Finviz vs TradingView 2024: Which Research Platform is Best?

Trying to decide between Finviz vs TradingView as your next investment hub?

It’s a big decision that deserves a lot of thought. Ultimately, this is where you will be deciding how to allocate your hard-earned money, so it’s important to get it right.

As a former hedge fund manager with extensive experience using both of these platforms, I am uniquely placed to offer a professional perspective that’s hard to find elsewhere.

Below, I share my insights into everything both have to offer, in what I believe is a balanced head-to-head comparison.

For those looking for the short answer, TradingView is the ultimate victor. It’s global data coverage, advanced charts, screening, and backtesting capabilities blow Finviz out of the water. Also, it’s 50-million strong investment community is without doubt one of the best educational resources out there.

What is Finviz?

Finviz is an online financial market research portal, combining stock screening, charting, financial analysis, and data visualization.

Finviz Elite subscribers also have access to more advanced features, such as real-time data, interactive charts, custom screening conditions, and backtesting.

What is TradingView?

TradingView is a cloud based charting platform released in 2011, combining extensive charting capabilities with an enormous social network of over 50 million global users.

It offers real-time market data across multiple financial markets, including stocks, ETFs, FX, Crypto, and Futures. In fact, its stock market data spans 70+ exchanges in over 50 countries.

What’s more, it has an incredibly comprehensive suite of analytical features, ranging from advanced charting tools, stock screening, backtesting, and fundamental data

TradingView vs Finviz Comparison

Feature	Finviz	TradingView
Stock Screening
FX & Crypto Screening
OTC Data
Backtesting
Heatmaps
Fundamental Data
Community
Trading		40+ Stock, FX & Crypto Brokers
Regions	US (including ADRs)	Global
Charts	5 chart styles, 30 technical indicators, 15+ drawing tools	16 chart styles, 100+ technical indicators, 90+ drawing tools
Free Trial	30-Day Back Money Guarantee	30-day Free Trial
Discount	-40% With Annual Subscription	Up to -50% Discount

Finviz vs TradingView Pricing

Both platforms offer multiple payment plans with different levels of functionality. TradingView has 3, ranging from a basic free version to an all-inclusive premium plan.

Finviz, on the other hand, has a free version and a paid version called Finviz Elite.

For a detailed breakdown of each plan’s features, read my TradingView review and Finviz review, respectively.

Follow the links below for up-to-date pricing.

Finviz Elite Free Trial & Discounts

While Finviz Elite doesn’t technically have a free trial, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, which means you can try it out for 1 month completely risk-free.

TradingView Free Trial & Discounts

TradingView offers a 30-day free trial for all of its paid plans, without requiring any upfront payment.

There are also several ways to get a discount.

Firstly, by clicking any of the links in this article, you will receive a $15 credit after you purchase any TradingView plan.

Secondly, users who choose to pay annually rather than monthly save 16%, which is equivalent to 2 months free!

And last but not least, users on a 30-day free trial of any paid plan will receive an “Early Bird” offer of up to 50% off.

Finviz vs TradingView Features

Here is an in-depth analysis of the key features behind TradingView vs Finviz.

TradingView vs Finviz Charts

While both platforms offer charting features, TradingView is in a league of its own compared to Finviz. For a closer contest, I suggest reading this TrendSpider vs TradingView comparison.

Finviz Charts

Firstly, free users of Finviz only have access to the following:

• Basic candlestick & line charts
• 20, 50, and 200-day simple moving averages
• Volume bars
• Daily, weekly, or monthly time frames
• Automated trend lines

While these features are pretty bare-bone to begin with, the real disappointment comes when you realize there’s no option to customize anything, or add any other indicators and line studies. You can’t even zoom in, or view the chart as a full screen.

Having said that, I will say that the automated trend lines are surprisingly accurate and very useful if your eyes aren’t “trained” to spot chart patterns yet.

Thankfully, Finviz Elite makes up for the shortcomings in the free plan with:

• Intraday charts (1, 3, 5, 30, or 60 minutes)
• Extended hours (pre and post-market)
• 5 Chart Types (candle, line, OHLC, Heikin Ashi, hollow candle)
• Advanced charts with 11 overlays & 19 technical studies
• 15+ drawing tools

However, even these only scratch the surface. Moreover, the user experience could be smoother in my opinion. Changing any of the indicators or overlays requires opening a separate settings window, inputting your new preferences, and then saving. Frustrating to say the least.

TradingView Charts

TradingView, on the other hand, represents the industry gold-standard when it comes to charts. In fact, it is the default charting platform of many third-party brokers.

Firstly, TradingView has over 15 customizable chart formats to choose from, including:

• Bars, Candles, Hollow candles, Columns, Line, Line with markers
• Step line, Area, Baseline, High-low, Heikin Ashi 
• Renko, Line break , Kagi, Point & figure, Range (Pro, Pro+, Premium)

There are also around 17 pre-set time frames ranging from 1 minute bars all the way up to yearly bars. Note, paid subscribers can also set custom time intervals, and Premium members can choose second-based intervals (1/5/15/30 seconds).

