Benzinga vs. Seeking Alpha – Which Platform Is Better?

Benzinga and Seeking Alpha are two of the top platforms for stock market news and analysis. Both platforms offer real-time updates throughout the trading day as well as stock research to help you trade and invest more effectively. Benzinga’s premium service, Benzinga Pro, offers real-time news alerts, while Seeking Alpha Premium gives you access to top-rated stock ideas.

If you’re thinking about signing up for Benzinga Pro or Seeking Alpha Premium, this guide is for you. We’ll compare Benzinga vs. Seeking Alpha to help you decide which service is better. We’ll also look specifically at what Benzinga Pro and Seeking Alpha Premium can offer.

About Benzinga and Seeking Alpha

Benzinga is an online market news platform launched in 2010. The platform offers free market news updates, in-depth stock research, and a paid newswire service. Benzinga has more than 45 million monthly readers.

Seeking Alpha is a stock research platform launched in 2004 with the goal of crowdsourcing analysis from a wide range of analysts, fund managers, and market experts. The platform also has an in-house editing team that publishes market news. Seeking Alpha has more than 20 million monthly users.

Benzinga vs. Seeking Alpha: Market News

Market news is at the heart of both Benzinga and Seeking Alpha. News articles are written by in-house editors at each service, and most news articles take less than five minutes to read. Access to news is free at each of these platforms, so for many investors it’s worth following both Benzinga and Seeking Alpha throughout the trading day.

Benzinga’s news articles are organized into a variety of categories, including earnings, M&A, legal news, IPOs, and insider trades. A popular news feed highlights the articles that are being most widely read by Benzinga users.

Seeking Alpha news stories are mainly organized by market and sector, so there are categories for healthcare stocks, financial stocks, consumer stocks, and REITs. There are additional news feeds for IPOs, earnings, and dividends.

Benzinga vs. Seeking Alpha: Stock Analysis

Benzinga and Seeking Alpha each offer stock research tools, although Seeking Alpha goes much further in this respect.

At Benzinga, stock pages include technical charts from TradingView and tables showing current analyst price targets, earnings history, and key financial ratios. Benzinga also has analysis articles that explore long and short stock ideas, although these tend to cover lists of stocks worth watching rather than in-depth research reports.

Seeking Alpha offers far more detailed information on its stock pages, particularly for fundamental analysis. The platform includes details about earnings, fundamental ratios, growth, and recent performance. There are tons of niche valuation metrics included along with A-F grades to help investors interpret them (with Seeking Alpha Premium). Even better, Seeking Alpha makes it easy to compare all of these statistics against a company’s peers in the same market sector.

Seeking Alpha also has numerous analysis articles for each stock. These articles are written by outside contributors, who are typically financial analysts, fund managers, or other market experts. Analysis articles are typically focused on one or a few stocks and they can be quite in-depth. For example, it’s not uncommon for an article to do a deep dive into a custom valuation model for a stock. Analysis articles from different contributors often have different perspectives or take different approaches to analyzing the same company, which can help readers make more informed investment decisions.

Benzinga vs. Seeking Alpha: ETFs, Crypto, and Additional Markets

Benzinga and Seeking Alpha both cover more than just stocks. Benzinga has newsfeed pages for cryptocurrency, forex, bonds, commodities, and options. There are also feeds specifically for ETFs, the cannabis industry, and penny stocks. 

Similarly, Seeking Alpha offers news and analysis for cryptocurrency, forex, commodities, and real estate. Seeking Alpha also has a newsfeed specifically for REITs and a screener for ETFs.

Benzinga vs. Seeking Alpha: Portfolios

Both Benzinga and Seeking Alpha support custom watchlists and portfolios. You can opt into alerts whenever news or analysis articles are published about stocks in your portfolio. The portfolios provide a quick look at price and valuation metrics for the stocks you own, but they don’t actually track your portfolio performance over time.

Benzinga Pro vs. Seeking Alpha Premium

Benzinga Pro and Seeking Alpha Premium are the flagship paid services from Benzinga and Seeking Alpha, respectively. While Benzinga and Seeking Alpha’s free offerings have a lot in common, Benzinga Pro and Seeking Alpha Premium are very different services.

