FactSet Competitors and Alternatives: Cost per Seat (2026)

FactSet's main competitors are Bloomberg, S&P Capital IQ, LSEG Workspace and Morningstar Direct at the institutional end, with YCharts and Koyfin as the lower-cost alternatives smaller firms actually switch to. None of the four institutional vendors publishes a price. Three of them, FactSet, LSEG and Morningstar, report enough in their own financial filings to work out what the average seat brings in, and that turns out to be the most useful thing a small firm can know before it takes a sales call.

Here is the short version for a firm with two to ten seats. On the filings, the average FactSet user accounts for about $10,000 a year, the average LSEG Workspace user about $7,500, and the average Morningstar Direct license about $17,200. Bloomberg is private and files nothing, and its seats are quoted at $24,000 to $32,000. Capital IQ can only be priced from the handful of real contracts that are public. The alternatives that publish a price start at about $2,500 a year for Koyfin's advisor tier.

What does each FactSet competitor cost per seat?

Every figure in this table was read at source between September 9 and September 17, 2026. The fourth column is the one that decides how much weight the third deserves, because a figure you can check against an audited filing is worth more in a negotiation than one that was copied from somewhere else.

Two patterns come out of the table. The first is that the checkable averages cluster lower than the figures in circulation. FactSet's and LSEG's reported averages both sit well below the $12,000 and $22,000 entry prices that most pages quote for those two vendors, and Morningstar's average license is below the last first-seat rate Morningstar printed, $18,000 in its annual report for 2017. The averages include cheap seats, so a fully loaded first seat at a small firm will cost more than the average, but a quote at double the average deserves a question. The second is that the three vendors with filings are the three you can actually negotiate against with evidence. For Bloomberg and YCharts you are comparing one quote with another.

Who are FactSet's main competitors?

The companies FactSet loses deals to are Bloomberg, S&P Global's Capital IQ, LSEG with Workspace, and Morningstar with Direct. Morningstar's own annual report names FactSet and LSEG's Eikon among Direct's competitors, alongside Bloomberg. Below that tier, YCharts and Koyfin win the smaller advisory and research firms that find a full workstation more than they need. Search results for this question mostly show company-profile sites that list FactSet's competitors as employers or as companies, which is a different question from which platform to buy.

Which one is the real competitor depends on the job the seat does. For portfolio analytics and a data pipeline into your own models, FactSet is hard to replace and the honest alternatives are Bloomberg and LSEG. For private company and deal data, Capital IQ usually wins. For fund and manager research, Morningstar Direct is the specialist. For equity research, screening and client reports at a small firm, the priced platforms cover most of it.

Is FactSet cheaper than Bloomberg?

Yes, by a wide margin on every figure available. FactSet's own filings put its average user at about $10,000 a year of subscription value, and its median procurement contract, which usually covers several seats, is $25,160. A single Bloomberg Terminal seat is quoted at $24,000 to $32,000 a year. The gap is real but narrower than those two numbers suggest, because FactSet's average is diluted by a fast-growing base of cheaper wealth management seats, which FactSet names as the main driver of 12% user growth in a year, and a loaded FactSet workstation with analytics and feeds costs well above the average. The full working is on FactSet vs Bloomberg cost per seat for small firms.

What is the cheapest alternative to FactSet?

Among the platforms on this list that publish a price, Koyfin is the lowest-priced alternative for professional use: Advisor Core is $209 a month billed annually, $2,508 a year, and the individual tiers start at $39 a month. It covers charts, screening, fundamentals, macro data and client reporting. It does not cover portfolio risk models, an API into your own models, deal data, or backtesting, and a registered firm should budget for Advisor Core rather than the Plus tier, because the advisor features start there. The full rate card, including the higher month-to-month rates, is on Koyfin pricing.

Among the institutional vendors, LSEG has the lowest checkable average. Its reported Workflows revenue works out to about $7,500 per Workspace user a year, and LSEG says wealth and academic users pay the least while trading users pay the most. A research seat at a small firm should land on the cheaper side of that. The derivation, and why the $22,000 figure most pages repeat matches an Eikon price range from 2013, is on LSEG Workspace pricing.

Which FactSet alternative fits a small firm?

Start from what the seat is actually used for. Most small firms that price a FactSet replacement discover they use three or four screens every day and pay for thirty.

An RIA or a family office with an in-house analyst. The work is usually public equity research, fund research and client reports. YCharts or Koyfin Advisor covers most of it for $2,500 to $6,000 a seat, and Morningstar Direct is the specialist if manager research is the core job. Keep one FactSet seat only if someone genuinely lives in the portfolio analytics.

A boutique investment bank, private equity shop or valuation practice. Private company and transaction data is the job, and Capital IQ usually beats FactSet there. The public contracts put a four-to-eight seat deal between $55,000 and $75,000 a year. Capital IQ vs FactSet cost per seat sets those contracts next to FactSet's audited average.

