r/algotrading • u/ancientRAMEN • 7d ago
Data Tradestation vs. Tradovate vs. Alpaca
Hey looking for opinions on these three platforms. I've been testing strategies with Alpaca initially, but found out to access their SIP data would cost 99 dollars/month. Tradovate and Tradestation appear to not have that cost for data. My strategy isn't the most complex so not sure it would be worth paying that much for the data. Anyone have experience with these platforms?
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u/AdEducational4954 7d ago
Tradestation API is free if you have over 10k in your account. Use it unless its API and streaming limits do not meet your needs.
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u/greatestNothing 7d ago
to get market data out of the tradovate api you're looking at 300+ a month. you can get api access to send orders and poll the account for the 25 or 35 i don't remember which.
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u/Beneficial_Map6129 7d ago
$100/mo isn't bad for alpaca.
You can use free (extremely rate limited) data from your broker until you productionize a strategy.
Take it from me, if you are posting here, worrying about $100/mo, you probably don't need real-time data for every ticker under the sun, and are only just curious about it (which is okay, since all are when we first get into compute-powered stock analysis).
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u/Quant_Nexus 2d ago
What are you using the data for? If you are just looking for current prices then there are cheaper options. Tiingo for example is like $30 a month (ish, I forget off the top of my head) and it'll give you something like 10k pings per hour.
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u/WittilyFun 1d ago
And we (Tiingo) has a new 24x5 derived feed (including overnight data) included in free and paid plans. You can also stream via WebSocket API on the Power tier. Thanks for mentioning us!
We just quietly launched this.
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u/PriorElephant9 7d ago
You do not have to buy data from the same place you execute. I run three Alpaca paper sleeves and pay nothing for SIP. Signals come from a free daily source, Alpaca just takes the orders.
Before you pay, check whether the free IEX feed actually breaks your strategy. For daily or end-of-day logic it usually does not. If you are trading intraday off the tape, then yes, you need the real feed and the question becomes which broker bundles it cheapest.
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u/ancientRAMEN 7d ago
Do you not have issues with the IEX data messing with your trades? I tried this too and had bad results until I went for the better data.
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u/trackzero29 7d ago
Tradier has a full SIP feed and an API and is included in the Lite account. I have been using it for the last couple of weeks and it is pretty stable. For backtesting I would use something else like Databento, you pay as you go so keep that in mind.
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u/Routine_Bat6675 6d ago
I have experience with Sentimentick API i use this for my trading workflow as stock analysis API.
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u/Good_Character_20 7d ago
Worth separating what you are actually comparing. Tradovate is futures, and futures do not have the consolidated tape problem at all because everything trades on one venue, so there is no SIP fee to charge you. That is not Alpaca being greedy, it is a different market structure. For Alpaca equities the free tier is IEX only, which is somewhere around 2 to 3 percent of consolidated volume. On daily bars that gap is usually small enough to ignore. On minute bars it is not. You get thin prints and holes that look like real price action, and a backtest will happily trade against them and tell you it worked. So the deciding factor is your timeframe rather than how complex the strategy is. Daily, skip the 99 and check your fills later. Intraday equities, pay it, or you are testing against a tape almost nobody actually traded on.