Investment research software: investment analysis software, equity research software, and the investment research platforms that actually publish a price
We opened eleven vendor pricing pages on August 22, 2026 and wrote down what each one said. Five of the six institutional platforms have a page titled Pricing that contains no price. The retail half of the category publishes everything. That split is the first thing to understand before you shortlist anything.
- 1 THESIS
- 2 EVIDENCE
- 3 BACKTEST
- 4 RISK
- 5 VERDICT
02 EVIDENCE · FUNDAMENTALS
04 RISK · IN PLAIN ENGLISH
Sample scenarios, not a live backtest of what you typed. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Educational analysis only, not financial advice.
In short
Investment research software splits into two markets that do not price the same way, and a buyer searching the category term is usually comparing across the line without realizing it. On one side sit the institutional platforms: Bloomberg Terminal, FactSet, S&P Capital IQ, Morningstar Direct, AlphaSense and the newer AI document engines like Hebbia. We checked their pricing pages on August 22, 2026. FactSet has a page titled FactSet Pricing, Explore FactSet Cost, that names no figure and asks you to contact us. AlphaSense has a pricing page whose call to action is connect with our sales team for scalable pricing. Hebbia has a page titled Pricing whose call to action is Book a Demo. Morningstar Direct publishes no rate. Bloomberg does not publish terminal pricing on its product page at all. Five of six, no number. On the other side, the retail and prosumer tier publishes plainly: TIKR at $0, $24.95, $54.95 and $119.95 a month, Koyfin at $0, $39 and $79 a month billed annually, Finviz Elite at $39.50 a month or $299.50 a year, Stock Rover from about $34 a month, Portfolio Visualizer free up to 15 assets and $30 or $55 a month paid. What separates the two is not data quality alone, it is what you are buying. Institutional platforms sell coverage plus a workflow: broker research, expert call transcripts, document search across filings, and an audit trail a compliance officer will accept. Retail platforms sell fundamentals, charting and screening for one person. Neither group tests whether an investment rule has ever worked, which is a third job entirely. That is what AgentTrading does: you state one thesis in a sentence, it backtests the rule on 20+ years of split and dividend adjusted daily data with 0.1% charged per trade by default, and it prints an honest verdict including UNDERPERFORMED when the idea loses to buy and hold. The plans on our pricing page, starting at $19 a month. We would rather say that here than have you find it at the checkout. Educational analysis only, and past performance does not guarantee future results.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. For educational and informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Consult a licensed advisor.
SIDE BY SIDE - PRICING CHECKED AUGUST 2026
Eleven investment research platforms, what each one publishes, and what it will not do
Every price below was read off the vendor's own page, with the date it was read. Where a vendor publishes nothing we say so rather than repeat a figure from a review site, because unsourced institutional pricing is the least reliable number in this category. The limitation column is the one that decides your shortlist: it is the job each tool does not do.