A small hedge fund or a trading-led shop. Real-time data, fixed income and FX decide it, and the alternatives are Bloomberg and LSEG. LSEG's average is far lower on paper, but it says trading seats are its most expensive, so compare like with like. Bloomberg Anywhere subscription cost covers how Bloomberg counts licenses, which matters as much as the rate once people work from home.

A research team that wants to test ideas, not just read about them. None of the platforms above tests a stated rule against two decades of adjusted daily history and tells you whether it beat buy and hold after costs. That is a separate tool, covered in the last section.

One practical note for firms that split a single workstation into several priced subscriptions. You swap one negotiated invoice for three or four card charges, each on its own billing term and each renewing automatically, and nobody at a small firm owns the list. Putting budget alerts on the cards those subscriptions bill to is the cheap way to catch the renewal you meant to cancel before it posts.

Three questions to ask any FactSet competitor before you sign

What is the per-seat rate at my exact seat count, and at one more? Every vendor on this list prices by volume and by user type. The five public Capital IQ contracts show the per-user price falling 12.5 times between four seats and four hundred, and a four-seat private equity firm paying about 70% more per user than a five-seat bank. Ask for the marginal rate, not the average.

What is the renewal uplift, in writing? The filings say prices move at renewal. Morningstar reports a Direct revenue renewal rate of about 104% for 2025, meaning the existing base paid more than the year before net of cancellations. LSEG told investors in July 2026 that the value of its AI Search tool will be reflected in the annual price review and that its Deep Research tool will be a premium add-on. For Bloomberg, NeuGroup, which sees its corporate treasury members' renewal notices, reported that the monthly price for two-year subscriptions would rise 6.5% in 2025. Price year two and year three, not just year one.

Which exchange fees sit on top? Real-time exchange data carries fees that follow the professional and non-professional distinction, and a registered firm pays the professional rate. LSEG reports these pass-through charges separately from its product revenue, and none of the vendors includes them in a headline number. Ask for them as their own line. Our investment research software guide sorts the whole category by what each vendor will tell you before a call.

What none of these platforms does

FactSet and every competitor on this page tell you what is true about a security now and what the estimates say. None of them tells you whether a rule you want to follow has actually worked. That is what AgentTrading is for, and it is narrow on purpose. You state a thesis in plain English, it restates it as an explicit rule and shows you the rule before anything runs, then tests it across 20-plus years of split and dividend adjusted daily data with a 0.1% cost per trade charged by default, plots it against buy and hold, and gives a verdict that says UNDERPERFORMED when the idea loses. Plans start at $19 a month and are bought online, with no sales call. It is not a data terminal, it has no real-time feed, no estimates database and no client reporting, and it is research and analysis only: no execution, no brokerage connection and no personalized advice. For a firm that has already chosen its data platform, backtesting software for financial advisors covers where the testing step fits and what the SEC marketing rule asks for before a backtest reaches a client.

Frequently asked questions

Who is FactSet's biggest competitor?

Bloomberg is the biggest competitor by market presence, and S&P Capital IQ is the one FactSet meets most often in research and banking deals. LSEG Workspace, which replaced Eikon in 2025, competes on the same buy-side and banking desks with deeper FX and fixed income. Morningstar Direct competes for fund and manager research. For small advisory firms, YCharts and Koyfin take more FactSet business than any of the four.

Is LSEG Workspace cheaper than FactSet?

On the reported averages, yes, somewhat. LSEG's reported Workflows revenue works out to about $7,500 per Workspace user a year, and FactSet's filings put its average user at about $10,000 of subscription value. Both averages include cheaper seats, wealth management at FactSet and wealth and academia at LSEG, so the gap between two loaded professional seats could be smaller or reversed. Get both quotes at your exact seat count.

What is a good FactSet alternative for a financial advisor?

For most advisory firms it is YCharts or Koyfin rather than another institutional terminal. YCharts publishes no price, and third-party reporting puts a seat at $3,600 to $6,000 a year, with bond data and several other data sets charged extra on every tier. Koyfin publishes every tier, and its advisor features start at Advisor Core, $209 a month billed annually. Morningstar Direct is the choice if manager research is the core of the practice.

Does FactSet publish its pricing?

No. FactSet's pricing page is titled FactSet Pricing and carries no dollar sign. Because FactSet is listed on the NYSE, though, it files annual subscription value and user count every quarter, and at May 31, 2026 those were $2,484.3 million and 247,766 users, about $10,027 per user. That is a ceiling on the average seat rather than a quote, and the period-by-period arithmetic is on FactSet cost.

Is Morningstar Direct a FactSet competitor?

For fund and manager research, yes, and Morningstar names FactSet among Direct's competitors in its own annual report. Direct costs more per license on average, about $17,200 a year against FactSet's roughly $10,000 per user, because it is sold almost entirely to professional investment teams. It is not a replacement for FactSet's portfolio analytics or its real-time data. The rate card history is on Morningstar Direct cost.