Finviz alternative

What Finviz does well

Finviz is arguably the most popular free stock screener for US retail traders. Its core strengths:

• Comprehensive screener: Filter by 60+ criteria across descriptive (sector, industry, country, market cap, exchange), fundamental (P/E, EPS growth, ROE, debt/equity, dividend yield, insider ownership), and technical (price vs moving averages, RSI, ATR, chart patterns, distance from 52-week high/low) dimensions.
• Sector heat map: A visual map of the entire US equity market by sector and market cap, color-coded by daily performance. One of the fastest ways to assess market breadth and spot sector rotation in real time (with 15-minute delay on the free tier).
• Chart patterns: Automated identification of classic technical patterns (ascending triangle, head and shoulders, channel, consolidation). Available on Finviz Elite.
• News aggregation: Per-stock news streams from hundreds of sources, updated frequently.
• Insider trading tracker: SEC Form 4 filings showing insider buys and sells, with dollar amounts and transaction types.
• Futures and forex overview: Quick-glance page showing major futures contracts, forex pairs, and commodities.
• Speed: Finviz is optimized for rapid scanning. Running a complex multi-filter screen across thousands of stocks takes seconds.

Two different discovery models

Finviz and RadarPulse represent two fundamentally different approaches to stock discovery:

• Finviz (criteria-driven): You define what you're looking for, stocks with P/E below 15, RSI above 60, price above 200-day MA, market cap above $1B. The screener finds all stocks that match your preset criteria. You're searching based on static attributes that are already publicly visible.
• RadarPulse (activity-driven): The platform surfaces names where unusual activity is happening right now, large institutional sweeps, elevated Vol/OI ratios, multi-exchange execution. You don't define the criteria in advance; the market's own activity reveals candidates you might not have searched for.

The key difference: Finviz tells you which stocks match criteria you already know about. RadarPulse tells you which stocks institutions are acting on, often before price moves that would generate those criteria. A Finviz screen catches a breakout after it's technically identifiable. Flow often catches institutional positioning before the breakout.

What Finviz doesn't do

Despite its breadth, Finviz lacks the real-time institutional intelligence layer:

• No live options tape scanning or unusual activity detection
• No sweep vs block differentiation
• No Vol/OI ratio signal, doesn't flag when options volume dramatically exceeds open interest
• No premium-weighted flow scoring (EXTREME / ELEVATED / NOTABLE tiers)
• No aggressor-side detection (can't tell whether trades hit the ask vs bid)
• No tape momentum, can't identify repeated directional prints in same name over sessions
• No congressional trade tracking (STOCK Act disclosures)
• No 13F institutional filing integration
• No multi-signal confluence across flow, congressional, and institutional data

Finviz's "unusual options volume" data on individual stock pages is a summary statistic, it shows that options volume is elevated, but not what kind of trades (sweeps vs blocks), at what strikes, in which direction (call vs put), or with what urgency signature.

Feature comparison

Who should use which tool

Finviz is the better primary tool if you:

• Identify trading candidates based on defined criteria (value screens, momentum screens, breakout screens)
• Want to quickly scan the full US equity universe by sector, fundamentals, or technical setup
• Need visual market breadth data (heat maps) to understand daily sector rotation at a glance
• Trade based on technical setups that you identify via price, volume, and pattern criteria
• Are building a watchlist from scratch and need to narrow from thousands of names to dozens

RadarPulse is the better primary tool if you:

• Want to discover what institutions are positioning for before that activity shows up in price data
• Trade options and need real-time sweep alerts, Vol/OI signals, and flow scoring
• Use congressional disclosure data as part of your trading signals
• Want to identify sector rotation signals from institutional options positioning in ETFs
• Focus on 5–15 high-conviction setups per week rather than screening hundreds of names

Best combined for traders who:

• Screen for technically strong setups in Finviz, then wait for flow confirmation in RadarPulse before entering
• Use heat maps to identify outperforming sectors, then watch individual names in those sectors for unusual flow
• Want dual-layer discovery: criteria-based universe building (Finviz) + activity-based signal generation (RadarPulse)

