OneTick

What it is

OneTick is an enterprise tick data platform — capture, storage, historical query and streaming analytics in one system — sold to hedge funds, banks, exchanges and compliance departments. The vendor merged with KX on 15 September 2025, so it now sits in the same catalogue as kdb+, and the two products compete for the same budget line at the same institutions.

Its distinguishing idea is that a query is a directed graph. You assemble event processors — the vendor counts hundreds of them, including transaction-cost and best-execution analytics — into a graph in a visual designer, and the same graph runs over stored history or over a live feed without being rewritten. That is the property an institution is actually buying: research and production run identical logic, and the surveillance case gets the same engine as the backtest. There is also a SQL interface and two Python APIs — a Pandas-style one and a graph-building one — so the graph is not the only way in.

The performance claims are the vendor's own and are not tested here: over 10 million ticks per second per core in bulk processing, 400,000 to 600,000 messages per second per core on real-time collection, and more than 10 billion messages a day across its installed base.

Pricing

Nothing is published. Not a rate card, not a per-query price, not a starting figure, on either the product's own site or KX's — and that absence is itself the planning fact. Every other card in this category lets you estimate the bill from a download and a machine size; here the number comes from a demo, a trial and a negotiation, and it arrives attached to scope, core counts and data licensing you have not seen yet. The one structural hint the vendor gives is elastic burst licensing for queries that fan out across hundreds or thousands of cores, which implies compute is metered somewhere in the contract.

Data & coverage

Unusually for this category, the vendor also sells the ticks. The on-premise platform arrives empty, but OneTick Cloud is a managed service over normalised, cleansed exchange data — more than 200 global equity, futures and options markets, trades and quotes back to 1993, Level 2 and Level 3 book depth, US, Canadian, European and Asia-Pacific venues, and derivatives from CME, ICE and Eurex; the published coverage samples add FX and metals, fixed income and crypto venues alongside the listed markets. Queries run server-side and return CSV, Parquet or a dashboard, which is the point: you do not download gigabytes to compute one day's slippage. What the subscription covers in exchange licensing is a contract term, not a product feature.

Integrations

onetick-py on PyPI is the vendor's own client, MIT-licensed and published by OneMarketData, at 1.212.0 on 14 September 2026 — actively maintained, but useless without a cloud account or an installed server. A REST API, a SQL API, the graphical query designer and Jupyter-friendly Python access round it out, with NumPy, Pandas and Matplotlib in the documented workflow.

Limitations

• No published price, and no self-serve path to one. Budgeting requires a sales cycle.
• Half the documentation is public, and it is the client half. The onetick-py reference is open and detailed, down to how the engine buffers ticks; the server's own manuals, the deployment guides and every licence term are not, so the operational burden is the part you cannot size before a trial.
• Query graphs are portable nowhere. OTQ graphs and event processors are the vendor's, the way q is KX's — the migration cost is part of the purchase.
• Data licensing sits on top. Exchange content carries the exchange's fees, and what the subscription covers is negotiated rather than listed.
• Not a fit for one person. There is no free tier, no community edition and no small plan.

Alternatives

kdb+ is now a sibling product and publishes an actual price ladder, including a free 16 GB community edition. ClickHouse and QuestDB do the storage and the as-of join for nothing, leaving you to source the data — which is the trade this product exists to remove. Databento sells normalised historical and live tick data with published per-gigabyte prices if it is the data rather than the platform you need.

See the rest of the tick data storage category.