Best Stock Charting Software & Apps of 2023

With so many stock charting apps, how do you find out which works best for you?

Your trading and investment style significantly impacts selecting the best stock charting programs since there are different features ranging from indicators, multi-time-frame visualization, drawing tools, and data feeds that make a difference.

Yet, there is the one best stock chart software that suits all investment styles with global data and feature-rich charting. Below is my complete breakdown of the best programs, apps, websites and tools for stock charts (free & paid for desktop and mobile).

Best Stock Charting Software

• TrendSpider: Best stock chart app for U.S. listed stocks, ETFs, Futures and Indices
• TradingView: Best stock charting program with global market data
• Trade Ideas Pro: Best charting software for day trading
• TC2000: Best stock charting software for investors
• Black Box Stocks: Best charts with dark pool data overlays
• Finviz: Best free charts

1. TrendSpider

TrendSpider leads the list of the best stock charting apps due to TrendSpider’s extensive charting capabilities and multifunctional apps for desktop, iOS and Android.

TrendSpider is a specialized trading tool for technical traders, making excellent charting a top priority for their developers. Moreover, it is one of the most innovative tools with steadily expanding features.

Line charts, Japanese candlesticks, hollow candlesticks, traditional price bars, and even more sophisticated chart types like Heiken Ashi and Raindrop Charts are supported. The available time-frames include daily, weekly and monthly stock charts and intraday intervals ranging from the 1-minute to the 4-hour chart.

Fast web-based stock charts, game-changing automation tools for fully-automated technical analysis, backtest functionalities, candlestick pattern recognition, automatic trendline detection and multi-timeframe analysis are a few of the additional benefits of TrendSpider.

The tool continuously innovates, and new helpful features are frequently added at no extra cost for subscribers. The latest examples are the dark pool data, the fear & greed feature, the social chatter and seasonality functionality and the trading bots via SignalStack.

• Desktop: Web-based version, Chrome extension
• Mobile: iOS App, Android App, web-based version

Pros:

• Extensive charting capabilities
• Stock screening, dynamic alerts, and trading bots included
• Options flow analysis and backtesting functionalities available
• 61,000+ supported assets (stocks, indices, pink sheets, futures, commodities, ETFs, digital assets, etc.)
• Real-time data feeds included in the subscription price

Cons

• Brokerage account connections only via SignalStack

Pricing: TrendSpider Premium: $39 per month, or $396 per year, TrendSpider Elite $79 per month, or $780 per year, TrendSpider Advanced $129 per month, or $1,164 per year.

Best Offer: TrendSpider 15% discount and 7-day free trial

2. TradingView

Over 30 million traders and investors visit the TradingView website every month. According to SimilarWeb data, TradingView is the most popular investing website (as of September 2023). But is TradingView good enough to be classified as one of the best apps for stock charts?

Indeed, TradingView offers the most extensive selection of chart types and time frames. The chart types include bars, candles, hollow candles, column and line charts, area-, baseline-, and high-low charts, plus more seldom chart types such as Heikin Ashi, Renko, Line Break, Kago, Range and Point & Figure charts. In addition, the supported time frames are various second charts, minute charts, hourly charts, and daily, weekly, and monthly time frames.

Besides, many drawing tools are available starting from various lines like trend lines, extended lines, trend angles, horizontal lines, parallel channels, disjoint channels, the anchored VWAP and more. The list continues with Fibonacci tools, Pitchfork, Gann Boxes, various annotation and measurement tools, different colors and hundreds of trading indicators.

With TradingView, users can trade via API through selected brokers, use the paper trading module, trade from charts and use the Depth of Market (DOM). As with TC 2000, real-time data costs a little extra. For example, North American stocks data cost about $6, indices $5, and E-Mini futures $4 per month. But there are also various European exchanges, Canada, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific. The number of markets supported is impressive.

