Best Charting and Derivatives Data Tools

TradingView plus Coinglass, both free, covers what most traders actually use. Everything else on this page is a specialist tool that earns its subscription only if you can name the decision it improves.

Four different questions, four different tools

The reason people overspend here is treating these as competitors. They answer separate questions, and knowing which question you are asking tells you what to buy.

• Where has price been, and what are the indicators saying? This is charting. TradingView, and essentially nothing else, because the indicator library and the community scripts are the moat.
• What is positioning doing? Open interest, funding rates, long-short ratios, liquidation clusters. This is derivatives data. Coinglass free, or Velo if you want the raw numbers. Our explainer on perpetual futures and the open interest guide cover how to read these.
• Where is liquidity sitting right now? Resting bids and offers, order flow, aggression at the touch. This is microstructure. TradingLite for heatmaps, Exocharts for footprint and volume profile. Only relevant if you trade intraday.
• What is the options market pricing? Implied volatility, skew, term structure. Laevitas. Useful as a sentiment read even if you never trade an option, but not worth paying for unless you do.

If you cannot say which of those four you are missing, the answer is you are not missing one.

What a full stack costs

The full comparison

TradingView

The default, and deservedly so. The charting engine is excellent, the indicator library is enormous, Pine Script lets you write your own, alerts are reliable, and you can trade directly from the chart on many venues. The free tier is genuinely usable rather than a demo, which is rare enough to be worth saying.

Its weakness is the whole reason this article has five other entries: it is a general markets platform, not a crypto derivatives platform. Open interest, funding rates and liquidation data are either absent or available only through community indicators of variable quality. Paid tiers mostly buy you more charts per layout, more indicators at once, and better alert limits, not better data.

Coinglass

The best free derivatives dashboard available. Aggregated open interest, funding rates, liquidation data and long-short ratios across every major venue, in one place, at no cost. The cross-exchange aggregation is the valuable part: a funding rate on one exchange tells you something, and the same rate across all of them tells you a great deal more.

Treat the liquidation heatmaps with some scepticism. They are estimates derived from open interest and assumed leverage rather than observations of actual stop placement, and they get quoted as though they were measurements. They are a useful sense of where pressure builds, not a map of where price must go.

Velo Data

Coinglass for people who would rather have the numbers than a dashboard. Clean cross-venue derivatives data, term structure, and an API, with an unusually generous free tier. If you build your own analysis in a spreadsheet or a notebook, this is the better starting point because the data comes out in a shape you can work with.

Less immediately useful if you want to glance at a screen and get a read. The two tools overlap in coverage and differ in philosophy, and picking between them is really a question of whether you analyse or observe.

TradingLite

The liquidity heatmap is the product, and nothing else renders resting order book depth over time as clearly. You watch walls of bids build and dissolve as price approaches them, which changes where you place entries and stops in a way that is hard to get from a candlestick chart. Around $29 a month.

It is a tool for intraday execution and it is close to worthless for anything else. Liquidity visible today will not be there in a week, so if you hold positions for days the information has decayed before it matters. Be honest about your holding period before subscribing.

Exocharts

Order flow: footprint charts, volume profile, delta. It shows which side was aggressing at each price rather than just where price went, which is a genuinely different kind of information and the closest thing retail gets to reading the tape properly.

The learning curve is steep and mostly conceptual rather than technical. A footprint chart is meaningless until you understand what absorption and exhaustion look like, and that takes weeks of screen time. There is a free tier, which is the right place to find out whether this way of looking at markets suits you before committing money.

Laevitas

Best-in-class options analytics: volatility surfaces, skew, term structure, options flow. If you trade options, this is the tool, and the alternatives are not close. Our explainers on crypto options and implied volatility cover what the numbers mean.

If you do not trade options, you will install it and never open it. The partial exception is that skew and implied volatility are useful sentiment reads for directional traders too, because they show what the market is paying to hedge. That is worth an occasional visit to the free tier, not a subscription.

The tool is not the edge

Worth saying plainly on a page that recommends paid software. Nobody has ever become profitable by subscribing to a data provider. Data tells you what is happening; it does not tell you what to do, and it does not fix position sizing, which is where most accounts actually die.

A reasonable test before any subscription: name the specific decision you make badly today that this tool would improve, and how you will know in three months whether it did. If you cannot answer, you are buying the feeling of being better equipped. That feeling costs about $700 a year at the top of this page.

The cheapest genuine improvement available to most traders is reviewing their own history honestly, which costs nothing. Our guides on position sizing and reading your own PnL properly cover more ground per hour than any subscription on this page.

What we could not verify

• Exact current pricing. Several of these providers change tiers and run promotions frequently, and some do not publish a simple public price. Figures above are the published rates on the verification date; check before subscribing.
• Data accuracy. Every aggregator depends on exchange APIs, which disagree with each other and occasionally go down. We have not run a systematic accuracy comparison across providers.
• Hyperliquid coverage depth. Coinglass and Velo both include Hyperliquid, but how completely and how quickly they update is not something we have measured against the source API.

Choosing, in one paragraph

Start with TradingView free and Coinglass free, which costs nothing and covers price, indicators, open interest, funding and liquidations. Upgrade TradingView when a limit genuinely annoys you. Add Velo if you build your own analysis, TradingLite if you trade intraday around visible liquidity, Exocharts if you will actually learn order flow, and Laevitas only if you trade options. If you are not sure which you need, you need none of them yet.