In this guide, you will find:
- An explanation of what a stock market data provider is
- Key factors to consider when choosing a provider
- The top 5 stock data providers of 2025
- A comparison table of these platforms
Let’s dive in!
What is a Stock Market Data Provider?
Stock trading is often considered a bloodspot. When dealing with stocks (or any financial product for that matter), a single mistake now can cause regret even decades in the future. No matter what your growth strategy is, you need robust, reliable data to make your decisions.
Stock Market Data Providers are exactly what they sound like. They provide stock market data. Not all data providers are created equal. When you have quality data, you can make quality, data-driven decisions.
Things to Consider When Choosing One
When choosing a provider, a number of issues should be taken into account. These decisions shouldn’t be taken lightly. They can strongly alter your financial trajectory.
- Features: What are the main selling points from the provider?
- Available Data: Do they offer pricing data? Is it real-time or delayed data? Do they offer fundamental and historical data as well?
- Formats: The delivery format is crucial. Whether you’re trading manually, or running a high performance arbitrage bot, you need your data to be compatible with your system.
- Delivery Options: If trading manually or doing analysis, CSV and Excel files are best. JSON and REST API services fit best into programmatic systems.
- Pricing: Is this product tangible for both retail and enterprise investors? Can you afford it? Is it overkill?
- User Rating: What have previous customers said about the product? Do you trust the reviews? Do you trust a product without reviews?
Top 5 Stock Data Providers
1. Bright Data
Bright Data offers one of the best toolsets around. Depending on your needs, you can utilize stock market datasets for historical analysis and forecasts. Bright Data also offers a Stock Market Scraper to provide real-time pricing, trends, earnings calendars, news and more.
With Bright Data’s tools, you get some of the best data in the industry, and you gain enterprise level access to additional tools like news and market sentiment for a fraction of the price of other enterprise trading tools. Their sample data allows you to try the product before you buy it. Once you purchase it, you get a variety of data formats and delivery options that fit into any trading system.
- Features
- Stocks, Crypto, Options and more (Yahoo! Finance)
- Pre-built datasets: Perfect for historical analysis.
- Real-time scraper APIs: Real-time prices and trends for the best decisions.
- Sample data in JSON or CSV: Try it before you buy it!
- Custom scrapers: Create custom scrapers tailored to your system’s needs.
- Available Data: Don’t limit yourself to just pricing and trends. Educate yourself on market sentiment and company insights.
- Yahoo! Finance (historical and real-time)
- Crunchbase (historical and real-time)
- ZoomInfo (historical and real-time)
- Pitchbook (historical and real-time)
- And many more.
- Data Formats
- JSON
- CSV
- Excel
- Custom
- Delivery Options
- Snowflake
- Google Cloud
- PubSub
- AWS S3 Buckets
- Microsoft Azure
- Compliance: GDPR and CCPA compliant.
- Pricing:
- Datasets: $500/month
- Scraper APIs: $1.05/1,000 requests
- Custom Scraper: $300/month
- G2 User Review Score: 4.6
2. Alpha Vantage
Alpha Vantage is a great budget option offering a free tier for consumer usage and smaller premium options based on your business needs. Alpha Vantage is built for retail traders. At their highest pricing tier, they offer 1200 requests/minute for $249.99/month. Their products provide excellent value to bot developers, retail traders and small enterprise clientele.
If you want the fastest trading bot, this tool is perfect. If you want to power a dashboard for hundreds of your own customers, Alpha Vantage might not be the right tool for you. They offer JSON and standard spreadsheet formats (good for both developers and non-developers). The Alpha Vantage API is their primary mode of delivery, but spreadsheets are also widely available and easy to download.
- Features
- Real-time and historical data
- Earnings, dividends, and balance sheets
- Time-series data
- Low cost
- Available Data: Alpha Vantage checks all the boxes for standard financial data providers.
- Stock Prices
- Fundamental Data
- Technical Indicators
- Data Formats
- JSON
- CSV
- Excel
- Delivery Options
- API
- Download
- Compliance: Not mentioned on their site.
- Pricing:
- Free (end of day): 25 requests/day
- 75 requests/minute (15 minute delay): $49.99/month
- 150 requests/minute (realtime): $99.99/month
- 300 requests/minute (realtime): $149.99/month
- 600 requests/minute (realtime): $199.99/month
- 1200 requests/minute (realtime): $249.99/month
- G2 User Review Score: Not Available
3. Quodd
Quodd is built with a focus on enterprise clientele. They offer real-time and historical data available through API access and bulk report downloads. They offer a variety of tools, but their lack of upfront pricing and enterprise customer model makes them unfeasible for retail investors.
Quodd’s offerings rival even those of Bright Data, but without an easy signup process or a clear pricing model, it’s difficult to access this data and we can assume it’s very expensive. Quodd offers JSON, CSV, and XML formats. This makes it an easy fit with enterprise grade tools (even legacy ones). Delivery options are also primarily geared toward enterprise. They deliver data through their API, batch downloads, and cloud streaming.
- Features
- Real-time, delayed, historical and reference data
- Institutional grade accuracy licensed from exchanges
- Custom APIs
- Regulatory compliance
- Available Data: Quodd hooks you into a variety of global data sources both real-time and historical.