• Desktop: Web-based version
• Mobile: iOS app, Android app, web-based version

Pros:

• Real-Time data for over 50 exchanges available, which also include crypto and futures markets (but cost extra on top of the TradingView subscription)
• Extensive charting tool capabilities
• Free version is available for testing, and a free trial for paid plans is available

Cons

• Real-Time data costs extra

Pricing: Free version with ads and limited functionalities $0, TradingView Pro $14.95 per month or $155.40 per year, TradingView Pro+ $29.95 per month or $299.40 per year, TradingView Premium $59.95 per month or $599.40 per year.

Best Offer: The best way to get started is by creating a free TradingView account here. Once the free account is created, you get a 50% discount and a 30-day free trial offer. This way, you have maximum flexibility and ensure high savings in case of a subscription.

3. Trade Ideas Pro

Trade Ideas Pro is the leading stock screener for day traders. Established in 2003, Trade Ideas continuously innovates the day trading segment with state-of-the-art tools and functionalities.

Today, Trade Ideas is an all-in-one software suite for day traders that covers everything from stock scanning, charting, strategy development, backtesting and stock alerts to trade from chart features and automated trading.

About ten years ago, Trade Ideas was still focusing on purely stock screening, but the software improved more and more and today, charting tools are an essential part of the software. The available chart types are candlestick, line and bar charts, area charts and HLC and OHLC (open-high-low-close) charts.

The supported time frames are the 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60-minute stock charts, plus the daily, weekly and monthly time frames. In addition, users can customize the charts with various color settings, use a risk-reward ratio overlay, trade from the chart with buy and sell buttons and connect market scans with the charting tool.

Trade Ideas is one of the few stock charting apps that show pre- and post-market data entirely. That means the pre-market stock charts start plotting as early as 4 AM EST when the official pre-market begins. Most other tools start plotting data at 8 AM EST.

Another thing where Trade Ideas Pro stands out from its competitors is the seamless broker integration. Everything began with the integration of Interactive Brokers, and today even a connection with E-Trade for commission-free trading is supported. This way, traders can automate their trading or trade from stock charts entirely commission-free.

• Desktop: Software installation, web-based version
• Mobile: Web-based version

Pros:

• All-in-one software solution for day traders
• Automated trading, strategy testing and paper trading account
• Real-time data included

Cons

• Currently, only two brokerage account connections are supported (IB and E-Trade)

Pricing: Trade Ideas Standard: $118 per month or $999 per year, Trade Ideas Premium $228 per month or $1,999 per year.

Best Offer: Use the promo code DAYTRADINGZ for a 15% discount on all Trade Ideas subscriptions.

4. Benzinga Pro

Benzinga Pro shines with integrated charting capabilities but primarily scores because of its advanced features such as the newsfeed, real-time market scanner, trading signals and the audio squawk for equities and options.

So, here is the point. Later in the list of the best stock charting apps, I’ll mention the well-known TradingView app. The cool thing about Benzinga Pro is that the TradingView charting functionalities are included in the subscription of Benzinga Pro. That’s possible because TradingView offers a white-label solution that other vendors can use on their platform. And that’s what Benzinga does.

The chart types include bar charts, candlestick charts, hollow candles, Heikin Ashi charts, line-, area-, and Baseline charts. The available time frames are the 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 and 30-minute, the 1,2 and 4 hours, and the daily, weekly and monthly time frames.

A benefit is that one subscription to Benzinga Pro unlocks the essential TradingView charting features, plus all the other benefits Benzinga Pro has. Especially their market scanner for pre-market and post-market data is pretty helpful to identify stocks that gap up, trade on high relative volume, make a new 52-week high etc. The possibilities of scanning are extensive.

One thing that makes Benzinga Pro unique is the Audio Squawk feature, where you can listen to someone who informs you via audio about the latest news and market action. So, instead of staring at a screen for research, you can focus on trading while listening to the Audio Squawk.

