Financial Data Providers Compared: 19 APIs Ranked for 2026

Choosing among financial data providers starts with two questions: which software will use the data, and which data you need. Pick your answer below. Each page ranks the providers for that job and shows what comparable access costs at each one, every plan and add-on included, checked on 26 September 2026.

We sell market data ourselves, and we scored ourselves with the same published rubric as the 18 others. We rank fourth overall, tied with Massive, and we come last on Excel and near the bottom on AI agents, because we have no Excel add-in yet and no MCP server.

Where should you start?

Most lists of market data providers name a winner without a method. Ours publishes the method for every one of the stock market data providers here and names the best financial data API for each job. The best market data provider for you is the one that ranks first for your job, not the one that ranks first overall.

What does comparable access cost?

A provider’s cheapest plan says little, because many providers sell stocks, options and spreadsheets separately. So for each provider we added up every plan and add-on you must buy to get the same thing. This table prices real-time US stocks and real-time US options with greeks in one account, through an API:

Not offered at any price: Cboe DataShop, EODHD, Financial Modeling Prep, Finnhub, Finsheet, Google Finance, Marketstack, MarketXLS, Microsoft Excel Stocks data type, Nasdaq Data Link, Sheets Finance, Tiingo, TradingView, Twelve Data, Wisesheets, Yahoo Finance.

The gap is widest at the top of the market. Massive sells stocks and options as separate plans, so the pair costs $398 a month, or $318.40 billed annually. Alpha Vantage unlocks real-time options only on its 600-requests-a-minute plan, at $199.99. Two providers undercut us, both with conditions: Tradier includes real-time data with a brokerage account, with greeks refreshed hourly, and Alpaca charges $99 for the full feed. Intrinio’s $150 real-time options price is derived, not the OPRA feed.

Why do our plans include every data type?

Because each of our plans sells an amount of data, not a list of data types. Every Market Data plan, the free one included, covers US stocks, ETFs, options and mutual funds, through both the API with its SDKs and the Google Sheets add-on.

Plans differ in credits, in history (one year, five years or unlimited), in freshness and in reference endpoints such as earnings.

The limits are real, and they are the same for every data type. The free plan is 24 hours delayed. Starter, from $12 a month billed annually, has real-time stocks through a derived midpoint and options 15 minutes delayed. Real-time options start on Trader, at $30. Every limit is listed on our pricing page.

Several competitors price the other way. Massive and ThetaData sell each asset class as its own plan. Sheets Finance sells market data, brokerage data and options as three subscriptions. Finnhub sells data by category and by market, and EODHD sells options as a separate add-on. Alpha Vantage is the closest to our model, with every feature on every paid plan and only the rate limit changing, although its real-time options need that $199.99 tier.

How did we score the providers?

One reader scored every provider on six criteria, from 0 to 10, after researching each one from its own pages and from its public reviews. The total is a weighted mean in which coverage counts twice as much as licensing, and so do price and data quality.

A score of 10 means the best offering among the providers we researched, not a perfect product. A 0 means the thing is absent. Where two of a provider’s own pages disagreed, as Marketstack’s did on its free tier, we recorded both figures and noted the conflict.

Which financial data providers rank best overall?

The overall ranking rewards breadth: one plan that adds forex and crypto to stocks outscores a specialist. That is why EODHD and Twelve Data lead it, and why the options specialists sit lower here than on the options data providers ranking, where ThetaData comes first.

Which provider fits which job?

A single overall number hides the question most buyers are asking. These are the providers that ranked first on each of our hub pages, with the page that explains the ranking.

Looking for an alternative to one provider?