In addition, they come with a plethora of technical analysis tools. For instance, you can overlay your charts with more than 100 built-in indicators and over 90 drawing tools, such as trendlines, channels, and Fibonacci retracements. What’s more, you can create your own custom indicators using TradingView’s native Pine Script programming language.

And if that wasn’t enough, you can also tap into TradingView’s library of 100,000+ community-built indicators – the largest in the world.

In addition, you can take advantage of these advanced charting tools:

• Multi Time Frame Charts: Display higher time frame data on a lower time frame chart. For instance, you can superimpose weekly candles on a daily chart, or a 10-day moving average on an hourly chart.
• Candlestick Pattern Recognition: Automatically plot more than 40 candlestick patterns of your choice on any chart. This comes with an explanation of each candlestick pattern as well as a possible trading interpretation.
• Chart Pattern Recognition: A Premium feature that automatically identifies 15 different chart patterns for you. This includes flag patterns, triangles, head and shoulders, and Elliott Waves.
• Fundamental Charts: Plot over 100 fundamental metrics alongside your stock charts to see their evolution over time. Most of this data stretches back 20 years.

Finviz vs TradingView Stock Screener

Stock screening is another key pillar in Finviz and TradingView, which means they’re great for generating new trade ideas. Below is a summary of their key similarities and differences.

Firstly, while both of their screeners include technical and fundamental metrics, TradingView wins on quantity. In particular, Finviz has 67 descriptive, technical, and fundamental filters, whereas TradingView has around 220.

In addition, while Finviz only lets you apply these criteria to around 8300 major stocks and ETFs in the US and Canada, TradingView caters for around 60,000 stocks and ETFs across the entire world.

What’s more, TradingView has separate FX and crypto screeners. The Forex screener covers 1833 currency pairs in total (including exotic pairs), with 49 major and minor pairs. Meanwhile, the crypto screener covers more than 40,000 crypto pairs across 55 exchanges, including spot, futures, and perpetual contracts.

During my testing, I found that TradingView was a far more customizable stock screener than Finviz. In particular, while TradingView has sliders and number-entry boxes for each parameter, Finviz only lets you select a handful of pre-set values from drop-down menus. Having said that, paid subscribers to Finviz Elite can choose their own values for each metric, just like TradingView. The difference is TradingView lets you do this for free.

Another similarity between Finviz and TradingView, is that free users can only update their results manually. However, paid subscribers to both platforms can choose to auto refresh results every 10 seconds if they wish to. If real-time scanning is what you’re after, I recommend Trade Ideas instead. I’ve even written a separate Trade Ideas vs TradingView review so you can compare them more closely.

Both stock screeners are capable of candlestick pattern recognition. Finviz can detect up to 11 different candlestick variations, while TradingView can detect up to 27. However, this only applies to daily candles in Finviz. In comparison, TradingView lets you screen across multiple time frames. Free users can screen across daily, weekly, and monthly time frames, while paid users can screen across 10 different time frames, ranging from 1-minute bars to monthly bars.

However, one advantage that Finviz has over TradingView, is the ability to screen for 28 different chart patterns including:

• Support & resistance lines
• Channels (ascending, descending)
• Wedges (bullish, bearish)
• Triangles (ascending, descending)
• Double tops & bottoms
• Head & shoulders (bullish, bearish)

Lastly, both platforms allow you to display your stock screener results in multiple formats, ranging from charts to custom data columns. This is great for scanning your eyes over potential candidates and narrowing your focus further.

Backtesting Trading Ideas

One of the main problems with screening is knowing what criteria to use. If our criteria sucks, then so will the list of stocks it generates.

Backtesting is one potential solution to this problem, because it lets you test your criteria on historical data. Essentially, you can see how much money you would have made by following certain trading strategies.

Thankfully, both TradingView and Finviz have backtesting capabilities, however this is only available to Finviz Elite subscribers. In contrast, backtesting is available to all TradingView users, although your payment plan determines the amount of historical data you can use.

For instance, Basic (free) members can use 5000 historical bars, Pro members can use 10,000, while Premium members can use 20,000. In comparison, Finviz Elite subscribers can backtest on over 24 years of historical data.

Both backtesters only cater to technical-driven strategies, however each of them gives you more than 100 technical indicators to experiment with. Alternatively, you can tap into the pre-built systems that both platforms offer. This is where TradingView truly shines, given its vast library of 100,000+ community-built strategies shared by fellow users.

You can also incorporate real-world frictions into both backtesters such as trading commissions. However, TradingView offers more flexibility, allowing you to adjust other parameters like order size, slippage, and margin. As such, it probably reflects real-world trading conditions better than Finviz.