| Tool | Best for | Price (August 2026) | The honest limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bloomberg Terminal | Trading desks and institutions that need the market standard and the messaging network that comes with it | Not published | No price on the product page. Sold as a multi-year seat commitment, not a subscription you can start this afternoon. |
| FactSet | Buy-side and sell-side teams that need integrated data, models and workflow across a whole firm | Not published. Its own SEC filings cap the average user at $10,027 a year, from $2,484.3 million of subscription value across 247,766 users at May 31, 2026 | A page literally titled FactSet Pricing that states no dollar figure anywhere. |
| AlphaSense | Research teams whose bottleneck is reading, across filings, transcripts, broker research and expert calls | Not published | Sales-led pricing. The expert call library and Canalyst models are separately priced add-ons. |
| Hebbia | Firms running AI agents across their own document sets, including private deal and diligence material | Not published | Demo-gated. It reasons over documents you give it; it is not a market data or fundamentals provider. |
| Morningstar Direct | Advisors, analysts and asset managers working in funds, ETFs and manager research | Not published today. Last rate card in Morningstar's own 10-K for 2017: $18,000 first user, $11,500 second, $9,800 each additional. Audited average revenue per license $17,209 annualized at June 30, 2026 | Fund and manager depth is the strength; single-stock and rule testing are not. The $17,500 first-user figure that circulates is the 2016 rate card, superseded a year later and unpublished since. |
| Koyfin | Individual investors and advisors who want most of a terminal without an institutional contract | $0, $39, $79/mo billed annually. $49 and $110 month to month | No backtesting engine at any tier. Advisor tiers step to $209 and $299 a month. |
| TIKR | Fundamental investors who want global financials and estimates at the lowest published price | $0, $24.95, $54.95, $119.95/mo | Fundamentals and estimates, not a workflow. No document reasoning, no research management, no strategy testing. |
| Stock Rover | US dividend and value investors who want deep screening and historical fundamental lookback | About $34 to $199/mo equivalent by tier | Historical screening is not strategy backtesting. Coverage is North America focused. |
| Finviz Elite | Anyone whose main job is finding candidates fast on price, volume and fundamentals filters | $39.50/mo or $299.50/yr | A screener first. Backtesting claims about Finviz are widely repeated and not verifiable at source. |
| Portfolio Visualizer | Asset allocation work: portfolio backtests, factor regressions and Monte Carlo on fund and ETF data | Free up to 15 assets. $30 or $55/mo billed annually | Allocation level, not signal level. The free tier cannot save or export. |
| AgentTrading | Testing whether the rule behind your research has actually worked, before you commit to it | From $19/mo | Flat monthly plans. No screening, no charting, no filings, no execution. |
Prices are the vendors' public list prices, checked August 2026, and vendors change them. Verify current pricing and capabilities with each vendor before you buy.
Bloomberg Terminal
Trading desks and institutions that need the market standard and the messaging network that comes with it
The reference point everyone in the category is implicitly compared against, and the reason the rest of this table exists. Coverage, news, fixed income, FX, derivatives and the Bloomberg messaging network are genuinely without a peer, and for a desk that lives on it the question of price barely comes up. For everyone else it is the wrong shape of purchase: the terminal is bought per seat on a term commitment through a sales process, and Bloomberg does not put a figure on its terminal product page. Our automated request to that page on August 22, 2026 was refused outright with a 403, which is itself a fair summary of how this end of the market treats price discovery. Treat any specific annual figure you read in a blog post as unsourced unless the writer says where they got it.
FactSet
Buy-side and sell-side teams that need integrated data, models and workflow across a whole firm
FactSet is the most common Bloomberg alternative inside institutions, particularly where the work is modeling and portfolio analytics rather than trading. It is also the cleanest illustration of how this half of the category behaves. Re-rendered on September 11, 2026, factset.com/factset-pricing carries an HTML title of FactSet Pricing, Explore FactSet Cost, a headline of Flexible Tools, Tailored Pricing, and no dollar sign at all. The only numbers on it are 100 and 40, counting third-party and proprietary data sets, and the single instruction is to contact the sales team. FactSet is different from the rest of this half of the table in one respect that matters: it is listed on the NYSE, so it has to file its Annual Subscription Value, client count and user count every quarter. At May 31, 2026 those were $2,484.3 million, 9,130 clients and 247,766 users, which puts the average user at $10,027 of subscription value a year, about $836 a month. Read that as a ceiling on the average seat rather than a rate, because ASV also covers feeds and enterprise solutions that no named user sits behind. It is the only checkable bound on any unpublished price in this category.
AlphaSense
Research teams whose bottleneck is reading, across filings, transcripts, broker research and expert calls
AlphaSense is the strongest answer in the category when your problem is document volume rather than data. It searches across filings, earnings transcripts, broker research and its own expert call network, and its summarization is the part users actually renew for. Its pricing page, read August 22, 2026, lists four things you can buy, Market Intelligence, Enterprise Intelligence, Expert Calls and Canalyst Financial Models, and prices none of them. The stated call to action is to connect with our sales team for scalable pricing, alongside a free entry point. The add-on structure is the part to plan for: the expert calls and the model library are where an AlphaSense quote grows, and they are not part of the base seat.
