For traders looking to take their strategy to the next level, Benzinga Pro and Trade Ideas are among the top trading software platforms on the market today. Benzinga Pro offers a combination of real-time news and market scanners, while Trade Ideas offers advanced scanners and AI-based market analysis.
Both software packages carry hefty price tags, so it’s important to understand what they each do and how they differ before deciding on an upgrade. In this guide, we’ll compare Benzinga Pro vs. Trade Ideas to help you decide which platform is right for you.
About Benzinga Pro and Trade Ideas
Benzinga launched in 2010 as a one-stop-shop for market news, broker reviews, stock discussion, and more. Benzinga Pro is the platform’s paid newswire service. It’s supported by a team of market analysts, and it’s where all the news and research that ultimately makes it to Benzinga first appears. Benzinga Pro has earned a reputation as one of the fastest market news platforms in the industry.
Trade Ideas was founded in 2003 as a market scanning and analysis platform for day traders operating online. The service has continually improved its scanning technology over time, and Trade Ideas now incorporates AI to scan for profitable setups and simulate trading strategies.
Benzinga Pro vs. Trade Ideas: Market News
Benzinga Pro is designed first and foremost as a stock news platform. Its primary focus is to deliver headlines as quickly as possible, before they reach any of the service’s competitors or mainstream outlets like CNBC. Many of the headlines that Benzinga Pro shares are written by the company’s dedicated team of market analysts rather than copied from other outlets.
So, it makes sense that the main Benzinga Pro dashboard largely consists of a list of headlines that are updated in real-time. You can filter and search the news feed to focus on specific companies or events. It’s also easy to set up multiple feeds for different types of news. When you find interesting news around a specific stock, the software enables you to pull up a price chart along with a list of recent headlines for that ticker symbol.
Notably, Benzinga Pro also offers an audio squawk feature that reads new headlines aloud as they come in. That enables you to focus your attention on your trading platform while still staying alert to breaking news. You can also set up news alerts for individual stocks or for specific keywords.
Trade Ideas does offer market news as part of its platform, but news is hardly the focus. For one thing, there’s no market-wide news feed. You can only see headlines for one stock at a time, and even then, the headlines are just one part of a detailed stock view that includes fundamental data. Trade Ideas also gets all of its headlines from other news outlets like CNBC and Reuters.
Benzinga Pro vs. Trade Ideas: Stock Scanning
Trade Ideas is one of the most capable retail stock scanners on the market today. The built-in scanners are particularly well-designed, and they include scans for complex strategies like stocks taking off in the first minutes of a trading session. All of the pre-made scans in Trade Ideas can be customized, but they bring a lot of value right out of the box.
On top of that, Trade Ideas offers fully custom scans. You can mix and match a wide variety of parameters and strategies, and the software offers more leeway to get creative than most other stock scanning tools. Notably, Trade Ideas also lets you backtest trading strategies so you can see whether they actually work.
Trade Ideas also incorporates AI in a way that few other stock scanners do. The platform’s AI engine simulates millions of trades every night to curate a list of potential setups and triggers for the following day. You can piggyback off any of these trades or limit your scan results to stocks that the AI identified as targets for that day.
In comparison, Benzinga Pro’s stock scanning capabilities are extremely limited. You can filter stocks by percent change over different periods of time and according to a variety of financial and valuation metrics. However, the software doesn’t offer pre-made strategy scanners, and it offers few filters to find specific technical setups.
Benzinga Pro vs. Trade Ideas: Chat Features
Both Benzinga Pro and Trade Ideas offer chat rooms where you can connect with other traders using the software.
In Benzinga Pro, there are chat rooms for different experience levels as well as for different types of asset classes, including crypto and options. These chat rooms are moderated, but they’re mainly for talking with other traders. Notably, you can also chat directly with Benzinga Pro’s analysts, so you can find out more details about a specific headline or find out how breaking news might impact a stock.
In Trade Ideas, the chat room is moderated by one of the company’s leading traders, who walks you through how he uses Trade Ideas to find and execute day trades. You can message with other traders, but the main purpose of the chat room is to help you learn how to more effectively use Trade Ideas.
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Benzinga Pro vs. Trade Ideas: Pricing
Benzinga Pro and Trade Ideas are both relatively expensive. Benzinga Pro starts at $99 per month, and the price jumps to $177 per month if you need audio squawk or the ability to chat directly with analysts.
Trade Ideas costs $118 per month, or $228 per month if you want to unlock all of the AI scanning features.
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Which Service is Better?
Ultimately, whether Benzinga Pro or Trade Ideas is better for you comes down to your trading strategy. If you’re primarily interested in trading news-driven price changes, then it’s hard to beat Benzinga Pro. The platform is often first to deliver breaking news, and you can stay abreast of headlines throughout the day thanks to news alerts and the built-in audio squawk. While Benzinga Pro has some basic scanner functions, it’s not particularly helpful for finding trading setups based on a particular strategy.
On the other hand, Trade Ideas is designed to help you scan the market for profitable setups and execute on your trading strategy. The platform offers exceptionally good built-in scanners as well as highly configurable DIY scanners. You can also develop and backtest strategies or use the AI trading functionality to piggyback trades. While some of the setups that Trade Ideas helps you identify might result from news headlines, the platform doesn’t provide much insight into market news.
Alternatives to Benzinga Pro and Trade Ideas
There are many alternatives to Benzinga Pro and Trade Ideas if neither platform has exactly what you need.
MetaStock Real Time offers a real-time market news feed from Reuters as well as more advanced charting tools than you’ll find in either Benzinga Pro or Trade Ideas, all for $100 per month. However, the scanning features are much more limited than those in Trade Ideas, and the news feed isn’t as customizable as that in Benzinga Pro.
Scanz offers both pre-made and highly customizable stock scanners that, once configured, do a pretty good job of matching Trade Ideas’ capabilities. The platform also provides a news scanner, but headlines are typically delivered a few minutes behind when they come out at Benzinga Pro. Scanz costs $149 per month if you want both stock and news scanning.
Conclusion: Benzinga Pro vs. Trade Ideas
Benzinga Pro and Trade Ideas are best-in-breed platforms for market news and stock scanning, respectively. Benzinga Pro is best for trading the news, while Trade Ideas is highly customizable to use for any day trading strategy.
