RadarPulse: an alternative to Unusual Whales

What people actually want from an options-flow tool

Strip away the branding and almost everyone is after the same handful of things from an options-flow tool. First, a way to cut the firehose down to size, millions of contracts trade every day, and the vast majority is routine market-making and hedging. Second, a sense of which prints matter and why: volume relative to open interest, premium spent, days to expiry, and whether the order was an aggressive sweep or a negotiated block. Third, context that isn't only options, what insiders, funds and lawmakers are doing. And fourth, a price that makes sense for how seriously you trade. If you're still mapping the concept itself, our primer on unusual options flow covers the underlying signal.

How RadarPulse delivers it

RadarPulse is built around a scoring engine and a small set of trackers. Here's what you get:

• A 0–100 unusualness score on every trade. RadarPulse rates each options print on volume-to-open-interest, premium size, days-to-expiry and aggressor side: so the ranking reflects the factors flow readers actually weigh, not a black box.
• A daily Top 25 with clear flags. The day's most unusual activity is collected into a ranked Top 25, each print tagged EXTREME, ELEVATED or NOTABLE so you scan labels first and drill into the strongest signals.
• Whale detection. Block and sweep orders moving real size are surfaced, with the aggressor side flagged.
• Congress, Trump and 13F trackers. See congressional stock trades, the Trump trades tracker, and institutional 13F holdings alongside the flow: context beyond the options tape.
• Radar (AI chat). A built-in AI markets assistant explains any ticker or print in plain English.
• Vera (AI equity research). An AI equity-research desk for digging into a name beyond its flow.
• Free $100K paper trading + Academy. Practise acting on what you see and learn the mechanics at zero cost, no card required.

The switcher's hook: import your Unusual Whales CSVs

If you already export flow from Unusual Whales, you don't have to leave that data behind. RadarPulse's column detection auto-detects and imports CSV exports, including Unusual Whales exports, as well as broker and other third-party CSVs, recognising the columns and OCC option symbols automatically. There's no rigid template to wrestle with.

Just as importantly, you don't need a second data subscription to get value. RadarPulse generates its own real, 15-minute-delayed options flow out of the box and scores it live, so you can scan the moment you open it with nothing to upload. Import a CSV when you have one; rely on the built-in flow when you don't.

A factual feature comparison

The table below describes RadarPulse's capabilities in detail. For the Unusual Whales column we only note what's widely and publicly known, that it's an established options-flow platform, and otherwise leave specifics blank rather than guess. Check each tool's own site for its current, authoritative feature list and pricing; the honest move is to compare them directly for yourself.

"See their site" means we're deliberately not stating another company's specifics, verify current Unusual Whales features and pricing on their own site.

RadarPulse pricing

Clear and flat. Two things are free forever; the scored scanner sits on paid tiers with a trial so you can test it at no cost first.

• Basic: $12/mo, with a 14-day free trial. The scored scanner, daily Top 25, whale detection and trackers on 15-minute-delayed flow.
• Pro, $29/mo. More headroom for active users.
• Elite, $59/mo. Adds the real-time tape for traders reacting inside the same minute.
• Free forever, $100K paper trading + the Academy. No card required, so you can practise and learn at zero cost.

Flow is 15-minute delayed on every tier except Elite. For the full, current breakdown see the pricing page.

Which should you pick?

There's no single right answer, and that's the honest take. Unusual Whales is an established platform with its own strengths; compare it on its own terms. RadarPulse is worth a look if you want a transparent 0–100 score on every print, a ranked daily Top 25, Congress and 13F context in the same place, AI chat and research built in, and a low entry price with a real trial, plus the convenience of importing the Unusual Whales CSVs you already have. If you mainly study flow and build watchlists, Basic on delayed data covers it; if you trade intraday off the tape, Elite's real-time data is the upgrade that matters. New to flow entirely? Start at the Learn hub, or compare free options on our guide to the best free options flow scanner.

Unusual Whales: what it does well

Unusual Whales is one of the most recognized options-flow platforms in retail trading, and that recognition is earned. Before comparing the two tools, it's worth being direct about what Unusual Whales has built and why it resonates with a large community of options traders.

