If you've shopped for market data as a retail quant, you already know the two names everyone repeats: Polygon and Alpha Vantage. They're fine. But they're not the only options, and for several use cases they're not the best ones. Tiingo, EODHD, and Databento each solve a problem the popular two solve poorly. This is a comparison of where each one earns its subscription, written from the perspective of a developer building backtests and dashboards, not a trading desk. None of this is investment advice.
What each one is actually for
These three are not interchangeable. Treating them as a feature checklist misses the point — they're built for different jobs.
Tiingo is the budget-friendly end-of-day specialist. Its core product is clean daily price history for US equities, ETFs, and mutual funds, plus a respectable fundamentals dataset and a news API. It's the one I reach for first on a personal project because the free tier is genuinely usable and the paid tier is cheap.
EODHD (EOD Historical Data) is the breadth play. Its pitch is one subscription that covers 60-plus exchanges worldwide — equities, ETFs, indices, forex, and crypto — with fundamentals for a large slice of them. If your strategy touches non-US markets, this is where the other providers start charging you extra or simply don't have the data.
Databento is the serious-infrastructure option. It delivers normalized historical and live data down to market-by-order (MBO) granularity, sourced directly from venue feeds. It's the only one of the three that a systematic intraday strategy would plausibly run on, and it prices accordingly.
If your strategy rebalances daily or weekly, paying for tick data is lighting money on fire. Most retail equity research lives comfortably on end-of-day bars. Buy intraday data only when your edge actually depends on it.
Coverage and granularity
Tiingo's sweet spot is daily bars with deep history for US-listed securities, plus intraday (IEX-sourced) on higher tiers. Its fundamentals cover financial statements and daily metrics, which is enough for factor screens and valuation work. Where it thins out is international markets and true exchange-consolidated intraday.
EODHD covers the widest set of exchanges of the three. The trade-off is that "covered" varies in depth by market — US data is dense, some smaller exchanges are end-of-day only with lighter fundamentals. Read their per-exchange coverage notes before you assume parity. Its bulk end-of-day endpoints are well suited to nightly batch jobs that refresh a whole universe.
Databento operates in a different league of granularity. You can pull full order-book events, trades, and consolidated feeds, normalized into a consistent schema across venues. For historical research it lets you reconstruct the book at a point in time — something the other two simply can't do. That power is why it's overkill for end-of-day work.
Pricing models, and why they differ
The pricing structures tell you who each product is for.
Tiingo and EODHD use flat monthly subscriptions. You pay a predictable amount and query within rate limits. For a solo researcher, predictability matters more than marginal cost, and both land in the tens-of-dollars-per-month range for hobbyist tiers. This is the model that makes sense when you're iterating and don't want a meter running.
Databento uses usage-based pricing — you pay for the data you actually pull, by volume, with live and historical priced separately. This is efficient if you need a specific historical slice once, and expensive if you're carelessly re-downloading gigabytes during development. Budget for it, and cache aggressively.
Market data carries redistribution and display restrictions that vary by provider and by whether the data is delayed or real-time. A personal backtest is almost always fine; publishing a dashboard or reselling derived data may not be. Read the terms before you build anything public.
How I'd choose
Start with the strategy, not the vendor.
If you're doing factor research, valuation screens, or any daily/weekly equity strategy on US markets, start with Tiingo. The free tier lets you prototype before you pay anything, and the paid tier is cheap enough to not think about.
If your universe spans international exchanges, or you want fundamentals across many markets without stitching together multiple providers, EODHD's breadth is the differentiator. One subscription, many exchanges, nightly bulk pulls.
If you're building anything that depends on intraday microstructure — execution research, short-horizon signals, order-book features — Databento is the only one of the three that will actually serve you, and you should accept the usage-based bill as the cost of doing that kind of work.
For most retail quants reading this, the honest answer is Tiingo plus, occasionally, EODHD. Databento is a tool you grow into, not one you start with.
The market-data vendor you pick shapes what strategies you can even test, so choose deliberately. For the vast majority of retail research, clean end-of-day data from a cheap, predictable subscription beats a firehose you can't afford to drink from.
Originally published at pickuma.com. Subscribe to the RSS or follow @pickuma.bsky.social for new reviews.
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