Highcharts Stock

What it is

Highcharts Stock is the financial-charting member of the Highcharts library family: candlestick and OHLC series, a navigator strip under the chart, a preset range selector, stacked panes, and data grouping that folds a long series into days, weeks or months as you zoom. It is sold as a $366 add-on to Highcharts Core rather than on its own, so a Stock licence always carries Core and its thirty-odd general chart types with it.

The indicator set is why most people arrive. The Stock documentation lists 48 built-in technical indicators — 19 overlays (Bollinger Bands, Ichimoku, Keltner Channels, Supertrend, VWAP, Pivot Points) and 29 oscillators (MACD, RSI, Stochastic, ATR, DMI, OBV, the linear-regression family), each a separate module loaded after indicators/indicators.js. The marketing page still says "over 40"; the source tree has 48 indicator directories, matching the docs table. Stock Tools adds an analyst-facing toolbar — trendlines, Fibonacci, measure, annotations — that end users drive without a developer.

Rendering is SVG; the optional boost module swaps in a WebGL canvas inside the SVG for very large series, at the cost of animations, dashed lines, stacking and non-circular markers. The vendor's own boost sample is a stock chart of 600 series and 72,000 points. highstock.js is 382 KB minified, about 136 KB gzipped at v13.0.2, before indicators (another 21 KB gzipped) and before the accessibility and export modules — several times the footprint of the free canvas libraries, and the trade you are making for the indicator set.

Pricing

Per developer seat, in US dollars, where a developer is "any person who will be simultaneously working with the API and/or source code". What moves the number is not the tier but the deployment: Internal (intranet and private sites only) is $370 a year for Core plus Stock, SaaS (one public application) $732, SaaS+ (up to five) $2,198. Each has a perpetual equivalent bought once instead — $850, $1,678 and $5,034. The webshop sells up to six seats; above that, and for shipping Highcharts inside something customers install or host, it is an OEM quote.

Both shapes carry the Highcharts Advantage plan — 10 support hours per developer, 36-hour first response, doubled and cut to 17 hours on Advantage Plus. Cancel it on a perpetual licence and you keep your version but not new releases; cancel an annual licence and you must stop using the software altogether.

Free is genuinely free but narrow: a natural person's hobby project, or an accredited school's coursework, on community-forum support. EULA 1.0 of 20 January 2026 replaced the old "fair use" wording with explicit exclusions — employers, freelance clients, non-profits, start-ups, monetised blogs, and internal prototyping or R&D all require a paid licence. There is no time-limited commercial trial, and no licence key or activation either: the licence is a legal document, and compliance is policed by CDN traffic analysis and crawling.

Data & coverage

None. Highcharts Stock draws whatever series you hand it and ships no prices, no symbols and no history; budget for a market-data provider separately. The one first-party exception is the Morningstar data connector, which is not part of a normal licence — it is sold only under a Partner-Data License and additionally requires your own Morningstar Direct Web Services account.

Integrations

Official wrappers for React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, Flutter, Node.js and TypeScript, with typings in the npm package; highcharts-react-official (MIT) last published 3.2.3 in October 2025, and the Angular and Vue wrappers were both updated in 2026. Highcharts for Python is a separately priced integration (+$110/year) published by partner HCP LLC — check it before you commit, since the highcharts-stock package on PyPI is still on 1.7.0 from April 2024 while its highcharts-core sibling reached 1.11.0 in May 2026.

Releases are steady rather than frequent: v13.0.0 on 11 June 2026, then 13.0.1 and 13.0.2 in August. The public repository is not archived and had commits on the day this card was written.

Limitations

• The licence is the barrier, and it is per developer. A solo builder whose one public side project earns anything pays $732 a year or $1,678 once, for Core plus Stock at a single seat. A three-person team triples it. Against the free libraries, this is the whole decision.
• An open-source project cannot use it. Redistributing the source or a modified build to third parties is prohibited outright, as is any derivative work put to commercial use.
• Non-profits pay commercial rates. The free Personal Use licence explicitly excludes them; only accredited institutions get the educational grant, and only for teaching and unfunded research.
• "Source available" is not open source. The code sits on GitHub and npm for transparency and non-commercial experimentation, but GitHub reports no recognised licence and there is no SPDX identifier to check — the terms are the EULA.
• Accessibility ships as a module you must remember to load. It is included with every licence, but forget the file and you get a console warning and an inaccessible chart.

Alternatives

Lightweight Charts, from TradingView, is free under Apache-2.0 and renders on canvas at a fraction of the bundle size, but ships no indicators and no drawing tools. TradingView's Advanced Charts is free for approved applicants and brings both, at the cost of a hosted-data adapter and an approval process. ECharts and Chart.js are free and general-purpose with no financial affordances at all — no navigator, no range selector, no data grouping.