Benzinga Pro is a financial markets newswire service. This platform offers breaking market news in real-time. Its goal is to deliver headlines before any other market news service. Headlines are written by a dedicated team of editors and are designed to be digested as quickly as possible.

Benzinga Pro also offers a detailed news scanner and customized feeds based on your watchlists. You can also upgrade to get an audio squawk feature, which reads headlines out loud so you don’t need to take your eyes off your trading platform.

Overall, Benzinga Pro is a powerful service for experienced traders who want to trade around breaking news stories. It’s less suitable for medium and long-term investors, who can generally wait a few minutes for headlines to show up Benzinga or Seeking Alpha’s free news feeds.

Benzinga Pro is free to use, but the free plan only gives you access to original headlines from Benzinga. Full access to the newswire starts at $27 per month, while access to audio squawk and the news scanner costs $197 per month or $1,997 per year.

Seeking Alpha Premium builds on the features available for free in Seeking Alpha and serves as a comprehensive research platform. It offers access to lists of top stocks that have strong ratings from Wall Street analysts, Seeking Alpha contributors, and a quantitative model built by Seeking Alpha.

Seeking Alpha Premium makes it easier to research stocks by grading them on a 1-5 scale and rating their fundamental ratios on a scale from A-F. You also get unlimited access to the Seeking Alpha stock scanner, which offers hundreds of technical, fundamental, and performance filters to help you find potential stock picks.

With Seeking Alpha Premium, you can also connect a brokerage account to automatically update your portfolio.

Seeking Alpha Premium is best-suited for medium and long-term investors who want to find new investment ideas. The top stocks lists are a great starting point for research and the stock scanner is one of the best we’ve tested.

Seeking Alpha Premium costs $4.95 for your first month, then $239 per year.

Seeking Alpha vs. Benzinga – Which Service is Better?

Benzinga and Seeking Alpha are relatively similar market news and stock research platforms. Seeking Alpha puts slightly more emphasis on stock research by offering more fundamental data and analysis articles in addition to news articles. Both platforms offer custom portfolios to support news alerts. Since all news articles are free to access, it makes sense for most traders and investors to keep an eye on both platforms.

If you want an advanced real-time newswire service, then Benzinga Pro is one of the best platforms available. It’s not cheap, but Benzinga Pro offers advanced tools like a news scanner and audio squawk that can help you stay ahead of the market when important news is breaking.

If you want in-depth stock research and trade ideas, then consider Seeking Alpha Premium. The top stock lists and stock screener offer a jumping-off point for finding stocks to buy, and you can use Seeking Alpha’s analysis articles to dig deeper into the stocks you’re most interested in.

Alternatives to Benzinga and Seeking Alpha

If you’re interested in using Benzinga and Seeking Alpha to stay on top of market news, then you might also consider a platform like CNBC. CNBC offers a wider view of the market, focusing on the news and events that are driving whole indices as much as it focuses on individual stocks. Headlines typically lag behind those in Benzinga Pro, but the speed of breaking news is comparable to the free feeds in Benzinga and Seeking Alpha.

CNBC Pro, which costs $34.99 per month or $299.99 per year, lets you stream live CNBC broadcasts online. So, it’s suitable if you want to keep an audible news stream open while trading but don’t want to pay for a pricey Benzinga Pro subscription.

If you’re more interested in finding stock ideas, you might prefer a stock picking newsletter like Motley Fool Stock Advisor. This stock picking service delivers two new growth stock recommendations each month and has a track record of beating the S&P 500 for more than 20 years. Unlike Seeking Alpha, Stock Advisor isn’t a stock analysis platform and doesn’t require any self-directed research.

FStock Advisor costs $199 per year.

Conclusion: Benzinga vs. Seeking Alpha

Benzinga and Seeking Alpha are market news platforms that make it easy to follow breaking news and get updates about stocks in your portfolio. Both platforms offer news for free, and Seeking Alpha offers detailed stock analysis written by financial experts. Benzinga Pro is a paid market newswire service designed for news traders, while Seeking Alpha Premium offers lists of top-rated stocks to help you generate trade ideas.

If you’re still looking to learn more about each, make sure to read our full Benzinga Pro review here and our full Seeking Alpha review here.