When it comes to exit rules, both platforms match up pretty evenly in terms of flexibility. For example, they both allow you to base exit rules off an indicator condition, time-limit, or stop-loss.

In terms of user-experience, I found Finviz’s backtester to be more beginner-friendly. It’s “point-and-click” approach is very intuitive and means you don’t need any coding experience. Just simply work your way through the series of drop-down menus.

In comparison, if you want to develop your own strategies in TradingView, you need some knowledge of its native Pine Script programming language. While it is incredibly easy to learn, it does take a bit of time, so you won’t be hitting the ground running straight away.

Another difference between the Finviz vs TradingView backtesters is the amount of output you get from each.

With Finviz, you get a summary of the following statistics:

Likewise, here is a snippet of some of the statistics spat out out by TradingView’s backtester. As you can see, there is far more information here, including a full list of each trade.

Overall, I prefer TradingView’s backtester over Finviz’s. Firstly, you can create far more complex strategies with the Pine Editor, with more realistic simulations. Also, the level of output you get is far more granular and I like the fact that you can see all of the buy and sell signals on the chart. Lastly, the community-built strategies provide you with an endless source of inspiration.

Fundamental Data

Another cool feature that both platforms share in common is the ability to conduct fundamental analysis.

In Finviz, free users have access to 3 years/quarters of historical statements, while Elite users have access to 8.

In addition, you get a snapshot of the key financial metrics and ratios for each stock, ranging from:

• EPS forecasts
• Return on Equity (ROE)
• Valuation Metrics (P/E, P/B, Dividend yield, etc.)
• Margins
• Number of employees

Elite users also get a visual representation of how EPS, sales, and shares outstanding have trended over the last few years.

In comparison, TradingView includes the following financial data and metrics from FactSet:

• Financial Statements: The last 7 years/semi-annuals/quarters income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements (depending on reporting frequency of each country)
• Ratios: Key valuation, profitability, liquidity, and solvency ratios
• Dividends: Historical dividend trend
• Earnings: Historical & forecast earnings
• Revenue: Historical & forecast sales, plus business segment & country breakdown

Data Visualization

Another cool feature that both Finviz and TradingView share in common is data visualization.

In particular, they have useful heatmaps that rank stocks according to different metrics. Rankings are colour-coded and displayed on one screen, giving you a birds-eye view of the entire market.

Finviz covers all US stocks listed on the NYSE, Nasdaq, and AMEX, including foreign-listed ADRs. Meanwhile, TradingView lets you narrow your focus to every major index across more than 50 countries.

However, while Finviz falls short on data coverage compared to TradingView, it lets you rank stocks according to fundamental metrics as well as technical ones – unlike TradingView. These include valuation ratios like P/E, P/S, D/Y, as well as float short and 5yr earnings growth.

On top of stock heatmaps, they both also have separate ETF and crypto heatmaps. Finviz even has heatmaps for futures and traditional currencies.

News

While everything touched on so far helps with quantitative analysis, at some point you need to incorporate some qualitative analysis into your process. Luckily, Finviz and TradingView have you covered here.

In particular, both platforms serve as fantastic news aggregation services. By searching for any ticker, you can access a stream of all the latest articles related to that stock from some of the most reputable financial media outlets.

If I had to pick between Finviz vs TradingView for news coverage? I would probably choose TradingView, simply because it separates the news into different categories. This makes it easier to find the news you’re looking for.

Who is Finviz Best For?

Finviz is best for beginner traders who want to experiment with basic charting and screening tools for free. It is also good for those wishing to conduct research on individual stocks, such as news and financial analysis. Finally, its data visualization tools are great for investors with a top-down approach, as it gives you a birds-eye view of value and momentum across stocks, sectors, and regions.

A Finviz Elite subscription is best for those who want real-time data with extended hours (pre/post-market), more customizable stock screener options, and backtesting capabilities.

Who is TradingView Best For?

TradingView is best for traders looking for an advanced charting platform with global, multi-asset data coverage. It will also appeal to traders who employ both technical and fundamental analysis to generate their trade ideas. Lastly, it will suit anyone who likes the social aspect of trading, as you’ll become part of the largest trading community in the world.

Finviz vs TradingView Summary

Following my in-depth testing and research of TradingView and Finviz, there can only be one winner.

In my opinion, that’s TradingView. It’s global data coverage, advanced charting features, screening and backtesting capabilities dwarf what’s achievable in Finviz. Not to mention you will become part of the largest investment community in the world, able to connect and learn from fellow traders. This is an invaluable educational resource that can’t be overlooked.

Having said that, I still think Finviz is a great entry-level platform for beginners. If anything, it’s a great way to learn the ropes before paying for all the bells-and-whistles. The screener – while basic – has a good range of fundamental and technical filters, including candlestick and chart pattern recognition. Moreover, the heatmaps contain a sea of information on markets, while there is plenty of news and financial data to conduct in-depth stock research.