The combined screener + flow workflow

1. Morning sector check (Finviz heat map): Identify which sectors are showing the strongest early momentum today. Note 2–3 sectors showing broad strength relative to the market.
2. Screener shortlist (Finviz): Run a screener within those sectors for names showing technical strength, price above 20-day MA, RSI 55–70, near 52-week highs, volume above average. Output: 10–20 technically qualified names.
3. Flow cross-reference (RadarPulse): Check those 10–20 names for any recent unusual options activity. Look for EXTREME-tier prints ($500K+, sweep at ask, bullish) in names that also show the technical setup from your Finviz screen.
4. Confluence filter: Any name where: (a) sector is outperforming + (b) technical setup is clean (Finviz) + (c) unusual bullish flow exists (RadarPulse) is a high-conviction candidate. Require all three to align before considering a position.
5. Congressional overlay: If the name also shows a recent congressional buy in RadarPulse, you have technical + flow + congressional alignment, the highest-conviction confluence available.
6. Execute with technical trigger: Don't enter on flow alone, require a specific technical trigger (breakout above key level, volume confirmation, pullback to support). Finviz's chart tools help you define the trigger precisely.

Where Finviz's options data falls short

Finviz does surface some options-related statistics on individual stock pages, options volume, put/call ratio, and an "unusual options volume" flag. These are useful surface signals, but they have meaningful limitations compared to dedicated flow platforms:

• No execution type: Finviz shows total options volume, not whether trades were sweeps (urgent, multi-exchange, hit the ask) or blocks (negotiated, OTC). The execution type is the most important quality signal for institutional intent.
• No strike/expiry breakdown: Aggregate volume doesn't tell you where volume concentrated. A 10× Vol/OI spike on a specific out-of-the-money call strike is far more informative than knowing total volume was elevated.
• No premium weighting: 1,000 contracts at $0.05 (= $5,000) and 100 contracts at $5.00 (= $50,000) both count as "volume" equally. Premium size is the single most important indicator of institutional conviction.
• Delay: Finviz's free tier uses 15-minute delayed data. Flow signals in individual stocks can move the price materially in 15 minutes. Real-time flow data is essential for acting on institutional signals.

Finviz in depth: the equity screener and market visualization tool

Finviz has earned its place as one of the most widely used free stock screening and market visualization tools available to retail traders. Understanding its genuine strengths helps clarify where it fits in a broader research workflow and where it leaves gaps.

The heat map is Finviz's most distinctive feature. It renders the entire US equity market as a mosaic of color-coded rectangles, sized by market capitalization and colored by daily performance. Green shading deepens as gains increase; red deepens with losses. At a glance, a trader can read which sectors are outperforming, where large-cap names are running, and which corners of the market are lagging, in seconds, without scrolling through individual tickers. Finviz also provides heat maps for S&P 500 sectors, futures contracts, and major forex pairs, making it a fast visual entry point for morning market orientation.

The screener is Finviz's core engine. It offers more than 60 simultaneous filter criteria organized across several dimensions:

• Descriptive: Sector, industry, country, exchange, market cap, index membership, float, shares outstanding.
• Fundamental: P/E ratio, forward P/E, PEG ratio, P/S, P/B, price/cash, price/free cash flow, EPS growth (this year, next year, past five years, next five years), sales growth, ROE, ROA, ROI, current ratio, debt/equity, gross margin, operating margin, net profit margin, payout ratio, dividend yield, dividend amount.
• Technical: RSI, price relative to 20/50/200-day moving average, 52-week high/low distance, average volume, relative volume, beta, ATR, chart pattern, candlestick pattern, performance over multiple timeframes.
• Ownership: Insider ownership, institutional ownership, insider transactions, institutional transactions.

Running a complex multi-factor screen across thousands of stocks takes Finviz a few seconds. The output is a scrollable table, sortable by any column, with thumbnails linking to individual stock charts. This speed and visual clarity is genuinely difficult to match with manual filtering.

