Best Bloomberg Terminal Alternatives: Free & Paid
Over the last 40 years, Bloomberg Terminals have become ubiquitous on Wall Street.
This software platform sits on the desks of financial professionals at top investment banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions. As of 2022, there were 350,000 active subscriptions. But that's not the most staggering number.
The annual cost of a Terminal is $32,000, or more than $2,600 per month. Per license.
Unless you're managing tens of millions of dollars, this makes it completely unaffordable for most regular investors.
What is a Bloomberg Terminal?
Michael Bloomberg, a former partner at Salomon Brothers (one of Wall Street's largest investment banks before its collapse during the Great Financial Crisis in 2008), launched Bloomberg LP, a financial data and news vendor, in 1981.
Its first product: the Bloomberg Terminal.
Decades before the widespread adoption of the internet and personal computers, Bloomberg Terminals provided a groundbreaking information-delivery service that completely changed the industry.
Market participants could then access groundbreaking data, analytics, and news in near real-time.
Today, more than 40 years later, Bloomberg Terminals are still the gold standard.
Is a Bloomberg Terminal worth it?
Here's what a Bloomberg Terminal does exceptionally well (and why it costs $32,000 per year):
- Seemingly infinite data, charting, and research
- Near immediate earnings reports and breaking news
- Aggregates hundreds of thousands of the world's most influential market participants into a live chat (called Bloomberg Chat)
Bloomberg Chat is arguably one of the most valuable features on the platform.
It allows institutional investors — the ones moving the markets — to communicate with one another, know how others are thinking, and get a feel for the sentiment at the biggest institutions.
Unfortunately, since all these institutional investors are on Bloomberg Chat, there is no true alternative to the Bloomberg Terminal. However, you can replace many of its other features with a combination of various tools and software.
And, really, unless you're managing tens of millions of dollars, Bloomberg is overkill anyway. Plus, its user interface is outdated and can be hard to use.
For most retail investors, the following tools and subscriptions can replace a Bloomberg Terminal — and at just a fraction of the cost or no cost at all.
Best Bloomberg Terminal alternatives: summary
Here's the tool stack you can use (in whatever combination best suits your needs) to replace a Bloomberg Terminal for a lot less money:
| Tool | Best for | Cost |
| Eikon, Koyfin | Bloomberg alternatives | Paid |
| Stock Analysis | Stock research, analyst ratings & forecasts | Primarily free |
| X (Twitter) | Breaking news | Free |
| Benzinga Pro, thinkorswim | Real-time newsfeed | Paid, Free |
| Seeking Alpha | Investment reports | Paid |
Keep reading for details on each one of these tools.
Best BT replacements: Eikon and Koyfin
If you don't want to combine multiple tools together to form a makeshift terminal, there are several companies that offer all-in-one alternatives.
The two best options are Eikon and Koyfin.
Eikon — best BT substitute for institutional investors
LSEG's (formerly Refinitiv's) Eikon is the most direct competitor to Bloomberg Terminals.
Eikon offers much of the same financial data, charting capabilities, modeling, and news services as Bloomberg, though it uses different sources for its news (Reuters instead of Bloomberg) and is typically a half-step behind Bloomberg in reporting breaking news*.
*Bloomberg has a reputation for breaking critical news stories first, which, along with its Chat, is its biggest (and most valuable) differentiator. When you're trading tens of millions of dollars, every second matters a lot.
While Bloomberg dominates the hedge funds, investment banks, and large asset managers that make up Wall Street, Eikon is popular among financial analysts, portfolio managers, and other financial officers at smaller institutions.
Eikon is a bit more affordable than a BT, but since it also targets institutions and professional investors, it's still out of the budget for most retail investors. Depending on the set of features you want, the annual price can range from $3,600–$22,000.
Don't worry — the rest of this list is made up of much more affordable products made for individual investors.
This article primarily covers the best Bloomberg alternatives for retail investors. If you're a professional investor and are interested in Eikon, you may also want to look into Capital IQ and FactSet.
Koyfin — best BT substitute for retail investors
Koyfin is the best Bloomberg alternative for retail investors — that's what it was made to be.
Frustrated by Bloomberg's cost and wanting to make a more user-friendly alternative for retail investors, Koyfin's founders modeled its features, data coverage, and user experience after the industry leader, all the way down to the keyboard shortcuts.
Koyfin has custom dashboards, thousands of chart configurations, stock comparison graphs, data visualizations, market news, analytics, company filings, and more. The more you use it, the more features you'll find.