Their core product is a comprehensive flow table with rich filtering options. Traders can slice the feed by premium size, days to expiration, sweep type, open interest, sector, and more. The depth of filter controls has made Unusual Whales a go-to for traders who want hands-on control over what they see rather than a curated ranked list. If your workflow involves manually working through a large set of prints and applying your own criteria, that kind of granular filtering is genuinely useful.

Unusual Whales was also early to integrate congressional trading data alongside their options flow. This was a pioneering feature: the idea that retail traders should be able to see what lawmakers were buying and selling, alongside the unusual flow data, in one interface. That integration helped define a category and built a loyal audience among traders who track political and institutional positioning as part of their research process.

The platform's social presence is notable. Unusual Whales has built a substantial following on social media, particularly on Twitter/X, where they publish flow recaps, research reports, and market commentary. That content flywheel has generated significant brand awareness and brought a large community of active options traders to their platform. For traders who are new to flow and want a platform with a visible community around it, that social presence has real value.

They also offer dark pool data as part of their product, which appeals to traders who track large off-exchange block trades alongside options activity. Combined with their relatively accessible pricing and a free tier with limited access, Unusual Whales covers a broad surface area at a price point that has made it popular with retail traders who want to explore flow without committing to high-end terminal pricing.

Their congressional data publication has also generated significant press coverage and contributed to a broader public conversation about legislative trading transparency. Whether or not you follow political trading as a strategy, the visibility Unusual Whales brought to that data category made the entire sector more aware of it as a signal worth watching. RadarPulse also tracks congressional trading data through its Congress tracker, but it's worth acknowledging that Unusual Whales helped establish the legitimacy of that data category for retail traders in the first place.

In summary: Unusual Whales has built a real product with a real community. This page is a factual comparison, not a takedown. If Unusual Whales already fits your workflow, there is no reason to switch. The question this page answers is what RadarPulse offers as an alternative, and where its approach differs.

The scoring difference: how RadarPulse approaches unusual activity

The central design difference between RadarPulse and a filtering-first tool like Unusual Whales comes down to a single question: who decides what counts as unusual?

With a filter-heavy table, the answer is you. You set the premium floor, the volume threshold, the DTE range, the sweep-only toggle, and you work through what remains. That puts full control in your hands, which experienced traders often prefer. The tradeoff is that it takes time, and the settings that surface the most interesting prints on one day may miss them the next. Two traders running the same filters on the same session can reach different conclusions.

RadarPulse takes a different position. Instead of handing you a filtered table and leaving the "is this unusual?" judgment to you, RadarPulse applies a systematic 0-100 unusualness score to every single print before you ever see it. The score is computed from a defined set of inputs: the volume-to-open-interest ratio, the total premium spent, the execution type (whether it was an aggressive multi-leg sweep across exchanges or a negotiated block), the aggressor side (buyer or seller), the days to expiration, and the time of day relative to market hours. Each factor is weighted and combined into a single number that represents how far outside the norm a given print sits.

The practical output of that scoring engine is the daily Top 25 leaderboard: the 25 highest-scoring prints from the session, each tagged with one of three flags. EXTREME marks the prints with the highest unusualness scores, the ones that stand furthest outside ordinary market activity. ELEVATED marks prints that are clearly out of the ordinary but not at the most extreme level. NOTABLE marks prints worth watching even if they haven't crossed into the upper tiers. The labels mean a trader can scan the leaderboard in seconds rather than working through hundreds of rows.

This matters most during active sessions. On a busy market day, a flow platform can surface 300 or more prints that pass a basic premium filter. Reviewing all of them manually is not practical for most traders. A ranked list that automatically puts the most unusual activity at the top changes the workflow: instead of filtering and sorting yourself, you start from the highest-signal prints and work down. You can still drill into the full feed if you want the raw data; the Top 25 is a starting point, not a ceiling.