Finviz also aggregates analyst ratings, tracks insider transactions from SEC Form 4 filings with dollar amounts and transaction types, and provides a news feed per ticker from hundreds of sources. On Finviz Elite, data is real-time rather than 15-minute delayed, and automatic chart pattern recognition is added.

What Finviz does not provide is meaningful to distinguish it from flow-first platforms. It does not score individual options prints for conviction, it does not produce a ranked daily flow leaderboard showing which names are seeing the most unusual institutional options activity today, it does not track congressional trading disclosures under the STOCK Act, and it does not include AI-powered conversational research tools. The question Finviz answers well is: "Which stocks meet these criteria right now?" The question RadarPulse answers is: "Which options prints represent the highest institutional conviction in the market today?" These are different questions, and both matter for serious active trading.

Technical screener discovery vs. real-time flow signal: how they stack

Finviz's screener is inherently backward-looking in one important sense: it identifies stocks that already exhibit certain measurable characteristics, an RSI in a specific range, a price above a moving average, a P/E below a threshold. These characteristics exist because of price history and reported financials. The screener surfaces stocks that have already done something noteworthy on a criteria basis.

RadarPulse's flow signals operate on a fundamentally different axis. When an institution sweeps 2,000 call contracts across three exchanges at the ask, paying $800,000 in premium with 18 days to expiration, that trade is happening right now. The stock may not yet show an RSI breakout. The price may not yet be above the 50-day moving average. The institutional actor is expressing conviction before the price move has materialized enough to register in a screener. This is the core distinction: screeners detect after; flow often detects before.

This does not make one approach superior to the other, it makes them complementary. Each layer of discovery answers a different question and operates on different timing:

• Finviz screener output: "These 23 names are technically extended, have rising earnings estimates, and are in sectors with strong relative strength." This is a qualifying universe built from verifiable, existing data.
• RadarPulse flow output: "These 4 names in that universe also saw EXTREME-tier bullish flow prints in the last two sessions." This is a real-time activity signal suggesting institutional actors are expressing directional conviction right now.

The practical combined workflow works as a two-stage filter. Stage one (Finviz): build a technically and fundamentally qualified universe of 15 to 30 names using screener criteria you trust, sector relative strength, moving average alignment, earnings momentum, volume characteristics. Stage two (RadarPulse): monitor that list for any names appearing in the Top 25 leaderboard with EXTREME or ELEVATED scores. A name that passes both filters, technical setup confirmed by Finviz, institutional options conviction confirmed by RadarPulse, meets two independent discovery criteria simultaneously.

The power of this combination is specifically that the two signals are independent. Finviz's screener data and RadarPulse's options flow data are derived from entirely different sources and methodologies. When they converge on the same name, that convergence carries more weight than either signal alone. A technically strong stock with no unusual flow might simply be drifting in a trend. Unusual flow in a technically broken name might be noise or a contrarian hedge. The intersection of technical quality and active institutional positioning is where the highest-confidence setups tend to concentrate.

Timing also differs. Finviz data updates throughout the day but reflects the current state of price and fundamental data. Flow signals are intraday on RadarPulse, a large sweep at 10:15 AM is visible in the feed 15 minutes later, while a Finviz RSI reading doesn't change in a meaningful way on that timescale. This means flow can serve as the intraday trigger once the technical setup from Finviz has identified the candidate.

RadarPulse's options flow scoring: how conviction is ranked

One of the primary limitations of basic unusual options volume data, including the summary statistics Finviz provides, is that raw volume doesn't distinguish between high-conviction institutional positioning and routine hedging, spread construction, or retail activity. A stock showing "5x normal options volume" could be experiencing institutional accumulation or it could be noise from a large covered-call position being rolled. RadarPulse addresses this with a structured scoring model applied to every options print.

