The Best Stock API in 2026: 17 Stock Data APIs Ranked

The best stock API for most developers is EODHD, which ranked first of the 17 stock data APIs we scored, on 40 years of history, global coverage and the best reviews in the group. We rank third, behind Financial Modeling Prep, on price and reliability but not on breadth. Every figure below comes from the provider’s own pages, checked on 26 September 2026.

The best stock market API for you still depends on the job, so the sections below say what each one is best at. We sell a stock API ourselves. We scored it with the same six criteria as the others, and the scorecards show where it lost points.

How did we rank the stock APIs?

Each API was scored from 0 to 10 on six criteria. Real-time prices and price for value count double. History, developer experience and reliability count one and a half, and breadth counts once. A 10 is the best offering in this group, and a 0 means the API does not offer it.

We weighted real-time prices heavily because it is the first question in most of the sales email we get, and the answer changes the price more than anything else. A real-time US price can come from the IEX exchange alone, from the full consolidated SIP tape, or from a derived calculation, and each costs a different amount in exchange fees.

Which is the best stock API in our ranking?

The five highest-ranked stock data providers, side by side:

EODHD

EODHD wins. Its lead comes from history and reviews: more than 40 years of US prices, international exchanges, and 4.7 of 5 from 146 Trustpilot reviews. Its end-of-day plan is cheap, but real-time prices need the All-in-One plan at $99.99 a month, and the free tier allows 20 calls a day.

Financial Modeling Prep

Financial Modeling Prep is the pick when fundamentals matter as much as prices. Its Starter plan is $22 a month billed annually, and it has official add-ons for Excel and Google Sheets. Its SDKs are community projects, and it does not document which feed its real-time prices come from.

Market Data

Our stock API returns a real-time price from the $12 Starter plan, billed annually, and our Google Sheets add-on shows real-time IEX quotes. The API price is SmartMid, a derived midpoint that needs no exchange entitlement, which is why it costs a fraction of a SIP feed. It is not the raw consolidated quote, and a strategy that needs the national best bid and offer should buy that feed elsewhere.

We lost points on breadth. That was fair. We cover US stocks and funds only, and we have answered “US markets only” in every year since 2022, to developers who assumed a ticker format meant global coverage. Our API also accepts one IP address at a time and no serverless functions, which rules it out for code that runs on rotating cloud IPs.

Twelve Data

Twelve Data covers more than 190,000 symbols on over 250 exchanges, streams over WebSocket, and has the second-best Trustpilot rating here, 4.4 from 57 reviews. The free plan works on trial symbols only, and paid plans start at $66 a month billed annually.

Tiingo

Tiingo gives 1,000 free requests a day with more than 30 years of end-of-day history, which makes it the best free source of long history in this group. Since February 2025, its full IEX real-time feed needs a separate agreement with the IEX exchange.

What does real-time stock access cost at each provider?

The cheapest plan that is actually real-time, add-ons included, at every stock API we ranked:

Which stock API has real-time data for the least money?

Tradier and Alpaca include real-time prices free with a brokerage account, and Yahoo Finance shows real-time quotes for major US exchanges through an unofficial route. Among paid data-only plans, ours starts at $12 a month billed annually and Tiingo’s at $25.

The consolidated SIP feed, defined in the SEC’s market data infrastructure rule, costs more: $99 a month at Alpaca, $99.99 at EODHD, and $199 at Massive.

The free stock API ranking scores the free tiers alone, and our guide to real-time market data explains what each feed includes. Two jobs have rankings of their own: drawing charts, in TradingView API alternatives, and feeding an AI agent, in financial MCP servers.

Why do two stock APIs return different prices?

Most “your numbers are wrong” tickets we receive turn out to be a dividend adjustment or a ticker that matched a foreign listing, not a data error. One API returns prices adjusted for splits and dividends by default and another returns them raw, so a ten-year chart can differ by a large amount on the same day.

Check the adjustment first. Our historical stock data API documents ours.

Why does our API accept one IP address at a time?

The exchanges treat a data product as controlled when the vendor can show that one customer device at a time reads the data and none of it is passed on. That status is what keeps our real-time prices low, so each account accepts one IP address and no serverless functions.

The rule has a cost, and we have watched it. In September 2026 a customer calling our API from Google Apps Script, whose outbound IP addresses rotate, hit the limit. We explained why and pointed him to our Sheets add-on, which refreshes safely. Thirty-three minutes later he wrote that Massive allowed his setup, and asked us to cancel.

Why can prices from a stock API differ from ours on the same day?

Usually because one source adjusts past prices for later splits and corporate actions and the other does not. Adjusted history changes whenever a new corporate action lands, so a value you fetched last month can come back different today.

That default cost us. In April 2026 an institution valuing donated stock told us our highs and lows disagreed with other quote sites, and it withheld a subscription payment for five weeks while we investigated. A donation is valued at the price that traded that day, so it needed unadjusted candles: two query parameters removed all five discrepancies it reported. The same review found a real bug that dropped the third decimal from some prices, and we fixed it.

How should you test a stock API before you pay?

Run the same twenty tickers through two free tiers on the same afternoon, and include one split, one ticker with a special dividend and one thinly traded name. Compare the adjusted closes, the time stamp on the last quote and how each API answers a symbol it does not know.

Most of the providers ranked here have a free plan or a trial, so this costs an hour and no money. Ours starts on the free plan of our stock market API.

If Python will consume the prices, start with our stock APIs for Python; for Sheets, Excel or an AI agent, the guide to financial data providers sends you to a ranking built for that tool. We do not sell futures data, crypto data, forex data or stocks outside the US, and each of those links ranks the providers that do.