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: one call shape (obb.equity.price.historical) over 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. V5, merged on 29 September 2026 as the openbb 5.0.0 metapackage, relicensed all of it from AGPL-3.0 to Apache-2.0 and cut the bundled connectors to seventeen. The desktop app has also taken over the old OpenBB Hub's job: a post of 3 December 2025 moved API-key storage into ODP Desktop, and my.openbb.co now redirects away.

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 its products will be released under a permissive licence. An edit to that letter dated 1 October 2026 says a non-profit, OpenBQ, funded by BrightQuery, now stewards the technology; the GitHub repository redirects to its openbq-org organisation, and the Workspace codebase is proposed for FINOS. BrightQuery is building a hosted "BQ Workspace", and on 8 October 2026 OpenBB's own Workspace sign-up redirected to its waitlist. Liveness in dates: last commit on develop 2 October 2026, ODP Desktop 2.0.0 on 30 September 2026, repository not archived.

Pricing

The open-source stack costs nothing and always did. The pricing page still lists Workspace Community free for one person — no export, no sharing, 20 Copilot queries a day, and the only edition whose usage OpenBB collects analytics on — but its "Start now" link led to BrightQuery's waitlist on 8 October 2026. Lite is $2,400 a year for a team under ten, self-hosted only, with the expired 50%-off badge gone. 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. With the company closing and the hosted app already pointing elsewhere, buy a team licence only against a written support term.

Data & coverage

None of its own — it ships connectors, not data. Since V5 the repository holds seventeen: SEC, FRED, the Federal Reserve, BLS, EIA, ECB, IMF, OECD, JODI, CFTC, FINRA, US government sources, Fama-French, Cboe, Nasdaq (including Nasdaq Nordic), TMX and Deribit. BLS, EIA and FRED want a free key and CFTC a free app token; the rest need none. Cboe supplies US stock and index history, quotes and options chains, TMX Canadian listings, Deribit crypto derivatives. The commercial connectors are gone: V5 removed FMP, Tiingo, Alpha Vantage, Intrinio, Benzinga, TradingEconomics, Finviz and yfinance among sixteen, and Polygon went in v4.7.0. Latency and history are whatever the source gives.

Integrations

Each connector is its own package. pip install openbb 5.0.0 pulls all seventeen plus the CLI and the MCP server, but the standard routers that give the shared call shape — obb.equity, obb.etf, obb.derivatives and the rest — sit behind an extra: pip install "openbb[routers]". Without them, a provider such as Cboe registers its commands under its own aliases. The removed connectors' last releases on PyPI pin openbb-core below 2.0, so they will not install beside V5; openbb-yfinance 2.0.0 is the exception, published on 29 September 2026 from its maintainer's own repository rather than OpenBB's.

MCP runs in both directions, and the two servers are different products. The open-source one is openbb-mcp-server (2.0.1, 28 September 2026), launched with the openbb-mcp command over streamable HTTP by default; it wraps the ODP REST app — or any FastAPI app you point --app at. Each session can serve only chosen tool categories, or switch on discovery so the model finds tools with search_tools and runs them with call_tool, and run_pipeline chains calls on the server instead of passing rows through the conversation. 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; the pricing page lists it on all three editions, and it lives or dies with the hosted Workspace. 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.
• Since V5, no commercial feeds out of the box. A script written against 4.x with provider="fmp" or provider="yfinance" breaks on upgrade; pin 4.7.2, under its AGPL-3.0 licence, or move the call to a source V5 still carries.
• An endpoint exists only for the providers that implement it, so changing --provider quietly changes which fields come back.
• Desktop app is Windows and macOS only; no Linux build is published.
• The company is closing. The code has a steward; the hosted Workspace already points to someone else's waitlist.

Alternatives

For raw data rather than a layer over it, the providers OpenBB wrapped until V5 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.