• Desktop: Web-based version
• Mobile: Web-based version

Pros:

• TradingView-typical charting included in Benzinga Pro
• Audio Squawk feature
• Real-time market scanner capabilities
• Real-time data feeds included in the subscription

Cons

• The Free and Basic plans are not that great, and lack included functionalities. Only the Essentials plan is fully functional.

Pricing: Free Plan: $0, Basic Plan $27 per month, Essential Plan $197 per month, or $1,997 per year.

Best Offer: The Benzinga Pro free trial is the best way to get started (Exclusive discount offer from Benzinga during the free trial period included).

5. TC2000

TC2000 has a long history of over 25 years of providing excellent charting tools and trading software to its customers. The ideal ratio between features and costs lets many customers stay for years.

Their particular strength is the installable software version of TC2000. It is the most robust version and includes various chart templates, a practice trading account, watchlists, order management tools, and an options chain.

The available chart types are line charts, OHLC bars, HLC bars, candlesticks, bar charts, area and Heiken-Ashi charts. The time-frames include minute charts from 1-minute to 2-hour charts and daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly chart time frames. In addition, tick charts are available with TC 2000. The drawing tools include lines, text, Fibonacci, VWAP, Gann, Andrew Pitchfork, Regressions, Speedlines and many more.

One thing to remember is that it needs a separate subscription to exchange data to use TC2000 with real-time data. That’s not really problematic since the realtime U.S. stock data costs only $14.99 per month, but you should know about it.

• Desktop: Software installation, web-based version
• Mobile: web-based version, iOS app, Android app

Pros:

• All-in-one platform with integrated practice trading accounts
• Tick data available
• Options chain included

Cons

• Real-time data costs extra
• Brokerage connection works only with TC2000 brokerage accounts

Pricing: Silver $9.99 per month or $99.84 per year, Gold $29.99 per month or $299.88 per year, Platinum $89.98 per month or $899.76 per year. Plus real-time market data: stocks $14.99, indices $9.99, options $9.99 per month.

Best Offer: Users who sign up to TC2000 using this offer receive a $15 discount on their first subscription.

6. Black Box Stocks

Black Box Stocks is a platform focusing on community and educational aspects for traders. Their team of talented and well-educated mentors provides high-class education every week with webinars, trade alerts, and great tools.

The Black Box Stocks charting app is only one feature, but the integrated data feed is one of the fastest. The chart styles include candle, bar, colored bar, line, vertex line, step, mountain, baseline, hollow candle, volume candle, colored HLC bars, scatterplot, histogram, Heikin Ashi, Kagi, line break, Renko, range bars and point & Figure.

The time frames start with 1-second intervals, 10 and 30 seconds, 1, 5, 10, 15, 30-minute charts, 1 and 2 hour time frames and the daily, weekly and monthly stock charts. In addition, there are many trading indicators and drawing tools available.

However, most Black Box Stocks tools focus on options trading to identify unusual options activity and dark pool trades. That, combined with the educational aspects and screener functionalities, makes Black Box Stock a great combined product for trading beginners looking for an all-in-one solution, including education.

• Desktop: Web-based version
• Mobile: iOS app, Android app, web-based version

Pros:

• Includes extensive educational components
• Stock screener, unusual options scanner and dark pool analysis
• Active community with trade alerts

Cons

• Charting is not the main focus

Pricing: Monthly plan $99.97 per month, annual plan $959 per month

Best Offer: Full access to Black Box Stocks for only $79.97 in the first month (20% Off, the discount will be applied automatically).

7. Stock Rover

Stock Rover is a web-based investment research platform with the most extensive range of fundamental data. Over 8,500 North American stocks, 4,000 ETFs and 40,000 funds are ready to be analyzed. In addition, 650+ metrics, stock ratings and data export functionalities make Stock Rover the number one choice for fundamental traders.

Stock Rover makes it to this list because of their creative charting capabilities for fundamental analysis, which empowers users with valuation charts, ratio charts, metric charting and more. You can visualize price vs. fundamental metrics, use historical ranges, a scatter plot and my favorite – the so-called football field, to visualize where a specific security is currently positioned compared to the history vs. peers measured fundamental by fundamental data point.