One frequently asked question is whether you have to choose. If you already subscribe to Unusual Whales and export their flow data, RadarPulse can import those CSV exports automatically. The column detection recognizes Unusual Whales' export format without a rigid template, maps the columns, and applies RadarPulse's scoring engine on top of the imported data. That means you can use Unusual Whales as your data source and RadarPulse as your scoring and ranking layer simultaneously. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive.

There is also a transparency dimension worth noting. When a score is computed from defined, disclosed inputs rather than a proprietary black box, you can understand why a print scores high. A print with a Vol/OI ratio of 40x, a $500,000 premium, a 7-day DTE, and an aggressive sweep execution on the bid side is going to score extremely high because every contributing factor is pointing the same direction. That legibility means you can evaluate whether the score aligns with your own read of the print rather than just trusting an opaque number.

For traders who are newer to reading flow and have not yet developed confident personal filtering criteria, the scoring approach can shorten the learning curve considerably. A 0-100 score with defined inputs gives you a concrete anchor for evaluating what you're looking at. For experienced traders, it provides a second opinion that doesn't require any extra work to generate.

The AI assistant advantage: Radar vs. no built-in AI

RadarPulse includes a built-in AI assistant called Radar. Radar is integrated directly into the app interface, which means you don't need to open a separate browser tab or switch tools to get context on a print you're looking at. You can ask Radar about any ticker, any market condition, or any options concept, and it responds in plain English using real market data.

The practical use case is straightforward. You're scanning the Top 25 and you see an EXTREME-flagged sweep on a ticker you don't follow daily. You have immediate questions: What does this company do? When is the next earnings date? What's the recent price action? Are there analyst upgrades or downgrades you should know about? Are there options concepts in play here you want to understand better? Without an in-app AI, you're tab-switching to financial news sites, earnings calendars, and research portals to build that context manually. That process takes time and breaks your focus on the flow.

Radar handles those questions directly. Because Radar has access to live market data, the answers it gives are current, not drawn from a fixed training cutoff. Ask about earnings and it tells you the date. Ask about price action and it references real numbers. Ask about a sector and it explains the dynamics relevant to the current session. The goal is to let a trader stay inside a single interface from "I see this unusual print" to "I understand what's going on with this name" without losing momentum.

This is particularly useful for flow traders who work across many tickers rather than specializing in a small watchlist. When you're monitoring flow across the whole market, you will regularly encounter names you don't have deep familiarity with. Radar fills that gap in seconds.

Unusual Whales does not include a built-in AI assistant of this kind. Their platform is designed around flow data and filtering tools, and their social content provides market commentary externally, but the in-app experience is data-first without an AI layer built into the interface. Whether that matters to you depends on how much time you spend looking up external context during a session. For traders who find themselves constantly tab-switching to research names they see in the flow, the in-app AI difference is meaningful. For traders who already have deep familiarity with the names they track, it matters less.

It's also worth noting what Radar is not. It is not a trading signal generator; it doesn't tell you to buy or sell anything. It is an information layer that reduces the friction between "I see an unusual print" and "I understand the context around it." The decision about what to do with that context remains entirely with you. That framing matters because AI tools in financial contexts sometimes carry misleading expectations about what they're actually doing. Radar is a research assistant, not a trade recommendation engine.

If you want to explore what Radar can do before signing up, the Learn hub covers how the tool works in more detail.

Vera AI equity research: the deep-research differentiator

Beyond Radar, RadarPulse Elite includes a second AI system called Vera. Where Radar is a conversational assistant built for quick context, Vera is structured for depth. Vera generates comprehensive equity research on any ticker, organized across twelve analytical lenses.

Those twelve lenses cover: economic moat and competitive positioning, valuation (including discounted cash flow analysis), management quality and capital allocation history, earnings quality and accounting signals, red flags and risk factors, a bull case, a bear case, sector position and industry dynamics, competitive dynamics relative to peers, technical setup, options positioning as it relates to the underlying thesis, and a compare mode that places up to five tickers side by side across the same framework simultaneously.