Hebbia
Firms running AI agents across their own document sets, including private deal and diligence material
Hebbia represents the newest slice of the category, the AI-native platforms that reason across large document sets rather than serving a data grid. The pitch is real work at scale: run a structured question over hundreds of filings, memos or diligence documents and get a matrix of answers with citations back to the source page. Its pricing page, read August 22, 2026, is titled Pricing and offers Book a Demo and Request a demo, with no figures. Understand the boundary before you shortlist it. Tools in this slice are extraordinary at extracting what a corpus says and are not where you go for prices, fundamentals, screening or any historical simulation.
Morningstar Direct
Advisors, analysts and asset managers working in funds, ETFs and manager research
Where the institutional tier gets genuinely useful for the advisory market. Morningstar Direct carries the manager research, style analysis, fund and ETF data and the client-ready reporting that a practice actually files, and the Morningstar rating and style box are language your clients already recognize. Its product page publishes no rate and returns a human-verification challenge to any automated client, but Morningstar is listed on Nasdaq and reports Direct revenue and license counts every quarter: $80.4 million and 18,688 licenses for the quarter to June 30, 2026, which is $17,209 per license annualized, with the license count flat for four years and growth coming from price. For an advisory firm the honest comparison is against Koyfin Advisor Core and Advisor Pro at $209 and $299 a month billed annually, which are published, and most advisors at larger firms are on Advisor Workstation rather than Direct, last priced by Morningstar at about $3,500 a seat. The full series from the year of the rate card is on the Morningstar Direct cost page.
Koyfin
Individual investors and advisors who want most of a terminal without an institutional contract
The best value in the published half of the category and the one most often bought after somebody prices FactSet. Free gives you charting, macro dashboards, a screener and two years of financials. Plus at $39 a month billed annually is the plan most individuals land on: ten years of financials and estimates, ETF holdings and an ETF screener, unlimited watchlists and screens, filings and transcripts. Premium at $79 adds custom formulas, portfolio risk statistics and hypothetical performance. Read off koyfin.com on August 20, 2026. Two details worth carrying: the month to month rates of $49 and $110 sit behind a billing toggle rather than in the page text, so Premium paid monthly costs about 39% more, roughly $372 a year, and there is no free trial but there is a stated 30-day full refund.
TIKR
Fundamental investors who want global financials and estimates at the lowest published price
The cheapest serious answer to the question that sends most people looking in the first place, which is where do I get real financials and analyst estimates without a terminal. Read off tikr.com on August 22, 2026: a free tier with no card required, then Plus at $24.95 a month, Pro at $54.95 and Ultimate at $119.95, with annual billing also offered and a stated 14-day money-back guarantee rather than a free trial. TIKR is the clearest evidence that the institutional and retail halves of this category are not separated by a technical impossibility. Somebody is publishing global fundamentals and estimates for $25 a month while a page titled Pricing three tabs over shows nothing.
Stock Rover
US dividend and value investors who want deep screening and historical fundamental lookback
The specialist for people who screen on fundamentals and want to know what the screen would have shown in past years. Checked July 2026: Premium around $34 a month, Premium Plus around $70, Ultimate around $99 and Ultimate Pro around $199, quoted annually. The distinction that trips buyers up is worth stating plainly, because Stock Rover states it honestly and reviewers muddle it. Historical screening asks what did the fundamentals look like in 2016. Backtesting asks what would have happened if I had bought on this signal and sold on that one, across every occurrence. Stock Rover does the first. It does not simulate entries and exits.
