TradingView vs ProRealTime: a subscription plus exchange fees, or a licence paid in trades

The usual reader here trades European shares, often US ones too, and has narrowed the choice to these two. Both chart everything that reader trades, on desktop, web and phone. Both script in a language that runs nowhere else. Neither has an API. The difference lies in three things: what the bill is paid in, what a real-time European price costs, and what keeps running after you close the screen.

What the bill is paid in

TradingView is a dollar subscription. Plans cost $12.95, $29.95, $59.95 and $199.95 a month on annual billing, and month-to-month adds $24 to $480 a year. The subscription covers no exchange fees. Each exchange's real-time feed is its own monthly line.

ProRealTime prices the desktop licence in euros: Complete €24 and Premium €70 a month, excluding VAT. You can pay that in cash, or in trades. Through Interactive Brokers or Saxo, each trade on a standard-sized instrument earns one PRT credit, worth €1 against the VAT-inclusive price. CFD and forex trades earn none. At France's 20% VAT, Complete is free from 29 trades in a month and Premium from 84. The credits also pay for exchange-direct data add-ons, so each add-on raises the number of trades needed to reach zero.

Read that rebate in the broker's own unit. ProRealTime's Interactive Brokers page quotes €1.00 as the commission on a €1,200 Euronext stock order. One credit is therefore about the commission on a small order: it gives back the commission on trades you would place anyway, and it is no reason to place more. The vendor says the same, that credits are not meant to encourage a trading frequency. IG is a third route. Premium costs €30 a month and is waived in any month IG earns the equivalent of four standard contracts. That account trades CFDs and needs a €1,000 deposit.

European real-time, line by line

Here the two price lists diverge, and the gap is not in the headline prices.

ProRealTime includes Cboe Europe. Every version, including the free Web one, carries real-time prints for US stocks and for Western European stocks, from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, the UK and more, from Cboe's venues. They are free to non-professional users. They are Cboe's prints, not the primary exchange's, so a quote can differ from Euronext or Xetra to the tick. The exchange-direct add-ons start at €5 a month for Euronext stocks, €5 for Italian stocks, €9 for German stocks (Xetra and Frankfurt) and €9 for the London Stock Exchange.

TradingView has no Cboe Europe stock feed. Euronext, Xetra and London are delayed until you buy them. A non-professional pays $9.95 a month for the Euronext bundle, which also covers Borsa Italiana, Oslo and Dublin, $19.95 for Xetra and Frankfurt, and $9.95 for London. The professional rates on the same list are $135, $101 and $64. The free real-time German prices TradingView does show come from Tradegate, Gettex and Lang & Schwarz. Those are real trades on secondary venues, not the Xetra book. For US stocks the two do the same thing: both show Cboe prints free, and the listing-exchange feeds are extra.

So for a Paris-and-Frankfurt watchlist on primary-exchange data, TradingView Essential costs $12.95 plus $29.90 of exchange fees, $42.85 a month before tax. ProRealTime Complete costs €24 plus €14 before VAT, or no cash at all once credits cover both lines. If Cboe's prints are good enough, ProRealTime's figure drops to the bare licence, and the free Web version charts the same prints without the scans and backtests.

What keeps running when you close the screen

ProOrder places orders. A ProBuilder trading system runs on ProRealTime's servers and sends orders to Interactive Brokers, Saxo or IG while the platform is closed, from Complete up. Premium runs up to 100 systems at once. Paper trading uses the same engine.

TradingView's alerts stop at a URL. Alerts run server-side with the tab closed, and from Essential up an alert can POST JSON to a webhook. Placing the order is somebody else's software: a bot, a broker bridge, or your own server. Trading through a connected broker on TradingView is manual order entry. TradingView lists Interactive Brokers, Saxo and IG among its connectable brokers, so the broker does not decide this. The work does: if you will not run the thing that receives the webhook, a system that trades unattended means ProRealTime.

History, scripts, and what leaves

TradingView caps chart history at 5,000 to 40,000 bars by plan. Premium's 20,000 one-minute bars cover about 39 Euronext sessions of eight and a half hours. ProRealTime Premium shows up to 200,000 candles on real-time charts, and up to 1 million in a Historical Data Mode reserved for Premium and meant for analysis and backtesting. ProRealTime's Premium page lists about ten years of Microsoft one-minute history in that mode.

Pine Script has the larger public library. ProBuilder has ProRealCode, a community site with more than 1,000 shared indicators and systems. Code written in either one stays where it was written. TradingView exports a chart's bars as CSV from Plus up, plus strategy reports. ProRealTime exports watchlists, workspaces, systems and backtest reports, and nothing else.

Where one is simply absent

ProRealTime covers the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. TradingView covers 50-plus countries, so anything listed in Asia, Australia or Latin America ends the comparison. ProRealTime trades through three brokers. TradingView connects to many more.

The recommendation

ProRealTime if you already trade through Interactive Brokers or Saxo. There the licence and the exchange add-ons are paid back by trades you were placing anyway. You get Cboe Europe in real time from the free Web version up, and ProOrder is the only way on either platform to run a system that trades unattended without a second service to receive the alerts.

TradingView the moment your broker is not Interactive Brokers, Saxo or IG, or anything you trade is listed outside the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. Price European exchange data as its own line before comparing the plans. For a Euronext and Xetra watchlist, that line costs more than the Essential plan it sits on.

The rest of the category is on the charting platforms and screeners page.