You can use some of Koyfin's features for free, but most users will want to upgrade to a Plus ($49/month) or Pro ($110/month) plan.
You can learn more about their plans here.
Best stock research and analyst info: Stock Analysis
If you're looking for stock quotes, financial statements, business metrics, dividend information, and analyst ratings, forecasts, and price targets, we've got you covered at Stock Analysis.
Our site is known for its fast loading times, simple user interface, and connections to the highest-quality data sources.
We hope you're as serious about data as we are, because we pay a premium to get the most comprehensive and accurate data we can from sources like S&P Capital IQ and Nasdaq Data Link.
One of our most popular features is Top Analysts, where we track Wall Street's most profitable analysts and show you their latest recommendations. You can use it to research your existing positions and find new stock ideas.
We also have a stock screener, a newsfeed, and a free daily market newsletter that can help you stay on top of the latest market news.
The vast majority of the website is completely free to use, but you can go Pro ($9.99/month or $79/year) to unlock all our features and the full financial history for every stock.
Best breaking news source: X (Twitter)
Here's a money-saving hack: you can create your own custom news feed by making a list of a few X (Twitter) accounts.
Many accounts on X publish every headline from leading, proprietary news sources (like Bloomberg and Reuters) within seconds of those articles being released on their native (very expensive) terminals.
Here are a few accounts to follow:
- Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone)
- First Squawk (@FirstSquawk)
- FinancialJuice (@financialjuice)
- The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex)
You'll get your news a few seconds behind the professionals, but it'll be free.
Best real-time news feeds: Benzinga Pro and thinkorswim
Again, if you prefer to get all of your news from one source, you have a couple of options — one paid and one free.
Benzinga Pro — best for day traders and other investors
For day traders and other investors heavily reliant on an up-to-the-minute news feed, Benzinga Pro is my top pick.
Benzinga Pro delivers breaking news faster than any other provider I've tried. In addition to being timely, the information is clear, reliable, and objective.
It also has a price sentiment engine, which lets you know how likely certain news is to move the underlying stock and in which direction. It's simple, but I've found it can save me 5–10 seconds, which can matter quite a bit when I'm day trading.
It also has a very active chat room. And while most of the users aren't institutional investors like on Bloomberg Terminals, there are plenty of savvy traders who are sharing their trade ideas.
You can try Benzinga for free, but if you like it, you'll want to upgrade to a paid plan. Benzinga Pro has three tiers: Basic ($37/month), Streamlined ($147/month), and Essential ($197/month).
If you're an active trader, I would recommend Streamlined or Essential.
thinkorswim — best free option for traders
thinkorswim is the trading platform that's now owned by Charles Schwab (which bought TD Ameritrade in 2020).
thinkorswim has long been one of the most popular trading platforms for day traders. It's fast, powerful, and infinitely customizable.
Along with all of its other features, it also has a real-time newsfeed.
While it may not be quite as timely as a Bloomberg terminal or Benzinga Pro, it's still very fast, and a great option for someone looking for a combination of trading platform and built-in newsfeed.
thinkorswim is completely free to use for anyone with a Charles Schwab account. You can get started with it here.
Best investment reports: Seeking Alpha
Bloomberg Terminal users can also write research reports and share them with other institutional investors. Again, like Bloomberg Chat, this is a way for investors to stress-test their ideas, get a feel for sentiment, and find new investment ideas.
The best way to replace this aspect of a Bloomberg Terminal is with Seeking Alpha.
Each month, thousands of contributors write detailed investment research reports and grade stocks with Strong Buy, Buy, Hold, Sell, and Strong Sell ratings.
These articles are my favorite place to research my current investments — to uncover risks I may have missed in my own analysis and to read others' thoughts on ongoing developments and quarterly reports — and to find new investment ideas.
Seeking Alpha allows me to dig far deeper into companies than I ever could on my own, in just a couple hours per month.
You can get a couple of articles per month for free but you'll bump into a paywall for Premium ($299/year) beyond that.
Final verdict
You may not be able to completely replace a Bloomberg Terminal — there's a reason it costs $32,000 per year and generates more than $11 billion in annual revenue — but you can replace parts of it with a number of tools that are built for retail investors.
For the vast majority of investors, a Bloomberg Terminal is totally unnecessary anyway and way too expensive.
Once you figure out what specific features you're looking for, you can easily find viable alternatives at much lower prices.