Each of these pages ranks the alternatives to one provider, with the reasons people give for leaving it and the things it still does better:

• Alpha Vantage alternatives, with its pricing tiers
• Polygon alternatives, now that Polygon.io is Massive
• Finnhub alternatives and Financial Modeling Prep alternatives
• yfinance alternatives and IEX Cloud alternatives, for code that lost its free source
• ThetaData alternatives, Databento alternatives and Unusual Whales alternatives, for options data
• Wisesheets alternatives and MarketXLS alternatives, for spreadsheets

For two providers head to head, read Databento vs Polygon, Polygon vs Alpha Vantage, Polygon vs Alpaca, Alpha Vantage vs Yahoo Finance, Finnhub vs Alpha Vantage, Tiingo vs Alpha Vantage, Twelve Data vs Alpha Vantage, FMP vs Alpha Vantage and EODHD vs FMP. Our older guides cover the Yahoo Finance API, the Google Finance API and S&P 500 data in Google Finance.

Compare any two providers

Pick two providers and the table below puts their facts side by side. It covers all 28 products we researched, including free and built-in tools that are not ranked above, such as Yahoo Finance and Excel’s Stocks data type.

What do the leading providers cover?

The five highest-ranked providers differ most on options and on real-time access. The numbered notes link to the page each value came from.

Where the scores come from

EODHD scored highest on coverage and on reviews: 4.7 of 5 from 146 Trustpilot reviews, the best rating of any provider here with more than a handful of reviews. Its options data is end of day only, and real-time stock prices need the $99.99 plan.

Twelve Data covers global stocks and crypto with official add-ins for both Excel and Google Sheets, but it has no options data at all, and the free plan works only on trial symbols.

Financial Modeling Prep is the fundamentals specialist: statements and filings from $22 a month, billed annually. It has no options product.

Massive, the company that was Polygon.io until October 2025, has the broadest asset list here, with futures and forex beside stocks and options. Real-time stock data starts at $199 a month, and its individual plans are for personal use only.

We cover only US stocks, options and mutual funds. Inside that scope we scored well on price and on quality: real-time options from the $30 Trader plan, a native Google Sheets add-on at no extra cost, and 4.5 of 5 from 110 Trustpilot reviews. We lost points for what we do not sell, fundamentals beyond earnings above all, and for having no streaming.

What do buyers get wrong when comparing providers?

The mistake we see most is comparing plan prices without comparing the license. Most individual plans, ours included, allow personal use only, and a plan that looks cheap can be one you are not allowed to build a public app on.

We answer this question in sales email many times a month, and our ruling turns on display. A script that pulls data every minute for your own research is personal use. A website that shows the same prices to your visitors is redistribution, and it needs a commercial license. Commercial plans begin at $333 per month through our partner Intrinio. Elsewhere, Unusual Whales sells redistribution from $625 a month billed annually, Massive’s business plans start at $1,999 a month, and several providers publish no commercial price at all. EODHD’s $332.50 plan is for internal use and still forbids display.

The second mistake is testing one provider at a time. In April 2026 one developer ran Market Data, Polygon and Massive side by side for a week before choosing, which is the right way to do it. Most of the providers here have a free tier or a trial, so you can put your own symbols through two or three of them before you pay.

Why do we refer commercial use of two data providers to a partner?

We stopped selling to business customers ourselves in February 2025, when IEX ended free redistribution of real-time stock prices for business use. From then on, every business plan carried exchange fees per customer and compliance work our small team could not carry.

So we refer commercial buyers to our partner Intrinio. Between 1 and 25 September 2026 we sent it 22 commercial enquiries, about one a day. The test we apply is display: if other people see the prices, or scores built from them, the use is commercial.

Why can prices from two data providers 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.

When is Market Data the wrong choice?

Choose another provider if you need any of these, because we sell none of them:

• markets outside the US, or forex, crypto, futures and index levels
• balance sheets and income statements
• streaming quotes over a WebSocket
• historical greeks and implied volatility
• stock data inside Excel today Our stock market API and options data pages describe what we do cover, and the licensing guide explains the exchange fees behind every price on this page.

For the providers’ own statements of their prices and terms, start with EODHD’s pricing, Massive’s pricing and ThetaData’s plans. Prices change, and every figure here carries the date we checked it.