Finviz Review

Finviz has one paid subscription tier called Finviz*Elite. It costs $39.50 per month or $299.50 per year, which brings the monthly cost down to $24.96 with annual billing. While there’s no free trial for Elite, Finviz offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Finviz also offers a free plan, which includes delayed market data and limited functionality. You don’t need an account to use most of the free tools, though registering with your email allows you to save research and screener presets.

Free plan, no registration

I was pleasantly surprised by how Finviz lets you dive in immediately and use most of its free tools. You don’t even need to provide your name and email address. As an anonymous visitor on the website, you can still access the screener, heatmaps, market news, and basic charting features.

That said, there are some substantial limitations. The free plan was enough to whet my appetite, but I kept running into restrictions. For example, whenever I tried using the charting tool for this Finviz review, nearly every action prompted a message encouraging me to upgrade. The free charting was so restricted that it felt not worth using.

The free subscription includes ads throughout the dashboard, along with occasional pop-ups, which I found distracting. Still, it’s understandable as Finviz needs to monetize its free user base in some way.

A major drawback of the free plan is the delayed market data. Heat maps are delayed by three to five minutes, while stock quotes, charts, and the stock screener lag by 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the exchange.

If you’re actively trading with information from the free Finviz plan, you’ll constantly be a step behind the competition due to the delayed data.

Free plan with registration

By providing your name and email address, you unlock a few additional features, including the ability to save research and portfolio data to your account. A free registered account lets you build, save, and track up to 50 portfolios and screener presets.

You can also customize your layout and screen. The upgrades aren’t earthshattering, and serious restrictions remain, particularly delayed market data. That said, I found being able to save information well worth providing my email.

Finviz*Elite

The Finviz*Elite plan gives you full access to all features on the platform. Most notably, you receive real-time stock market data across the site. For serious investors, that alone could justify the monthly cost.

Elite also enhances functionality for many of the platform tools. For instance, you can actually use the charting tool functions to test trading ideas. Additionally, you can set up email alerts for your portfolio investments, letting you stay on top of things even on the move. Elite also gives you access to the powerful Backtest tool and adds more information to the screener. I appreciated the additional statistical view of the picks from my screener, showing how the lengthy list broke down by country, sector, industry, and market cap.

Finally, the Elite plan lets you download your research and screener picks in an Excel file. It's also accessible via API, allowing you to integrate Finviz data with other services. With a free plan, you can only access that information on the Finviz website.

Finviz's core purpose is to provide financial visualizations of the market and your investments. I was impressed by the level of detail across each section and how smoothly the tools worked together.

For example, after I identified several interesting stock picks through the screener, it only took one click to transfer everything to the portfolio tracking and analysis tool.

At times, the amount of information felt a little overwhelming, but overall, I was pleased with the features.

Screener

The Finviz stock screener lets you sort through investments using a range of technical, fundamental, and trading data. It is one of the most effective screeners I’ve ever used in the way it balances the number of possible screeners while maintaining ease-of-use. Adding and removing screening criteria using the dropdown menus was very easy. I found it gratifying to see an initial list of over 10,000 stocks slowly whittle down to five as I added my target criteria.

There were times I would have liked a little more guidance. For example, I couldn’t figure out how to customize the table to give me more than the default 20 results per page, a supposed benefit of the paid account. Still, it was straightforward enough, especially given the sheer amount of possible data and screeners.

Portfolio tracking and alerts

Finviz lets you build portfolios for tracking. You could manually enter your investments or transfer over picks from the screener. You’ll then see your portfolio's market data, news, and heatmap. From there, you can pull up the specifics for each investment, including any charts you’ve created.

More importantly, with an Elite plan, you can set up email alerts for your investments based on news, analyst ratings, price movements, and changes in your preset screener criteria.

I appreciated how quick and easy it was to set up different portfolios for tracking, especially using picks straight from the screener.

Market news, financial statements, and heatmaps

Finviz provides an extensive, ongoing database of market news. I liked how the news can be filtered by investment type and source. This organized financial news feed could be worth using even if you never touch the other tools.

Finviz also provides company financial statements and tracks the latest trades by insiders and executives. Additionally, it summarizes market trends through interactive heat maps and charts. These tools are available for stocks, ETFs, forex, futures, and cryptocurrencies.

Of course, you could find all this information on your own with some work, but I appreciated how it was all in one place, even for free accounts.

Charting

Finviz offers built-in charting on the platform. While you can see charts and make a few basic drawings with a free subscription, I didn’t find it especially helpful. It felt like every move I tried to make flagged me to update to a paid plan.

The charting tool with the Elite plan is still basic. On the plus side, I found it user-friendly with a simple, built-in tutorial for first timers. The capabilities were decent. For example, I liked how easy it was to simultaneously pull up and compare multiple charts.

On the down side, it didn’t offer as many built-in strategies as a website specializing in charting, like TradingView. I’d consider the charting at Finviz as a nice bonus to the screeners and other information, but it shouldn’t be your main motivation for signing up.

Backtests

I found the Finviz Backtest tool to be fascinating as a way to analyze how past strategies would have worked out. This tool is only accessible with an Elite subscription.

You add your target investments, the timeline, and your entry/exit strategies and parameters. The Backtest tool then crunches the numbers to show how you would have performed.

I put together a sample entry/exit strategy that would have beaten the historical S&P 500 from 1996 to 2023: 13.52% versus 10.44% per year. However, it would have required stomaching a lot more volatility, and 3,731 trades versus simply buying and holding the S&P 500. It gave me something to ponder: was the extra return worth the extra effort and stress?

I feel like I was just scratching the surface of this tool. Active traders could reveal some hidden gems by playing around and seeing the results of a backtest on Finviz.

At first glance, the Finviz platform can feel overwhelming. Upon logging in, you’re met with a pile of charts, stock tickets, heatmaps, and other market data. There isn’t a welcome page or any real explanation of what you’re looking at. I get the impression that someone brand-new to investing might be scared away.

Once I dove in, however, I found the Finviz platform easy to figure out through trial and error. It was almost addictive. Once I started testing tools, I was excited to dig deeper and try more features.

It’s a good thing the platform is so intuitive because Finviz doesn’t offer much onboarding. It only has some basic educational articles and videos. For example, I did find a short two-minute intro video with an AI voice guiding me through the platform. The charting tool came with a quick guided tutorial. If you run into serious issues, you can reach out to customer support.

Still, I would have liked some more built-in guidance. For example, the experience would be improved with a chatbot that can answer questions and point me to the right educational articles, even if it were all automated. I found myself frequently going to Google to figure things out, sometimes relying on non-Finviz sites for help.

I suspect that people stop asking questions once they get the hang of the platform because of the high-quality design. Just expect a bit of a learning curve as a beginner.

Finviz does an excellent job collecting, organizing, and above all, processing real-time investment data. Its screener is one of the very best on the market. I loved how clearly the platform presents large volumes of information in visual formats.

The free plan is generous, offering access to most features without requiring registration. However, if you plan to use Finviz for active trading or time-sensitive decisions, a paid subscription is essential to enable real-time data.

There are some places where Finviz falls short. Its charting tool isn’t that strong, even for paid users. If you are big on technical analysis, I’d recommend investing in a TradingView subscription instead. It has a much better charting tool, though its screener is less extensive than Finviz. If you’re on a budget and only want a basic screener, Stock Rover starts at just $7.99 monthly versus nearly $40 at Finviz.

Even though it has a few drawbacks, Finviz does one of the best jobs presenting extensive market data all in one place. Its branding as a hub for financial visualizations is well-earned.