ATAS

What it is

ATAS is a Windows desktop platform for order flow, built around the footprint — each candle opened up into the volume traded at every price inside it, split by buyer and seller — plus cluster statistics, delta, a Smart DOM and a Smart Tape. Where Bookmap draws resting liquidity as a heatmap over time, ATAS starts from executed volume inside the bar: the older and more widely taught way of reading the same tape.

The audience is narrow: futures, mostly CME, a handful of contracts at a time. There is no screener, no scanner and no strategy backtester — Market Replay is a recording you step through, not a simulation of a rule. A Trading Journal module tallies PnL, win rate, profit factor and drawdown from executed trades and exports the lists to CSV. A liquidity heatmap tied to the chart and DOM ships on every plan as a beta, and from Plus the Following Manager copies a master account's orders or net position onto follower accounts, each with its own volume ratio.

Pricing

Four plans billed in euros by a Latvian company, and the tier that matters is Pro, because it is the first one that can connect a real-time futures or stock feed at all. Start is free and permanent with no card; Plus at €24.95/month carries the same data restriction and buys six instruments, advanced indicators, Renko and Range frames and Market Replay. Pro is €69.95/month with 20 instruments, three connections, the new options board with its strategy modelling, and four options-chain indicators. Ultra at €89.95/month lifts every limit and adds the Options X-Ray suite; its market-by-order bundle is a bonus until 27 November 2026, after which the page warns it may become paid on every plan.

Those are the month-to-month figures, and all of them exclude VAT, which EU residents pay at their own country's rate. An annual plan cuts them to €19.95, €39.95 and €49.95, can be paused twice a year for 14 days, and each tier also sells outright at €999, €1799 and €1999. Read the lifetime option carefully: the licence agreement grants updates at the vendor's discretion and states plainly that features may not be maintained on an ongoing basis. The 14-day trial is one per user, takes a card or PayPal and converts to the paid plan unless you return to Start first; paying at once instead adds 14 free days. ATAS refunds a first payment in full if you ask within 14 days.

Data & coverage

No plan includes a price feed, and this is the number a licence price hides. The one data-backed module is Ultra's Options X-Ray suite: twelve SPX 0DTE indicators drawn on the ES chart from Cboe-derived data, updated every minute, with no feed of your own required. dxFeed runs an ATAS-specific order page where the subscription is locked to this one application. At non-professional rates it charges $39/month for CME market depth, $99 for the CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX depth bundle, $65 for Eurex futures Level 2, $74 for Nasdaq TotalView with NBBO, $74 for the NYSE Arca book, $64 for Cboe EDGX and $179 for the US equities bundle. Top-of-book-only tiers run $19 to $49. So a working Pro setup on CME is about €70 plus $39 a month, in two currencies, and a professional subscriber pays materially more.

The alternative is a futures broker's own Rithmic or CQG Continuum connection, where the broker bills the platform fee and the exchange passes its own market data fee through — cheaper on one exchange, and the only route to the MBO bundle, whose own description says it works with Rithmic and that dxFeed support is still in development.

Coverage is 25-plus exchanges and 3,000-plus instruments: CME, Eurex and HKEX futures, NYSE and NASDAQ equities and ETFs, options on both, and crypto spot and derivatives on Binance, Bybit, Bitget and OKX. US futures and equities are first-class here, not an afterthought behind crypto.

Integrations

Futures connect through CQG, CTS, dxFeed, Exante, Interactive Brokers, IQFeed, MetaTrader 5, NinjaTrader, Rithmic, Tai-Pan and Trading Technologies, plus two Russian-market gateways; futures brokers on CQG or Rithmic — AMP, Stage 5, Dorman, Lincoln Park — come in that way. Funded-account prop firms are a large part of the audience: The Trading Pit, BluSky, Vision Trade Futures, FunderPro, Trade OPM and the dxFeed Prop ecosystem, through Rithmic or dxFeed. Eight crypto venues and ATAS SIM, a 15-minute-delayed futures simulator, complete the list.

Extension is C# and only C#: indicators, calculation modules and automation strategies compile against the platform's own raw data, and finished ones can be sold through the ATAS marketplace. Alerts can be routed by webhook to Telegram, Discord or your own server. There is no REST API, no Python binding and no MCP server.

Limitations

• No price feed at any tier, including lifetime. Budget the feed before the licence.
• Start and Plus cannot connect real-time futures data, so the two cheapest paid tiers are analysis-after-the-fact for anyone trading futures.
• The classic platform is Windows only; on a Mac the native build is ATAS X, still a beta.
• The dxFeed subscription is licensed to ATAS alone and does not follow you to another platform.
• Market-by-order tools require Rithmic; on dxFeed they are listed as under development, and the bundle is an Ultra bonus dated to end on 27 November 2026.
• No screener, no scanner, no backtester. Market Replay replays, it does not test.
• The options tools are new. The board, strategy analyzer and chain indicators need a Rithmic or Interactive Brokers connection; the X-Ray suite covers SPX 0DTE only, and only on Ultra.
• No spot forex. The vendor's instrument table does list an FX section, but it is CME currency futures — 6E, 6B, 6J, the micros and the dollar index; spot pairs appear only in its MOEX section, outside the markets this card covers.

Alternatives

Bookmap for the liquidity heatmap rather than the footprint, at a similar total once data is added. Sierra Chart is the cheap end of order flow, with C++ instead of C#; Quantower covers footprint, scanners and 60-plus connections with a free tier; NinjaTrader adds the backtesting ATAS does not have. The wider field is in charting platforms and screeners.