Stock Rover vs. FinViz – Which Platform Is The Better Choice?

Stock Rover and FinViz are two of the more well-established stock screening tools on the market today. While the two platforms share some features in common, including advanced screener tools and portfolio management options, they take very different approaches to investing. Stock Rover focuses primarily on fundamental data, while FinViz offers a blend of technical and fundamental data for analysis.

We’ll compare Stock Rover vs. FinViz side-by-side to help you determine which of these services is right for you.

About Stock Rover And FinViz

Stock Rover was founded in 2008 by two software engineers, Howard Reisman and Andrew Martin. The platform aims to put fundamental research, an advanced screener, and portfolio management tools together for investors. Stock Rover doesn’t publish any information about how many users, free or paid, that it currently has. 

FinViz was created in 2007 as a platform for creating visualizations of financial data. The platform’s main selling point is that these financial visualizations make it easier to sift through screener results and other information compared to competing stock screeners. FinViz has around 20 million monthly users.

Notably, FinViz also offers data for futures, forex, and cryptocurrencies, although the features for screening these assets aren’t as well-developed as the stock features. Stock Rover offers data on thousands of ETFs and more than 40,000 mutual funds in addition to stocks.

Stock Rover vs. FinViz: Stock Screeners

Stock screeners are at the hearts of both Stock Rover and FinViz. In fact, the screeners reveal much about the different approaches these two platforms take to investing.

The Stock Rover premium stock screener focuses heavily on fundamental data. Nearly all of the 14 built-in screens focus on fair value to some extent, and the majority of the more than 600 available screening parameters cover corporate financial data and fundamental metrics. Technical metrics are represented in the screener, but they make up a minority of the available filter parameters.

One of the nice things about the Stock Rover screener is that it’s nearly endlessly customizable. You can apply screens on top of screens, for example. Or you can use the equation builder to create your own highly complex set of filters. 

The FinViz stock screener is more evenly split between fundamental and technical parameters. It includes filters for metrics like trading volume and stock prices, which are essential for screening for potential trades. FinViz also offers automated chart pattern recognition, enabling you to filter based on common chart patterns like triangles, channels, and head and shoulders patterns. This is a really powerful feature for day and swing traders.

That said, FinViz only offers around 80 filters in total that you can access through drop-down menus and text entry boxes. The screener is relatively straightforward to use, which is a plus. It is notably more limited than the Stock Rover screener since you can’t create fully custom filters.

Stock Rover vs. FinViz: Screener Results Visualization

Where FinViz gains the upper hand is in visualizing your screener results. Stock Rover takes the traditional approach to presenting results – a tabular display for which you can easily sort columns. The tables are somewhat dynamic in that you can quickly access more data, create a watchlist, or open charts, but they’re still tables.

FinViz, on the other hand, offers extremely useful visualizations of your screen results. You can use a heatmap, for example, to group stocks by sector, size them by market cap, and color them according to recent performance. Or you can modify the settings to visualize P/E, dividend yield, cash flow, and more. FinViz also offers bubble charts that can be used similarly, but make it easier to compare fundamental and technical parameters across an X-Y axis.

It’s hard to overstate how nice it is to be able to visualize screener results this way. Instead of just sorting screen results by, say, market cap in a table, you can compare stocks that met your screen filters on up to four variables (using the x and y-axes, bubble size, and bubble color). It really helps you start narrowing down your screen results to a few stocks you want to research further.

For more technical-oriented screens, FinViz also lets you visualize your results as miniature candlestick charts with moving averages and trendlines. It takes a trained eye to quickly make sense of these mini charts and pick out promising setups from a screen, but this is another feature that really helps FinViz stand out for stock market screening.

Stock Rover vs. FinViz: Charts

Both Stock Rover and FinViz offer technical charts. Neither particularly stands out in this regard, however. The charts are reasonably customizable, but you don’t get access to many technical studies.

The main feature to highlight here is that Stock Rover’s charts enable you to plot fundamental data alongside price and technical data. Alternatively, fundamental data can be charted on its own. This makes Stock Rover more useful for visualizing changes in a company’s financial position over time, whereas the screener and FinViz’s visualizations only offer the most recent snapshot of fundamental data.