The chart types include only candlesticks, line and OHLC charts on an hourly, daily, weekly and monthly time frame. But that’s okay since this tool is not made for technical analysis. Instead, it is optimized for fundamental research.

• Desktop: Web-based version
• Mobile: Web-based version

Pros:

• Powerful fundamental analysis technology
• More than 50,000 securities (stocks, ETFs, funds) can be analyzed
• 650+ metrics available
• Custom screening, charts and stock ratings

Cons

• Not made for technical analysis

Pricing: Essentials plan $7.99 per month or $79.99 per year, Premium $17.99 per month or $179.99 per year, Premium Plus $27.99 per month or $279.99 per year.

Best Offer: Here, you can subscribe to the 14-day free trial and get a Stock Rover discount offer before the free trial ends.

8. Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha is a platform for stock market news, fundamental data and analysis. Advanced features like the pre-configured screeners, quant ratings and SEC-filing access let users dive deep into a company’s financial situation to ensure making well-informed decisions.

The fundamental data points include company financials, dividends, growth metrics, profitability, etc. However, the quant rating feature is the point where Seeking Alpha stands out vs. Stock Rover. Seeking Alphas’ proprietary system evaluates and rates stocks with grades ranging from strong buy, buy, hold, sell and strong sell. And the great thing about it is that users can plot a chart, including the quant rating history. This way, it is easy to see how effective the quant rating was relative to the price development of an underlying stock.

Furthermore, there are also ratings from Seeking Alpha authors, official Wall Street ratings, and price projections of analyst estimates included. The charts are not made for technical analysis. Instead, Seeking Alpha visualizes important financial metrics in charts, graphs and tables.

• Desktop: Software installation, web-based version
• Mobile: Web-based version

Pros:

• Extensive market research capabilities
• Seeking Alpha Quant with strong buy recommendations

Cons

• Not made for technical analysis

Pricing: Seeking Alpha Premium is $239 per year.

Best Offer: Seeking Alpha Premium 14-day free trial

9. Finviz

Finviz is a great free stock charting app for long-term investors. I use it for over 15 years whenever I need a quick glance at the markets. It is fast, reliable and works on any device. Sure, the free version does not come even close to the feature-rich apps mentioned above, but it is worth it as long it’s what you need.

The free version only supports candlestick and line charts and the daily, weekly and monthly time frame. Below each chart, you find fundamental analysis tools and figures like market cap, EPS, ROI, performance figures and dividend insights.

Finviz Elite is the paid plan and expands the functionalities significantly. Elite users gain access to premarket (from 8:00 AM EST) and aftermarket data and can use advanced chartings with intraday charts, overlays and indicators, complex drawing tools and performance comparison charts. There is also a feature to backtest trading strategies and correlations tools.

• Desktop: Web-based version
• Mobile: Web-based version

Pros:

• Fast and reliable web-based charting tool with free functionalities
• Extensive fundamental data scanning capabilities

Cons

• Pre-market feed starts at 8:00 EST and not 4:00 EST

Pricing: Free version $0, Finviz Elite $39.50 per month or $299.50 per year.

Best Offer: Here, you can test Finviz for free

10. eSignal

eSignal closes the list of the top stock charting apps being the high-end charting solution for traders with deep pockets. eSignals’ real-time data is ultra-reliable and supports hundreds of global markets. That makes eSignal kind of unique in this list, where only TradingView can offer similar numbers of exchanges.

eSignal lets you subscribe to nearly all global exchanges instead of being limited to North American stock exchanges.

However, a subscription to eSignal does not include any real-time data. So the subscription to eSignal by itself has only low value, and additional costs come up for subscribing to the exchanges you want to trade. Unfortunately, eSignal alone is already expensive, and they are not that transparent about the fees for the data subscriptions.

eSignal is a software application. While there is also a web-based version, only the software application unfolds the full power of the platform.