The workflow this enables starts with the flow. You see an EXTREME-rated call sweep on a name. Radar gives you the quick context: earnings date, recent price action, analyst movement. Then you want to go deeper: is this company in a structurally strong position? Is there a credible bull thesis here, or is this a name with real red flags that make the flow harder to read? Vera generates that research without requiring you to piece it together from multiple sources. The result is a structured document, not a search result, organized around the questions that matter for forming an investment view.

This level of AI-powered fundamental research is not available inside Unusual Whales at any tier. Unusual Whales is built around the options flow data itself; the fundamental research layer, if you want it, comes from external sources you access separately. For traders who want the full arc from "I saw unusual flow" to "here is a complete research view on this name" without leaving the platform, Vera is the capability that closes that loop.

Vera's research is AI-generated from public market data and is intended for educational and informational purposes only. It is not financial advice. The research is generated on demand, meaning it reflects the data available at the time of the request, and it should be treated as a structured starting point for your own analysis rather than a definitive investment recommendation. With that context understood, the depth and speed of what Vera produces relative to building the same picture manually is the differentiator the Elite tier is built around.

One practical point on the compare mode: when you're trying to understand why a specific ticker is seeing unusual flow, it often helps to look at it relative to its sector peers. If you see an EXTREME call sweep on a semiconductor name, comparing that name's valuation and competitive position against two or three of its direct competitors in the same Vera session tells you whether the flow is stock-specific or part of a broader sector rotation. Compare mode makes that multi-name view fast enough to be useful in the middle of an active trading session rather than something you'd only do in post-market research.

For more on how Vera works and what a typical research output looks like, see the AI equity research page.

Pricing and value comparison

Pricing comparisons between platforms need a baseline caveat: pricing changes, and Unusual Whales controls their own pricing. The figures below reflect what is publicly known at the time of writing; verify current Unusual Whales pricing directly on their site before making a decision based on cost alone.

With that said, here is the RadarPulse pricing structure in full detail, alongside a general characterization of where Unusual Whales sits in the market.

RadarPulse Basic is $12 per month, with a 14-day free trial included. At this tier you get the scored scanner, the daily Top 25 with EXTREME, ELEVATED, and NOTABLE flags, whale detection, the Congress tracker, the Trump trades tracker, 13F institutional tracking, and 15-minute-delayed real options flow out of the box. You also get CSV import, so if you have Unusual Whales CSV exports, they import automatically at this tier.

RadarPulse Pro is $29 per month. Pro adds more capacity and features suitable for active traders who are using the platform daily and want higher headroom on the tools they're running. Pro-tier flow is also 15-minute delayed, which is workable for most research-oriented and swing-oriented approaches.

RadarPulse Elite is $59 per month. Elite adds the real-time options tape, which is relevant for traders who need to react to flow inside the same minute it prints rather than with a 15-minute lag. Elite also includes Vera, the AI equity research system described above, giving Elite subscribers the complete platform from flow data through AI research.

RadarPulse Academy and the $100K paper-trading wallet are both free, no card required, and do not expire. These are not trial features; they are permanent free offerings. New traders who want to learn how to read flow and practice acting on it can do so at zero cost before ever committing to a paid plan.

Unusual Whales pricing has historically been positioned in the $50 to $100 per month range depending on the tier, though the exact current structure should be verified on their site. At comparable tier pricing, RadarPulse is priced lower across the board. The Vera AI research and Radar AI assistant are both Elite-exclusive features at RadarPulse; they are not available at any tier of Unusual Whales, which means the feature comparison at the Elite level extends beyond price.

If you are currently paying for Unusual Whales and are evaluating whether to switch or supplement, the CSV import feature means you can run both simultaneously at low cost. Import your Unusual Whales exports into RadarPulse's scoring engine at the Basic tier and see whether the ranked, scored view adds value to your existing workflow before making any decision about changing your primary subscription. To join and explore the pricing in context, the waitlist is the starting point.

Who should use each tool

Both platforms serve the same broad goal: helping retail traders find unusual options activity worth paying attention to. The right choice between them comes down to workflow, what you want the platform to do for you, and which design philosophy fits how you actually trade.