Stock Rover vs. FinViz: Stock Research

One major benefit to Stock Rover over FinViz for fundamental investors is that Stock Rover provides in-depth stock data and research. Every stock comes with a detailed research report that includes a stock fair value analysis. Stock Rover also assigns stock ratings based on fundamental and technical criteria. Ratings are broken down into individual scores for a stock’s value, growth, quality, and investor sentiment. You can use these ratings when building screens.

FinViz offers much more limited stock research tools. You can review basic financial metrics, but there’s no comparison against industry peers or ratings.

Stock Rover vs. FinViz: Portfolio Analysis

Stock Rover and FinViz include surprisingly similar portfolio analysis tools. These tools aren’t so much for tracking your performance over time, although they do a decent job of that, as for helping you diversify your holdings. For example, both platforms include correlation analysis that enables you to explore what stocks in your portfolio historically experience price changes together.

One additional feature that Stock Rover offers is portfolio rebalancing. With Stock Rover’s tool, you can assign target percentage values to each of the stocks you hold in your portfolio. As drift happens over time, Stock Rover will calculate the number of shares of each stock that you need to buy or sell to return to your target allocation.

Stock Rover vs. FinViz: Backtesting

FinViz boasts a significant analysis tool that Stock Rover doesn’t have – backtesting. With FinViz, you can set up a trading strategy in nearly the same way you would for a stock screen. The platform will then calculate your historical profit and loss from this strategy.

To be sure, FinViz’s backtesting tool isn’t the most comprehensive we’ve seen. But it’s noteworthy that FinViz offers this type of analysis while Stock Rover does not.

Stock Rover vs. FinViz: Pricing

Both Stock Rover and FinViz are fairly affordable for the quality of tools they include.

Stock Rover has a basic free plan, although this leaves out most of the platform’s screening and analysis features. The Essentials plan costs $7.99 per month and offers wider access plus five years’ worth of detailed historical data. However, you’ll need a Premium plan for $17.99 per month to put screens on screens, create custom filters, and access portfolio analysis tools.

FinViz has a more generous free plan that gives you access to most of the stock screener filters and visualizations, but delays price data by several minutes. FinViz Elite, which costs $39.50 per month, offers real-time data and unlocks the platform’s backtesting tool.

Which Service Is Better?

Whether Stock Rover or FinViz is better for you depends on your investment strategy and style. Stock Rover leans heavily towards fundamental analysis, which makes it a better platform for medium and long-term investors. The appeal for long-term investors is bolstered by the software’s focus on ETFs and portfolio analysis tools, which can help you keep your portfolio on track over the course of years.

FinViz takes a more balanced approach to fundamental and technical analysis. The free version of this software can be very useful for medium and long-term traders, since you get access to most of the screener and portfolio tools at no cost. It’s one of the best free stock screener tools available. However, short-term traders will need a FinViz Elite plan to unlock real-time data and technical backtesting. 

In comparing the screeners, Stock Rover offers far more parameters and customization options than FinViz. However, FinViz’s visualization tools are really powerful for digging into screen results and could put this platform slightly ahead for investors who prefer relatively simple stock screens.

Stock Rover And FinViz Alternatives

Stock Rover and FinViz are both strong platforms with a lot to offer. But if you’re interested in these, you might also want to consider TradingView. This software offers a massive trove of fundamental and technical indicators, and it’s fully customizable. You can create your own indicators using the built-in coding tool or borrow and modify crowdsourced indicators from other traders on TradingView. TradingView also offers a pretty thorough stock screener that has a similar blend of fundamental and technical parameters to FinViz.

The main downside to TradingView compared to Stock Rover and FinViz is that it can be expensive. There’s a free tier, but paid plans vary the number of indicators you can have on a single chart. The Pro+ plan, for example, costs $29.95 per month and still only allows you to have 10 indicators overlaid on a single price chart.

Conclusion: Stock Rover vs. FinViz

Stock Rover and FinViz are easy-to-use stock research platforms that offer a lot more than just stock screening. Stock Rover is best for medium and long-term investors who prefer fundamental analysis, while FinViz is best for short and medium-term traders who want to blend fundamental and technical analyses. Both services are highly affordable and offer free tiers, so you can access many of their complementary features without paying twice.