Every trade in the RadarPulse feed is scored from 0 to 100 using six disclosed factors with explicit weights:

• Vol/OI ratio (40% weight): The ratio of today's volume to existing open interest at that specific strike and expiry. A high ratio indicates new directional positioning rather than maintenance of existing hedges. A print where volume exceeds open interest (ratio above 1.0) is particularly notable, more contracts traded today than previously existed.
• Premium size (30% weight): The raw dollar value of the trade. Institutional actors pay large premium because they are expressing large conviction. A $1.2 million sweep and a $3,000 retail buy both appear in the options tape; only one is institutionally significant. Premium size is the single heaviest factor in the scoring model.
• Execution type (10% weight): Whether the trade executed as a sweep (routed across multiple exchanges simultaneously, indicating urgency to fill the full size immediately) or a block (negotiated OTC, indicating a large but pre-arranged trade). Sweeps score higher for institutional conviction because the urgency signature suggests the buyer or seller did not want to telegraph the trade or wait for a better price.
• Aggressor side (10% weight): Whether the trade hit the ask (buyer was aggressive, willing to pay the offer) or the bid (seller was aggressive). Ask-side aggression on calls and bid-side aggression on puts indicate directional conviction from the initiating party.
• Days to expiration (5% weight): Trades with near-term expirations carry more conviction signal per dollar of premium, because there is less time for the thesis to play out. A $500,000 print with 7 DTE implies the buyer expects movement very soon. A $500,000 print with 180 DTE is significant but less urgent.
• Time of day (5% weight): Activity in the first 30 minutes or last 30 minutes of the session often carries more signal weight. Opening sweeps can represent overnight research converted to action; closing prints can represent positioning ahead of known catalysts or after-hours events.

Scores translate into three tiers. EXTREME (85 and above) represents the top fraction of daily prints, those combining very high Vol/OI, large premium, sweep execution, and ask-side aggression. ELEVATED (65 to 84) represents strong but not maximum conviction prints. NOTABLE (45 to 64) captures prints worth monitoring but with mixed signal quality.

The daily Top 25 leaderboard applies this scoring across the full options tape, often 5,000 or more individual prints per session, and surfaces the 25 most unusual. This cuts the noise dramatically. Instead of scanning hundreds of elevated-volume tickers, a trader sees the 25 prints that combined the most unusual features simultaneously.

Transparency is a design principle: every score in RadarPulse shows its factor breakdown. If a print scores 91, the breakdown shows how much Vol/OI contributed, how much premium contributed, and so on. This allows a trader to assess the quality of the score rather than treating it as a black box.

To illustrate with a concrete example: a $1.35 million sweep of call options on a mid-cap technology stock, executed across four exchanges at the ask, with a Vol/OI ratio of 8.4 on a strike 15% out of the money with 9 days to expiration, would score in the high 80s to low 90s on this model. The size, urgency, strike selection, and Vol/OI ratio all align to suggest a non-routine, directional trade. Finviz's heat map would show this stock's daily performance, and the screener would show its current fundamentals, but neither would surface the fact that an institution just made a very specific, urgent, large directional bet in the options market.

Congressional and political flow: the RadarPulse layer

Finviz tracks insider transactions through SEC Form 4 filings, the disclosure that corporate insiders (executives, directors, and beneficial owners of more than 10% of shares) are required to file within two business days of a transaction. These filings show purchases and sales with dollar amounts, transaction types, and post-transaction holdings. This is genuinely useful data for identifying when executives are buying their own stock, often a signal of insider confidence in the company's prospects.

RadarPulse adds a second and entirely distinct category of "smart money" disclosure that Finviz does not cover: congressional trading data under the STOCK Act (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act). Members of the House and Senate are required to disclose personal securities trades within 45 days of execution. These disclosures appear in RadarPulse's congressional tracker, updated as filings arrive, with late-filing flags identifying members who missed the disclosure deadline.

The RadarPulse congressional tracker also includes the Trump trade tracker, drawing on OGE (Office of Government Ethics) disclosures for the policy basket, trades and holdings by executive branch officials that may reflect awareness of policy developments before they become public. This is a distinct data source from the congressional STOCK Act filings.

For traders who already use Finviz to screen for insider buying activity, adding RadarPulse's congressional layer adds a second "informed trading" signal from a completely different population of actors. Corporate insiders know the fundamentals of their specific company. Congressional members may have advance awareness of regulatory decisions, defense contracts, pharmaceutical approvals, technology policy, or tariff schedules that materially affect specific sectors and names. These two types of informed trading can align, amplify each other, or diverge, and tracking both provides more context than either alone.