Use Unusual Whales if:

• You prefer their established brand and want to be part of their existing community of options traders. A large community means more peer discussion of the signals you're watching, which has genuine value for newer flow traders getting oriented.
• You want a comprehensive, filter-heavy flow table where you control the parameters manually. If your process is to set your own premium floors, DTE ranges, and sweep filters and work through the results yourself, Unusual Whales' filter-first architecture is built for that.
• You want access to their historical flow database. Backtesting your own filtering criteria against historical data is a legitimate use case, and if that's part of your workflow, verify whether their historical data depth fits your needs.
• You value dark pool data integrated alongside options flow. If off-exchange block prints are part of your reading of positioning, their dark pool data is a built-in signal to check.
• You already have a subscription and are comfortable with their interface. Switching tools has a real learning-curve cost that is worth accounting for before moving.

Use RadarPulse if:

• You want automatic scoring and ranking of unusual prints rather than manual filtering. If you'd rather start from a ranked list and drill in, rather than configuring filters yourself, RadarPulse's scoring-first approach fits that workflow directly.
• You want a built-in AI assistant alongside your flow data. Radar handles ticker context, earnings dates, price action, and options concepts in plain English without requiring a tab switch.
• You want AI-powered equity research as part of your flow-to-thesis workflow. Vera (Elite tier) provides structured fundamental analysis across twelve lenses on any ticker, which is not available in Unusual Whales at any tier.
• You want a lower entry price. RadarPulse Basic at $12 per month is the starting point, with a 14-day free trial, and the Academy and paper-trading wallet are free permanently with no card required.
• You want to use your existing Unusual Whales CSV exports without abandoning them. The CSV import means you don't have to choose; you can bring your Unusual Whales data into RadarPulse's scoring engine at any tier.
• You are new to flow trading and want a structured starting point rather than an open-ended filter table. The scored approach and the Top 25 provide an anchor that a blank filter table doesn't.

Neither platform is the right answer for every trader. The filters-first vs. scoring-first distinction is a genuine design philosophy difference, not a matter of one being objectively better. Some traders find that owning their filter criteria fully is an important part of their process, outsourcing that judgment, even to a systematic score, feels like giving up control they want to keep. Other traders find that they spend more time managing filters than they do actually analyzing the prints that matter, and a ranked list changes that calculus. Both positions are reasonable, and the honest recommendation is to use the approach that fits how you actually make decisions.

The CSV import is worth emphasizing because it removes the binary framing from the decision. You don't have to choose between Unusual Whales and RadarPulse as if they are mutually exclusive. Many traders find that using both, Unusual Whales for its raw data depth and community, RadarPulse for its scoring layer and AI tools, gives them a more complete picture than either alone. If you want to explore that combination, join the waitlist to get started with RadarPulse.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good alternative to Unusual Whales?

Unusual Whales is an established options-flow platform. RadarPulse is an alternative built around a 0–100 unusualness score on every options trade, a daily Top 25 ranked with EXTREME, ELEVATED and NOTABLE flags, whale detection, and Congress, Trump and 13F trackers. It generates its own real, 15-minute-delayed flow so you don't need a separate data subscription, and it can also auto-detect and import CSV exports, including Unusual Whales exports. Pick the tool that fits how you trade and what you want to spend.

Can RadarPulse import an Unusual Whales CSV export?

Yes. RadarPulse's column detection auto-detects and imports CSV flow exports, including Unusual Whales exports, along with broker and other third-party CSVs and OCC option symbols. You don't have to import anything, though, because RadarPulse also generates its own real, 15-minute-delayed flow out of the box, so you can scan immediately without a second data feed.

How much does RadarPulse cost?

RadarPulse Basic is $12/mo and comes with a 14-day free trial. Pro is $29/mo and Elite is $59/mo, with Elite adding the real-time tape. A $100K paper-trading wallet and the Academy are free forever with no card required. Flow is 15-minute delayed on every tier except Elite.

Is RadarPulse's options flow real-time?

RadarPulse generates its own real options flow on a 15-minute delay on every tier, which is workable for studying unusual activity, building watchlists and learning to read flow. Real-time tape is available on the Elite tier for traders who need to react inside the same minute.

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