People email us all the time asking which is the best stock price API. It’s a fair question, and after running Tiingo since 2014, my answer hasn’t changed: it depends on what you’re building. A student backtesting on weekends, a fintech shipping an app to customers, and a fund that needs licensed, redistributable data all have different needs – and the “best” stock market data API for one of them can be a poor fit for the other two.
So this is a field guide, not a ranking. We’ll cover what actually matters when picking a stock API, then go provider by provider with real numbers: coverage, free tiers, entry prices, one genuine strength, one fair caveat.
And yes – we make one of these. Tiingo has been our life’s work since 2014, and we’ll tell you why we built it the way we did. But we’ll be fair to everyone else on this list, because they’re good at what they do, and you deserve a straight answer more than we deserve your subscription.
What actually matters in a stock market data API
Before the list, the checklist. These are the questions we’d ask any provider – ourselves included.
- Real-time and historical depth. Backtests need decades of clean history; live products need a real-time feed you’re actually licensed to use. Ask where both come from and how far back the data goes.
- Breadth. Stocks are the start – ETFs, mutual funds, crypto, forex, and global exchanges matter the moment your strategy or product grows past US equities.
- Fundamentals and news. Prices tell you what happened; fundamentals and news tell you why. Context in markets is everything.
- Licensing and redistribution rights. The clause everyone skips until it bites. Many free or scraped sources prohibit displaying data to your own users, so if you’re shipping to customers, read this before you read the price.
- Reliability and uptime. Clean, boring, always-on data is the product. An API that hiccups during market hours costs you far more than its subscription fee.
- Docs and ease of integration. You should get from signup to your first data pull in minutes, not days. Good docs are also a signal of how a vendor treats developers everywhere else.
- Vendor stability. APIs get acquired, repriced, and retired (ask anyone who built on IEX Cloud). You want a provider committed enough to give you real notice before anything changes underneath you.
The stock market data APIs worth knowing in 2026
Tiingo (that’s us)
We’ve been doing this since 2014, which makes us the oldest accessible retail market-data API still around. We cover 80,000+ assets – US equities, ETFs, mutual funds, and Chinese A-shares – with end-of-day history back to 1962, real-time prices via IEX, real-time overnight prices via Blue Ocean ATS, crypto across 150+ exchanges, forex on 140+ pairs, and 70M+ news articles spanning 20+ years. The free tier is genuinely usable (500 symbols a month with 30+ years of history), and paid plans are flat-rate starting at $30/month. The fair caveat: our global equity coverage centers on the US plus Chinese A-shares, so if you need dozens of international exchanges, look at Twelve Data or EODHD too – more on why we built things this way below.
Intrinio
If your work lives in US fundamentals, Intrinio is excellent. Their machine-learning XBRL standardizer turns SEC filings into clean, standardized data usually within about 30 minutes of the filing, and they layer on options (including real-time OPRA), news, and ETF data, with 50+ years of price history and 15+ years of fundamentals. They’re also the official referral partner IEX Cloud pointed its customers to when it shut down, which says something about how the industry regards them. The tradeoffs: it’s US-centric (US-only fundamentals plus roughly 1,500 ADRs), there’s no permanent free tier (a sandbox and a trial only), and pricing starts at $150/month for individuals, $333/month for startups (phasing toward $999), and $1,250+/month for enterprise.
Alpha Vantage
Alpha Vantage is where a lot of developers make their first stock API call, and for good reason: it’s simple, well-documented, and unusually broad – US and global equities (100,000+ symbols), fundamentals, news with sentiment, crypto, forex, options, 50+ technical indicators, even economic indicators. Two things to know going in. The free tier has shrunk to 25 requests/day (it used to be 500), and premium is priced purely on request rate: $49.99/month for 75 requests/minute, stepping through $99.99, $149.99, and $199.99 up to $249.99/month for 1,200/minute, with real-time and 15-minute-delayed data requiring premium. Daily history runs 20+ years, though intraday history is shallow.
Twelve Data
Twelve Data has the best global breadth of the modern, API-first providers: 90+ exchanges across 50+ countries, covering stocks, ETFs, fundamentals, indices, forex, and crypto, with about 30 years of history. The free Basic plan is generous in a specific way – 8 credits/minute and 800/day, including real-time US data for non-display use, which is rare at $0. Paid plans run from $29/month (Grow) to $99 (Pro) and $329 (Ultra), scaling with usage. The one thing to budget mental energy for: it’s credit-metered rather than plain request counts, so different endpoints cost different amounts and you’ll want to do the math for your use case.
EOD Historical Data (EODHD)
EODHD’s pitch is breadth per dollar: 60-70+ exchanges, 150,000+ tickers, 30+ years of history, and US options, with the All-World end-of-day plan at $19.99/month. Plans step up to $29.99 (adds intraday), $59.99 (fundamentals), and $99.99 (all-in-one). Fair warnings: the free tier is 20 calls/day on demo tickers only, so you can’t really evaluate with it, and real-time WebSockets and options are paid add-ons rather than bundled.
Financial Modeling Prep (FMP)
FMP goes deep on fundamentals: full statements, ratios, DCF models, 13F filings, and earnings-call transcripts, alongside stocks, crypto, forex, and commodities. The free tier is a real one – 250 calls/day of end-of-day US data – and paid plans are inexpensive, from $22/month (Starter) to $59 (Premium) and $149 (Ultimate) at annual-billed rates, with real-time included from the first paid tier. The catches: no options data at all, and both global coverage and history depth are gated by tier (5 years on Starter, 30+ on Premium and Ultimate).
