OpenBB

What it is

OpenBB's open-source half is the Open Data Platform — the OpenBB Platform, released under the ODP name on 23 October 2025. It is a provider-agnostic layer, not a data vendor: pip install openbb gives one call shape (obb.equity.price.historical) over thirty-odd independent connector packages, and the same endpoints come back out as a FastAPI REST app, a CLI, a Windows/macOS desktop app and openbb-mcp-server, the vendor's own MCP server.

The paid half is OpenBB Workspace, a dashboard UI with a Copilot. On 25 August 2026 the founder announced the company is winding down and will re-release Workspace, ODP, Copilot and the Excel add-in under a permissive licence — order and timing to follow, and nothing published since. The letter opens as a dismissible overlay on every page of the site, including the one still selling Lite. Take the liveness as dates rather than adjectives: no commit on the default develop branch since 20 July 2026, none on the v5 branch that was assembling the next major version since 28 July 2026, newest release tag 25 April 2026, repository not archived.

Pricing

The open-source stack costs nothing and always did. Workspace Community is free for one person — no export, no sharing, 20 Copilot queries a day, and the only edition whose usage OpenBB collects analytics on. Lite is $2,400 a year for a team under ten, self-hosted only, still shown struck through beside $1,200 under a "50% off until 31 Aug" badge whose LITE50 code the checkout link still prefills. Read the Copilot row before buying it: Lite has no Copilot in either form, while Community may at least bring its own API key and Pro gets one deployed for it. Pro is quoted and adds the Excel add-in, SSO, multi-entity and white-labelling; a Snowflake native app is $500 per seat per year. All annual. Given the wind-down, buy a team licence only against a written support term.

Data & coverage

None of its own — the docs say outright that OpenBB does not host or serve data and supplies connectors without warranty. SEC, FRED, ECB, IMF, OECD, Cboe, Finviz and Yahoo Finance need no key or a free one; FMP, Tiingo and Alpha Vantage need your key; Benzinga, Intrinio and TradingEconomics need a paid plan. Polygon is no longer among them: v4.7.0, in March 2026, removed the module from the repository and stopped publishing it — the docs provider table still lists it anyway. Latency and history are whatever you bought elsewhere.

Integrations

Thirty-two provider extensions live in the repository, each its own installable package, so a build has only the endpoints of the providers actually installed — and pip install openbb is narrower than the docs table implies. In the 4.7.2 metadata openbb-yfinance, openbb-cboe, openbb-ecb and the MCP server itself sit behind extras; pip install "openbb[all]" gets them.

MCP runs in both directions, and the two servers are different products. The open-source one is openbb-mcp-server (1.4.1, 26 May 2026), launched with the openbb-mcp command; it wraps the ODP REST app — or any FastAPI app you point --app at — and its discovery tools let each session switch on only the tool categories it needs instead of loading the whole platform into the context window. The command name is not the package name, and PyPI has no openbb-mcp project at all. The hosted Workspace MCP is a /mcp endpoint that bridges Claude Code, Codex or Cursor into a live Workspace browser tab to read dashboards, fetch widget data and build widgets — listed on all three editions including free Community, one bridge per user, dead the moment the tab closes. Inside Workspace the Copilot is itself an MCP client calling third-party servers, and Agent Rita, the reference agent for wiring your own model in, is a separate MIT-licensed repository.

Limitations

• No data, no broker, no order routing, no backtester. It is plumbing.
• AGPL-3.0-only, still, on every branch — the promised permissive relicensing has no date and has not landed. Serve a modified copy over a network and you owe those users your source.
• An endpoint exists only for the providers that implement it, so changing --provider quietly changes which fields come back.
• Desktop app is Windows 11 and macOS 10.15+ only.
• The company is closing. The code will outlive it; the hosted Workspace may not.

Alternatives

For raw data rather than a layer over it, the providers OpenBB wraps sell direct — Massive, Intrinio, Tiingo, EODHD, Financial Modeling Prep — and several ship MCP servers of their own. The rest of the market data APIs are the comparison.