YCharts

What it is

YCharts is a research and client-communication platform sold to financial advisors, RIAs, banks and asset managers. One subscription holds a data terminal over North American equities, funds, bonds and macro; portfolio construction and analysis; and the machinery that turns either into a branded PDF a client actually reads — proposals, a 30-module report builder, talking points, firm disclosures.

That last part is what separates it from Koyfin and TIKR, which sell the research and stop. The tiers say so plainly: Analyst is research with no proposals, portfolios or report builder, and Presenter is the mirror image — firm branding in full, but charting, dashboards, report builder and even proposals themselves marked View Only, and screeners absent altogether. Only Professional is both halves, so if you are not producing documents for someone else to read, much of what you would be quoted for is inert.

Pricing

Nothing is published. Four tiers — Analyst, Presenter, Professional, Enterprise — carry no figure beside any of them; the page asks you to call or schedule a conversation, and there is no self-serve checkout anywhere on the site. A 7-day trial is advertised, with no free plan behind it. Review sites quote annual numbers, which are not the vendor's and are not repeated here.

Read the add-ons before assuming a quote is the bill. Bond data, alternatives data, SMA data and Cap Gains Valet cost extra on every tier, Enterprise included; mutual fund data and the Excel add-in are extra again on Analyst. UCITS funds and Morningstar estimates are add-ons too, and the AI agent is metered: every subscription includes 2,000 credits a month, roughly 100 to a query, with more sold separately.

No professional status is required to buy. YCharts publishes a solutions page for individual investors and educators, and the Analyst tier names individual investors among its buyers.

Data & coverage

Equities are North American and nothing else: NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, OTCBB and PINK in the US, TSX, TSXV, CNSX and NEO in Canada — 20,000-plus equities and ADRs, 30 years of history, 4,000-plus daily calculations per company, screenable on 4,500 metrics. Around them sit 45,000-plus funds, ETFs, CEFs and UITs, 7 million-plus bonds, somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 SMAs depending on which vendor page you read, 25,000-plus indices with up to 50 years, 500,000-plus economic indicators and 25 cryptocurrencies.

YCharts licenses rather than collects and names its suppliers: CBOE for intraday pricing, FactSet for financials and sector data, Lipper and Morningstar for pricing and fundamentals, S&P for estimates, Xignite for both, bonds from S&P Global, ESG from MSCI, SMAs from eVestment and Morningstar.

Estimates are shallower than the fundamentals: quarterly figures span the current quarter, two forward and eight back, annual ones the current year plus two either side. Fundamentals land before the open the day after release for S&P 500 companies, up to ten days for smaller ones.

Integrations

Fourteen named integrations — Addepar, Aviso, Black Diamond, Broadridge, eMoney, Fidelity, LPL ClientWorks, Northwestern Mutual, Orion, Pershing, Raymond James, Redtail, Schwab & iRebal and VRGL — plus Advyzon by file upload. Every one imports client holdings; none is a way to get data out.

The Excel add-in is the only route resembling programmatic access: an access key, more than 30 templates, and most platform data except bonds and alternatives. It is also Windows-only — the vendor states it is not compatible with Mac, with Google Sheets or with Office online. Otherwise export is CSV, XLSX and PDF from inside the product.

Limitations

• No published price and no way to buy without a sales call — for a self-directed investor, usually the whole answer. Koyfin at $49 to $110 a month and TIKR at $24.95 to $119.95 do the same research job with the number on the page.
• North American listings only — no European, Asian or Latin American equities at any tier or add-on price. Both alternatives above are global; this is the largest coverage gap.
• No API, documented or otherwise, and the Excel add-in, the nearest thing to one, is a paid extra on Analyst and absent from Presenter.
• Not real-time. US prices refresh every one to three minutes, Canadian about every 15, OTC has no intraday pricing at all, and the Stock Screener does not update price-based calculations intraday.
• It emits verdicts, not only data. The Y-Rating labels a stock Attractive, Neutral or Avoid from three proprietary scores — a Fundamental Score of 4 or lower prints Avoid on its own — and five Portfolio Strategies, among them Ben Graham Formula and Peter Lynch Universe, each publish 35 equally weighted stocks rebalanced monthly against a backtest. The AI agent's own documented example prompts have it read a prospect's brokerage statement and "recommend a model portfolio with a better risk-adjusted fit". YCharts states it is not registered as an investment adviser and does not purport to make recommendations, but a monthly 35-stock list and a three-way rating are what appears on screen: read both as one vendor's model rather than a reported figure.
• Backtesting means portfolio-level hypothetical performance — weights, rebalancing and fees replayed over history. No scripting language, no rules-based signal engine.
• No options analytics, no execution, no mobile app, and no tax reporting: the tax feature is a transition-cost estimate, not a filing document.

Alternatives

Koyfin is the closest neighbour and the better buy for almost any individual — global rather than North American, published prices, a free tier — and its Advisor tiers at $239 and $349 a month cover the client-portfolio and branded-report work YCharts quotes for. TIKR is cheaper again and deeper on global history. GuruFocus also sells computed verdicts beside its data, at a published price and with an API attached.

See the rest of fundamental data and research platforms.