Nasdaq Data Link (formerly Quandl)
A lot of developers still call this one Quandl – Nasdaq acquired it in 2018 and renamed it Nasdaq Data Link in 2021, and the platform lives on. It’s a different animal from everything else here: less a price feed, more a marketplace of datasets, with core financial data sitting next to a deep bench of third-party alternative and economic data, all behind one API key with Python, R, and Excel libraries. Free public datasets coexist with premium subscriptions, and pricing is per-dataset (there’s no single public price table). If you want alternative and economic data under one roof, it’s unmatched; if you want a unified real-time stock feed, it isn’t that.
Xignite (now part of QUODD)
Xignite built its name on enterprise cloud market data: 500+ REST APIs spanning real-time, delayed, and historical data across asset classes, with institutional-grade breadth and SLAs. QUODD acquired Xignite in 2023, and xignite.com now redirects to quodd.com. Pricing is quote-based with no public self-serve tiers, so this is a contact-sales product for fintechs and institutions – for an individual developer, it’s more machinery than you need.
Bloomberg
Bloomberg remains the institutional benchmark, and if you sit at a professional desk, nothing matches its combination of real-time data, news, and analytics in one place. Programmatic access runs through BLPAPI: the Desktop API requires a Bloomberg Terminal login, while the Server API (SAPI) and B-PIPE are separately licensed enterprise feeds – in practice, individual API access means paying for a Terminal. Bloomberg doesn’t publish official pricing, but third-party estimates put a Terminal at roughly $2,000-$2,700/month per seat (about $24k-$32k a year, usually on a two-year contract) – treat those as estimates, not official numbers. For most individuals and indie developers, that math ends the conversation before it starts.
IEX Cloud (retired)
We include IEX Cloud because people still search for it, and it deserves a kind word: it was a popular, developer-friendly stock market data API that introduced a lot of people to this space. Its parent, IEX Group, announced on May 31, 2024 that it would retire all IEX Cloud products, and the API shut down fully on August 31, 2024, with departing customers referred to Intrinio. One clarification: IEX Cloud was the data subsidiary – the IEX Exchange itself is a stock exchange and still operates. The gentle lesson for all of us is that single-vendor dependency is real, so pick providers that are licensed, committed, and give real notice before things change. (It’s why our own Developer Program promises at least a year’s notice – more below.)
Why we built Tiingo the way we did
Tiingo started in 2014 with a simple frustration: the data quants and institutions took for granted was priced out of reach of everyone else. We took no outside investors then and we have none now, which means we get to optimize for people instead of quarterly targets. The question that shaped our stock API was never how much we could charge for data – it was how much we could give away and still keep the lights on.
That shows up in the numbers. The free Starter plan is built to be used, not to frustrate you into upgrading: 500 unique symbols a month, 50 requests/hour, 1,000 requests/day, 1GB of bandwidth, 30+ years of price history, and 5 years of fundamentals – all at $0. Yes, we know that’s generous for a free tier. It’s the point. When you outgrow it, Power is $30/month ($300/year) for individual, non-commercial use, and the commercial plan is $50/month ($499/year) for the same data with a commercial-use license. Flat-rate, no per-symbol metering, no surprise overage math. Add-ons like the Fundamental Data API (20+ years of fundamentals) and our News API (70M+ articles over 20+ years) follow the same at-cost spirit, and the Crypto API spans 150+ exchanges.
Two things matter to us that don’t fit neatly on a pricing page. First, licensing: our data is properly licensed and redistribution-friendly, because a stock price API you can’t legally build a product on isn’t much of a gift. Second, stability: our Developer Program commits to at least one year’s notice before any breaking change. After watching developers get orphaned when APIs disappear, it was important to us that nobody building on Tiingo ever wakes up to a shutdown email and a countdown clock.
At a glance
| Provider | Free tier | Real-time | Global | Entry price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tiingo | 500 symbols/mo, 1,000 req/day | Yes (via IEX) | US + Chinese A-shares | $30/mo | Licensed, affordable data from hobby to commercial |
| Intrinio | Sandbox + trial only | Yes (IEX / Nasdaq / OPRA) | US-centric (~1,500 ADRs) | $150/mo | Standardized US fundamentals, options |
| Alpha Vantage | 25 requests/day | Premium only | Yes (100,000+ symbols) | $49.99/mo | Easy start, broad data types |
| Twelve Data | 800 credits/day, real-time US | Yes (free, non-display) | 90+ exchanges | $29/mo | Global breadth |
| EODHD | 20 calls/day, demo tickers | Paid add-on | 60-70+ exchanges | $19.99/mo | Low-cost global end-of-day |
| FMP | 250 calls/day (EOD, US) | From first paid tier | Yes (tier-gated) | $22/mo | Deep fundamentals on a budget |
| Nasdaq Data Link | Free public datasets | Not a unified feed | Varies by dataset | Per dataset | Alternative + economic data |
| Xignite (QUODD) | No | Yes | Yes | Quote-based | Enterprise / institutional |
| Bloomberg | No | Yes | Yes | ~$2,000-$2,700/mo (est.) | Professional desks |
| IEX Cloud | Retired (Aug 2024) | – | – | – | Customers referred to Intrinio |
The bottom line
There is no single best stock market data API. There’s the best one for what you’re building. If you live in US fundamentals, Intrinio earns its price. If you need fifty countries of coverage, Twelve Data and EODHD are strong. If your firm can expense a Terminal, Bloomberg is Bloomberg. None of that is a knock on anyone – matching the tool to the job is the whole point of this guide.
And if what you want is licensed, redistribution-friendly data that’s broad, deep, and priced like a utility instead of a luxury – a free tier you can actually build with, $30/month when you’re ready, and at least a year’s notice before anything ever breaks – that’s the corner we’ve been building since 2014. Grab a free API token and kick the tires. And if you end up choosing someone else on this list, we hope this guide made the choosing easier. Good data should be accessible to everyone. That’s been the mission since day one, and it isn’t changing.