Two examples illustrate the value of multi-layer confirmation. First: a defense contractor appears in a Finviz insider-buying screen, an executive purchased $500,000 in shares. That same name then appears in RadarPulse's congressional tracker showing purchases by two members of the House Armed Services Committee in the prior 60 days. The combination of corporate insider buying and congressional buying in the same defense name creates a two-source confirmation of potential informed conviction. Second: a pharmaceutical company appears in RadarPulse's Top 25 with an EXTREME-tier call sweep of $900,000. The same name has a recent congressional purchase by a Senate Health Committee member disclosed in the prior 30 days. When unusual options flow and congressional buying align in the same name, particularly in a sector that is sensitive to government decisions, the multi-signal confluence carries more weight than any single indicator. Finviz's screener can confirm whether the stock's technical setup is also constructive, creating a three-layer confirmation: technical quality (Finviz), institutional options conviction (RadarPulse flow), and politically informed buying (RadarPulse congressional tracker).

Radar and Vera: AI research in the screener-to-flow workflow

When a Finviz-screened name appears in RadarPulse's Top 25 flow leaderboard with an EXTREME score, the immediate practical question is: why might this be happening? What does this company do, what catalysts are on the horizon, and what would make a $1 million sweep in near-term calls make sense? Answering this question typically requires switching to another tool, an earnings calendar, a news aggregator, an analyst research site, and spending several minutes assembling context.

RadarPulse includes Radar, a conversational AI market assistant with live data access, built directly into the platform. When a name surfaces in the flow feed, a trader can ask Radar for immediate context: what the company does, what earnings events are approaching, what recent analyst activity looks like, what regulatory catalysts might be relevant, and why the options activity might reflect institutional positioning. Radar provides this synthesis without requiring a tab switch or a separate research workflow.

Finviz provides some fundamental data on each individual stock page, basic financials, a news feed, analyst ratings summary, insider activity, and a chart. This is useful reference data. What it does not provide is a conversational AI assistant that can synthesize that data with live news, interpret why unusual activity might be occurring, or answer follow-up questions in a research dialogue.

Radar is one of RadarPulse's two AI research characters. Its character mark is the two-ring radar face, a flat, concentric-circle design that serves as its avatar throughout the platform. It is never represented with a generic robot icon or any other emoji substitute. Radar's design is conversational: ask it about a ticker, a sector, a congressional trade, or a flow pattern, and it responds with grounded, data-connected analysis.

Vera, available at the Elite tier, provides structured multi-lens AI equity research. Where Radar is conversational and real-time, Vera is a research character that produces structured analysis across multiple dimensions, technical, fundamental, sentiment, and flow context, for a given name. Vera's character mark is the cyan V monogram, a distinct visual identity that appears in her research outputs and avatar. Like Radar, Vera is never represented with an emoji or generic icon. The two characters serve different research modes: Radar for quick, conversational context during live flow monitoring; Vera for deeper structured research on names that have been identified as high-priority candidates.

The practical workflow integration: Finviz builds the initial qualified universe of technically and fundamentally screened names. RadarPulse's flow feed and Top 25 leaderboard identify which of those names (and others) are seeing institutional options conviction on a 15-minute delay. When a match appears, a Finviz-qualified name showing up in RadarPulse's EXTREME tier, Radar provides immediate research context without leaving the platform. For the highest-priority candidates, Vera at the Elite tier produces the full structured multi-lens analysis. This keeps the research loop within a single workflow rather than requiring context-switching across four or five separate tools.

Pricing: free screener plus flow subscription

Finviz operates a freemium model. Its core screener, heat maps, news feeds, insider transaction tracker, and basic chart viewing are available without registration or payment. Finviz Elite adds real-time data (removing the 15-minute delay on the free tier), advanced chart pattern recognition, backtesting, correlation analysis, and extended historical data. For current Finviz Elite pricing, verify directly on the Finviz website, pricing may change and the figures on this page should not be treated as authoritative.