Finviz Elite
Anyone whose main job is finding candidates fast on price, volume and fundamentals filters
The most used screener in the retail market and priced simply: read off finviz.com on August 20, 2026, one paid tier at $39.50 a month or $299.50 a year, which Finviz displays as $24.96 a month billed annually. That is roughly a 58% premium for paying monthly, the widest gap in this table. The 7-day trial auto-renews into a paid subscription, so diary it. One caution we have documented separately: review sites confidently describe a Finviz backtester with figures ranging from 16 to 24 years of history, while finviz.com/backtests returns HTTP 410 Gone and the feature appears nowhere in the Elite page or knowledge base. Verify it yourself before you buy for that reason.
Portfolio Visualizer
Asset allocation work: portfolio backtests, factor regressions and Monte Carlo on fund and ETF data
The tool most often reached for when the question is about a portfolio rather than a stock, and it is genuinely good at that question. Free covers up to 15 assets including backtesting and Monte Carlo but will not let you save or export a result, which is the friction that converts people. Basic is $30 a month billed annually and Pro is $55, checked September 4, 2026, and only the Pro tier carries a commercial-use licence. The boundary: it backtests allocations and rebalancing schedules, not a rule that enters and exits on a condition. Asking it what happens if I buy when the 50-day crosses the 200-day is asking the wrong tool.
AgentTrading
Testing whether the rule behind your research has actually worked, before you commit to it
Our own row, and the honest version. AgentTrading is not a research terminal and does not try to be. You state one thesis in a sentence, for example hold SPY while it trades below its 20-day average and sell when it closes back above, and it restates the rule as an explicit entry and exit card before anything runs, backtests it on 20+ years of split and dividend adjusted daily data with 0.1% charged per trade by default, prints every assumption on the result, and stamps HELD UP, MIXED or UNDERPERFORMED against buy and hold over identical dates. It will tell you your idea failed, which is the entire point. What it will not do: screen, chart, read filings, price options, produce client reports or place a trade. The $19, $49 and $129 plans on our pricing page are on the pricing page.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. For educational and informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Consult a licensed advisor.
WHAT YOU GET - INVESTMENT RESEARCH SOFTWARE
Investment research software, run on the bench
Most of this category will not tell you the price
We opened eleven vendor pages on August 22, 2026. FactSet publishes a page titled FactSet Pricing with no figure on it. AlphaSense asks you to connect with our sales team for scalable pricing. Hebbia offers Book a Demo. Morningstar Direct publishes no rate. Bloomberg refused an automated request to its terminal page with a 403. TIKR, Koyfin, Finviz, Stock Rover and Portfolio Visualizer publish everything. Plan for a scoping call on one half of your shortlist and a card payment on the other.
The two halves are not competing on the same job
It is tempting to read the price gap as the same product at different quality levels. It is not. Institutional platforms sell coverage plus a workflow: broker research, expert transcripts, document search across filings and an audit trail compliance will accept. Retail platforms sell fundamentals, charting and screening for one person at a desk. If nobody at your firm needs the audit trail or the document corpus, you are paying for a workflow you will not open.
Nothing in the table tests a rule
Every platform above answers what does this look like now, or what did this look like then. None answers what would have happened if I had traded this rule for twenty years. Screening history is not backtesting: Stock Rover shows past fundamentals, Koyfin has no backtesting engine at any tier, and Portfolio Visualizer tests allocations rather than signals. Budget the rule-testing job separately or accept that the thesis behind your research stays untested.
Where we lose, stated plainly, including the checkout
AgentTrading has no screener, no charts, no filings, no transcripts, no options analytics, no client reporting and no execution. If your job is researching companies across a global universe, every institutional platform above does that far better than we do. The $19 starting price is on our pricing page. We would rather lose the click than surprise you at the checkout.
HOW IT WORKS - 4 STEPS
From a sentence to a stamped verdict
Decide which of the three jobs you are actually buying
Coverage and workflow, meaning broker research, transcripts, document search and an auditable process, points at the institutional tier and a sales call. Fundamentals, charts and screening for one or two people points at the published tier, where $25 to $80 a month buys most of it. Testing whether a rule has worked is a third job that neither tier does. Write down which one is blocking you this quarter, because the shortlist follows from that answer and almost nothing else.