- Stocks, Options, Futures, Indices, Bonds
- Banks, Money Markets
- News, IPOs, earnings reports
- Currencies, Forex
- Data Formats
- JSON
- CSV
- XML
- Delivery Options
- API
- Cloud Streaming
- Batch Downloads
- Compliance: SOC2, ISO 27001
- Pricing:
- No Public Pricing (contact their sales department for a custom quote)
- G2 User Review Score: Not Yet Rated
4. Polygon.io
Centered around developers, Polygon.io is a great place for developers and bot operators. They offer a variety of plans for both individuals and enterprise. Polygon gets you access to low-latency real-time and historical data. They offer a great development product, but Polygon.io is a double-edged sword.
Their API is perfect for building an enterprise dashboard, but that’s what it’s for: building your own tools. People without development skills will likely have significant hurdles when using Polygon.io. Their primary data formats are JSON, flat files (csv, tsv etc.), and they even offer access to their SQL database. JSON and SQL are the ubiquitous in software development.
- Features
- Real-time, and historical data
- Websocket API for high performance, reactive trading
- Options Data
- Crypto and Forex Data
- Fast, Scalable APIs
- Available Data: Polygon.io puts you at the forefront of real-time pricing data while also offering historical.
- Stocks
- ETFs and Mutuals
- Earnings reports
- Currencies, Forex
- Data Formats
- JSON
- Flat Files
- SQL
- Delivery Options
- API
- Download from S3
- Compliance: Data sourced from licensed exchanges and other financial institutions.
- Pricing:
- Individual:
- Stocks Basic (end of day data): $0/month
- Stocks Starter (15 minute delay): $29/month
- Stocks Developer (15 minute delay): $79/month
- Stocks Advanced (real-time): $199/month
- Business:
- Stocks Business (real-time): $2,000/month
- Custom: Contact for a quote
- Individual:
- G2 User Review Score: Not Available
Intrinio
On its front page, Intrinio is described as “built by developers for developers”. They boast a robust API for both real-time and historical data. They cater to big players– financial analysts, trading platforms and hedge funds — offering institutional grade data.
Intrinio offers their data mainly in JSON and CSV formats. They offer an immense variety of data products (take a look at the pricing plans below). However, these plans come at a very high cost. Real-time options data costs $2,500/month. For options trading alone, you’re looking at $30,000 in operating costs just for data!
- Features
- Real-time, and historical stock data
- Websocket API for high performance, reactive trading
- Options Data
- Market News and Sentiment
- REST API
- Available Data: Like Polygon.io, Intrinio puts developers at the forefront of market data.
- Stocks, Options, Futures, and Derivatives
- Forex and Commodities
- Data Formats
- JSON
- CSV
- Delivery Options
- API
- Batch Downloads
- Compliance: Data sourced from licensed exchanges and other financial institutions.
- Pricing: The list below is non-exhaustive, but covers most of their plans. Intrinio is not viable for most retail traders.
- Fundamentals:
- US Fundamentals: $9,600/year
- US Press Releases: $30,000/year
- NewsEdge: Contact for details
- Stocks:
- End of Day Prices: $3,100/year
- Real-Time Stock Prices: $6,000/year
- Historical Prices: $6,000/year
- 15 Minute Delayed SIP: $6,000/year
- Global Real-Time Prices: $6,000/year
- NASDAQ Basic: $9,000/year
- Options:
- US Historical End of Day Prices: $2,800/year
- Intraday Historical Options: $4,800/year
- 15 Minute Delayed Prices: $9,600/year
- Real-time Options: $2,500/month
- Fundamentals:
- G2 User Review Score: Not Yet Rated
Summary Comparison
| Provider | Features | Data Categories | Formats | GDPR Compliance | Custom Services | Dedicated Support | G2 Review Score | Sample Datasets | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | Extensive tools, real-time scrapers, pre-built datasets | 9+ | JSON, ndJSON CSV, Excel, Custom | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | 4.6/5 | ✔️ | From $300/mo |
| Alpha Vantage | Budget-friendly, time-series APIs, free tier | 4+ | JSON, CSV, Excel | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Not Available | ❌ | Free (EOD), $49.99+/mo (real-time) |
| Quodd | Enterprise-grade, licensed exchange data, batch downloads | 8+ | JSON, CSV, XML | ✔️ (SOC2, ISO 27001) | ✔️ | ✔️ | Not Yet Rated | ❌ | No public pricing (Contact sales) |
| Polygon.io | Developer-focused, low-latency WebSocket API | 6+ | JSON, Flat Files, SQL | ❌ | ✔️ | ❌ | Not Available | ❌ | $0-$199/mo (individual), $2,000/mo (business) |
| Intrinio | Institutional-grade, real-time + historical market data | 7+ | JSON, CSV | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | Not Yet Rated | ❌ | $2,800-$30,000/year (varies by dataset) |
Conclusion
Bright Data is one of the best financial data providers in the industry. Unlike more traditional stock data providers, Bright Data can give you all the insights you or your company might need at a fraction of the price Quodd, Polygon.io, or Intrinio charges. Alpha Vantage does provide their data at a lower price, but they’re geared more toward developers and retail traders.
If you’re looking to get into trading and you want valuable data for a reasonable price, take a look at the following products.
Create a new account and gain access to instant sample data, custom datasets, and custom web scrapers!
No credit card required
