and 400 alerts. Features are identical across the four plans, bots included, and the backtester works under the same bar-size floor as the scanner.

That makes the comparison flip once a test is part of the job. Scan and backtest on five-minute bars: $137 on TrendSpider, $254 on Trade Ideas. On one-minute bars: $183 against $254.

Neither card records how many scans or alerts a lower plan allows. Trade Ideas states no count at all; TrendSpider states its counts only for Advanced. If you run many scans at once, that is the number to get from each vendor before paying.

The data feed

Both put real-time US equities and ETFs in the plan price. The differences are at the edges, and in how much each card says about them.

TrendSpider's card spells out who pays what. Equities, ETFs, forex and crypto are included for non-professionals; futures are $7.50 a month, OPRA options $9.50, a self-certified professional owes NASDAQ $29 a month, and OTC and some index feeds are delayed up to 15 minutes. The guide to real-time data fees explains why professional status changes the line.

The Trade Ideas card says real-time data is part of TI Standard and that exchange rules for live data are why there is no functional free trial. It does not say whether a professional subscriber pays exchange fees on top. That field is blank, not zero.

Coverage is lopsided. Trade Ideas is US stocks and ETFs only: no futures, forex or crypto, and no options analytics behind the options orders it can route. TrendSpider adds US options with an options map, CME futures, forex and crypto. Neither has a non-US listed stock at any price.

Desktop or browser

The full Trade Ideas product is a Windows desktop application. The browser build is real but is not the full platform, and a free account buys only 15-minute delayed data on the browser dashboards, metered. On a Mac the vendor's own advice is Parallels or a cloud Windows instance.

TrendSpider is a web app, with iOS and Android apps besides. There is nothing to install and no operating system to choose.

Automation and the broker link

Trade Ideas sends orders out through its Brokerage+ module to Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, E*TRADE and Alpaca by API, with partner arrangements at moomoo, Centerpoint and Cobra. Auto trading sits on TI Premium. Money Machine, the automated-execution layer the site promotes, was an alpha in simulated mode only, restricted to Premium, when the card was checked. It has no webhooks, no scripting language and no public API: alerts stay inside the application. What it has that TrendSpider does not is paper trading, real-time, on the $127 plan.

TrendSpider's alerts and bots post to webhooks, and custom indicators are written in JavaScript inside the platform. Execution runs through SignalStack: manual order entry comes free with the subscription, automated execution is capped at five orders a month, and past that SignalStack bills you separately. Its card records no paper trading. Neither has a data API to pull scan results into your own code.

Prices, dates and trials

Both cards were verified on the same day, 13 September 2026, for pricing, capabilities and coverage, so nothing here rests on two snapshots taken months apart.

They do not quote the same tab. The Trade Ideas card gives both monthly and annual prices: $127 or $1,068 a year, an effective $89 a month; $254 or $2,136 a year, an effective $178. Annual billing is its only discount. The TrendSpider card gives the monthly list prices, $82, $137, $183 and $321, says annual billing discounts them without stating the annual figure, and records a sale on 13 September 2026 advertising up to 45% off the first twelve months, excluding add-ons and data feeds and non-refundable. A reader comparing annual prices has a number for one side only.

Neither can be tried for free. TrendSpider's trial is 14 days for $19 to $49, non-refundable; a full plan bought afterwards can be refunded within 72 hours, minus the trial fee. Trade Ideas sells a "Test Drive", a quarterly window of one or two weeks at Premium level for a fee its card calls small without stating it.

The recommendation

TrendSpider, until the job is a live intraday scan of US stocks on a Windows machine that you do not intend to backtest inside the tool. From that moment, Trade Ideas Standard: $127 a month or an effective $89 billed annually for a scanner whose card records no bar-size floor, against $183 for TrendSpider's one-minute scan, plus paper trading TrendSpider does not offer. The moment you want to test the scan as well, the order reverses again: TrendSpider at $137 or $183 does that, where Trade Ideas asks $254. And if you trade options, futures, forex or crypto alongside stocks, or work on a Mac, it is TrendSpider whatever the bar size.

For the same TrendSpider plans set against a charting platform rather than a scanner, see TradingView vs TrendSpider. The rest of the category is on the charting platforms and screeners page.