Price the published half first, deliberately
It costs nothing and it calibrates every quote you receive afterward. TIKR at $24.95 a month, Koyfin Plus at $39 billed annually and Finviz Elite at $39.50 a month cover fundamentals, estimates, charting and screening between them. If a free week with those three closes your gap, you have saved a procurement cycle. If it does not, you now know precisely which capability is missing, which is the single most useful thing you can bring to a FactSet or AlphaSense scoping call.
Check the billing term before the headline rate
The published half of this category advertises annual rates and charges more monthly, and the gaps are wider than buyers expect. Finviz Elite is $24.96 a month billed annually against $39.50 month to month, about 58%. Koyfin Premium is $79 against $110, about 39%, which is $372 a year on one seat. TrendSpider Standard is $54 against $82, about 52%. Decide the term on purpose. Drifting onto monthly because it felt safer is the most expensive default in the category.
Send one real rule through a tester before you commit a budget
Take the thesis your research keeps producing, state it in one sentence, and find out what it did over 20+ years of adjusted daily data with realistic costs charged. Most people discover one of two things: the idea held up and now has evidence behind it, or it underperformed buying and holding the same asset, in which case no amount of better research software was going to help. That answer is worth having before you sign anything, and it is the job AgentTrading is being built to do.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. For educational and informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Consult a licensed advisor.
On the same bench
Once a shortlist exists, the useful next question is what each vendor charges rather than what it claims, which is the job of how much stock analysis software costs and the per-vendor breakdowns behind it: Koyfin pricing for the closest published competitor to the institutional tier, Finviz pricing for screening, TrendSpider pricing for a vendor that bills its AI separately, and Trade Ideas pricing for the tier trap where the advertised rate belongs to the plan without the AI. If your work is analyst-shaped rather than portfolio-shaped, AI equity research covers what these tools do and do not automate, and investment research for financial advisors and RIAs covers the practice side. None of the platforms above test a rule, so when your research produces one, take it to stock backtesting for a single name, portfolio backtesting for a basket, or ETF backtesting for sleeves, and read is backtesting accurate before you trust any result. For the honest side by side against a single vendor, start at the Koyfin alternative comparison. Firms replacing a market data terminal should start with Bloomberg Terminal alternative for financial advisors, which prices each option at the tier a registered firm is permitted to buy. Where a vendor declines to publish anything, YCharts pricing shows what can still be established from its own plans page, and Capital IQ cost does the same for S&P by working out a per-user figure from the few real contracts that are public. The one vendor here whose silence can be checked against an audited document is FactSet, because it is listed and files its subscription value and user count every quarter: FactSet cost runs that arithmetic period by period, and FactSet vs Bloomberg cost per seat sets it against the one major vendor that files nothing at all. Morningstar is the second: Morningstar Direct cost divides its reported Direct revenue by its reported license count and traces the $17,500 figure everyone quotes back to the 2016 rate card it came from, and Capital IQ vs FactSet cost per seat covers the two negotiated platforms a deal team weighs. LSEG is the third vendor that can be checked this way: LSEG Workspace pricing divides the revenue of its Workspace business by the users it moved off Eikon.
QUESTIONS - ASKED AND ANSWERED
Investment research software: the common questions
What is investment research software?
Investment research software is the category of tools that collect market and company data, then help an investor or analyst turn it into a decision. In practice it covers three different products: institutional platforms that bundle data with a research workflow and audit trail, such as Bloomberg, FactSet, AlphaSense and Morningstar Direct; retail and prosumer platforms that publish fundamentals, charting and screening, such as Koyfin, TIKR, Finviz and Stock Rover; and strategy testing tools that check whether a rule has historically worked.
How much does investment research software cost?