RadarPulse at launch offers three subscription tiers:

• Basic ($12/month): Core options flow feed, daily Top 25 leaderboard, EXTREME and ELEVATED tier alerts, basic congressional tracking, Radar AI assistant access. Includes a 14-day free trial.
• Pro ($29/month): All Basic features plus the full congressional tracker with Senate and House disclosures, advanced flow analytics including Vol/OI breakdown and score factor detail, paper trading wallet with $100,000 simulated capital.
• Elite ($59/month): All Pro features plus Vera structured AI research, developer API access, webhook engine for automated alerts, and priority data access.

The $100,000 paper trading wallet and the Academy educational content are free at all tiers, including for unsubscribed users. These are permanently free features, not trials.

For traders who currently use Finviz as their primary discovery tool, adding RadarPulse at the Basic tier ($12/month) adds the institutional options flow intelligence layer that Finviz doesn't provide at any price. The combined monthly cost of Finviz's free tier plus RadarPulse Basic is $12/month, a small fraction of institutional data service pricing, which typically runs hundreds to thousands of dollars per month for comparable flow data access. Even Finviz Elite plus RadarPulse Pro covers both the screener-driven and flow-driven discovery layers at a combined cost that remains well within reach for active retail traders.

At the institutional level, real-time options tape access, congressional disclosure aggregation, and AI research synthesis each represent separate data subscriptions that collectively can cost thousands of dollars monthly. A Bloomberg terminal subscription, dedicated options flow platform, congressional disclosure service, and AI research assistant together exceed $3,000 to $5,000 per month for professional-grade versions of each. RadarPulse assembles these layers into a single platform priced for individual active traders rather than institutional desks, making institutional-grade intelligence accessible to the broader retail market for the first time.

The free-forever features also matter for onboarding. A new trader can register for RadarPulse, access the $100,000 paper trading wallet immediately, begin placing simulated trades based on the flow feed, and measure their accuracy against the leaderboard, all without paying anything. This lets a trader build confidence in flow-driven decision-making before committing capital, which is a meaningful risk management advantage that the Finviz free tier (screener, heat maps, news) does not provide in the same way, since Finviz's free tier doesn't include simulation or outcome tracking.

RadarPulse is currently in pre-launch and accepting waitlist registrations. Waitlist members receive priority access at launch and early-adopter pricing. There are no checkout buttons or live subscriptions available during the pre-launch period, all tier pricing will activate at launch for registered waitlist members. The waitlist is free to join and carries no obligation; it is simply the mechanism by which launch access is allocated and early pricing is reserved for the traders who have followed the platform's development most closely.

Join the waitlist to reserve your place and secure launch-day access at early-adopter pricing.

Frequently asked questions

Can Finviz find unusual options activity?

Finviz shows a basic "unusual volume" flag when options volume is elevated relative to a historical baseline, and displays a total put/call ratio on the stock page. It does not provide the detailed signal breakdown, execution type, strike-level Vol/OI, premium weighting, aggressor side, that dedicated flow scanners surface.

Is there a free Finviz alternative?

Several tools cover parts of Finviz's functionality for free: StockAnalysis for fundamental data, TradingView for charts and technical analysis, and Macroaxis for certain screener filters. No single free tool replaces the breadth and speed of Finviz's screener. For options flow data specifically, which Finviz doesn't fully provide at any tier, RadarPulse is accepting waitlist signups.

Does Finviz Elite include real-time data?

Yes, Finviz Elite removes the 15-minute data delay and adds real-time stock data, live charts, chart pattern recognition, correlation analysis, and backtesting. For active traders who use Finviz regularly, Elite adds Vera research and API access. It doesn't add options flow scanning or unusual activity detection.

What's better than Finviz for options traders?

For purely technical and fundamental screening, Finviz remains one of the best tools available. For options flow signals, the live institutional activity layer that Finviz doesn't cover, dedicated flow platforms are necessary. Many serious options traders maintain both Finviz (for universe building and technical context) and a flow scanner (for live institutional signals).