• Desktop: Software installation
• Mobile: No

Pros:

• Reliable and speedy market data network
• 100+ indices across global markets with stocks, options, futures and forex

Cons

• Real-time data not included in the price
• Intransparent about the costs of market data

Pricing: eSignal Signature $192 per month or $1,739 per year, eSignal Elite $391 per month or $3,772 per year. Market data comes on top of those costs.

Best Offer: There is a 30-days money-back guarantee for new users. Before subscribing, investors should contact sales support via chat to evaluate the market data costs before subscribing.

Best Stock Charting Software – My Conclusion

Stock chart apps help investors to understand the price action of a stock better. Extensive data and analysis functionalities help investors to make well-informed investment decisions.

TrendSpider and TradingView are the best solutions for technical analysis with great charting functionalities. Stock Rover and Seeking Alpha lead the field for fundamental analysis with hundreds of financial metrics and peer comparisons.

More About Charts, Candlesticks and Trading Patterns:

• Candlestick Patterns Cheat Sheet
• Price Action Trading Patterns
• 3 Bar Play Pattern
• Chartpattern.com Review

Stock Charts Guide

What are stock charts good for and do I really need them? Stock charts help users to visualize the price data in a helpful way. Stock charts have different chart types and time frames.

Chart Types

A chart type describes the visualization type. Examples are candlestick stock charts, OHLC (open-high-low-close) charts, Heikin Ashi charts and more.

The best charting apps have advanced features such as price action pattern recognition for day trading patterns like the bull flag pattern, ABCD pattern or ascending triangle pattern.

The time frame, on the other hand, describes the time interval of a chart. For example, the daily time frame plots one candlestick per day and shows the open, high, low and close of that day with a color in the body of the candlestick.

How to Get Started

Stock charts are trading tools that many investors use for stock trading, options trading, or future contracts. To trade stocks, it needs a trading platform from a broker. This is because only the broker can route orders to a stock exchange.

However, beginners are well-advised to start only without a broker to test the efficiency of technical indicators, stock trading strategies, or automated processes within the trading platform.

Trading Style

Most investors still focus on stock trading since other instruments are often more complicated and often come with higher risks. However, there are two types of investors in the financial markets.

One part is the more active traders who want to use advanced charts and extensive technical analysis tools for their stock analysis. Those are often so-called day traders. But stock analysis apps can also focus on analyzing fundamental data instead of visualizing only stock prices.

Long-term investors often look for free stock charting software or free stock analysis software. That’s reasonable since free stock chart software and free stock market news are often good enough to make investment decisions for the long term.

However, free stock charting apps typically don’t work when it comes to day trading. Day traders need powerful, fast and robust charting tools.

So, free stock charts are great for buy-and-hold investors, but day traders consider using fast data feeds to visualize the stock price with tick data and highly-functional charting tools to trade stock effectively.

Stock Charts with Trading Indicators

Technical indicators can be used in addition to price data, but it is not needed for successful stock trading. To trade stocks also needs investors to think about simplicity to understand the stock market without complicated routines.

Moreover, technical indicators often visualize something that even active traders with years of experience can’t explain.

So, indicators can be part of stock analysis within a trading platform, but stock prices alone can also be sufficient to make well-informed investment decisions. For active traders, the stock price on tick-by-tick data is important, and an advanced trading platform can be helpful here to ensure high-quality stock prices within the used charting tools.

FAQ

What is the best free stock chart app?

The best free stock chart app is Finviz. The app comes with free daily, weekly and monthly market data for U.S. stocks (currently 8,632 stocks supported), including fundamental data for each stock. In addition, the free plan supports candlestick charts, while the paid plan for Finviz Elite also supports intraday-time frames and other chart types.

What is the best stock chart to use?

The best chart for trading is the candlestick chart. It visualizes the open, high, low, close and price change within the time frame. Investors making investment decisions primarily on fundamental data can use all chart types that support at least the daily closing price.