It depends entirely on which half of the category you are in, and the honest answer for the institutional half is that you cannot know from the website. Checked August 22, 2026, FactSet, AlphaSense, Hebbia, Morningstar Direct and Bloomberg all publish no figure. The retail half is transparent: TIKR runs $0 to $119.95 a month, Koyfin $0 to $79 a month billed annually, Finviz Elite $39.50 a month, and Portfolio Visualizer free to about $55.
What is the best investment research software?
There is no single best, because the tools are not solving the same problem. If document volume is your bottleneck, AlphaSense or Hebbia. If you need firm-wide data, models and workflow, FactSet. If you want most of a terminal for one person, Koyfin at $39 a month billed annually. If you want the cheapest real fundamentals and estimates, TIKR at $24.95. If you need to find candidates fast, Finviz Elite. If you need to know whether a rule worked, none of them do that.
What is the difference between investment research software and equity research software?
In everyday use the terms overlap heavily and most vendors answer to both. Where a distinction exists, equity research software leans toward the sell-side and analyst workflow: building and maintaining company models, drafting and distributing research notes, and tracking estimates against consensus. Investment research software is the broader label covering the buy-side too, including screening, portfolio analytics, manager and fund research, and the document search layer. Buy on the job you need, not the label.
Do investment research platforms include backtesting?
Almost none of them do, and this is the most common false assumption in the category. Koyfin has no backtesting engine at any tier, including Premium: its hypothetical performance feature re-runs a modified version of an allocation you already hold, which is not a rule executed across history with a trade list and drawdown curve. Stock Rover offers historical screening, which shows past fundamentals rather than simulated entries and exits. Portfolio Visualizer tests allocations rather than signals.
Is there free investment research software?
Several credible free tiers exist and they are worth exhausting before you pay. TIKR has a free tier with no card required. Koyfin Free includes advanced charting, macro dashboards, a screener, portfolio tracking on one account and two years of financials, though it carries no ETF data at all. Portfolio Visualizer is free for up to 15 assets including backtesting and Monte Carlo, but will not save or export. The common ceiling is history depth and the ability to keep your work.
What investment research software do financial advisors use?
Advisory practices generally need two things retail tools do not provide: fund and manager research, and client-ready reporting the firm can file. Morningstar Direct is the long-standing answer on the research side, with no published price. Koyfin publishes advisor tiers at $209 a month for Advisor Core and $299 for Advisor Pro billed annually, where Core covers one custodian and 10 client reports a month and Pro adds multiple custodians, 200 reports, PDF broker statement upload and PMS integrations with Black Diamond, Addepar and Orion.
Why do so many investment research vendors hide their pricing?
The usual reason is that the price genuinely varies, since institutional contracts are scoped by seat count, modules, data feeds and redistribution rights, and a single published number would be wrong for almost everyone. The practical effect on you is the same either way: you cannot budget, you cannot compare, and you will spend a scoping call before you learn the figure. The defense is to price the published half of the category first so you walk into that call knowing exactly which capability is missing.
Can AI replace investment research software?
Not yet, and the reason is sourcing rather than reasoning. General assistants are good at explaining a concept and poor at guaranteeing that a specific number came from a specific filing on a specific date, which is precisely what research has to survive. The AI-native platforms in this category solve that by restricting the model to a licensed corpus and citing back to the source page. Treat AI as a layer over sourced data, not a replacement for it, and never accept a figure without its source.
Can I buy AgentTrading today?
No. The plans shown on our pricing page start at $19 a month. We would rather state that on the comparison page than let you find it at the checkout, and it is the same standard we apply when we report what a competitor does and does not publish.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. For educational and informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Consult a licensed advisor.
Your next idea deserves a verdict, not a hunch.
Bring a thesis or a ticker. AgentTrading restates the rule, shows the evidence, runs 20+ years of history, and stamps an honest verdict. You decide.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. For educational and informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Consult a licensed advisor.