Investing in today’s complex financial landscape can be a daunting task. Whether you are a seasoned investor or just starting, finding a one-stop solution that caters to all your investment needs is challenging. The market is flooded with numerous investment research platforms, each offering specialized solutions for different types of investors. This article aims to shed light on the key features, core competencies, and pricing policies of each of the stock analysis websites, to make it easy for investors to pick the right tool.
That’s us! We believe that Business Quant is the go-to investment research platform for serious investors. Business Quant specializes in providing Key Performance Indicator data (or KPI data) on US stocks and industries. This includes financial breakdowns by segment, geography, and product categories. You can also access key operating metrics such as Tesla’s vehicle delivery volume, McDonald’s store openings, AT&T’s subscriber additions, and lots more such metrics on thousands of US stocks.
In essence, Business Quant saves countless hours for you — you don’t have to ever go through boring SEC filings and company documents, to extract and maintain key metrics on the companies you follow. Our KPI database is unique and its coverage rivals bigger platforms such as Bloomberg and FactSet that cost upwards of $10,000 a year.
Besides, Business Quant also hosts several other features such as:
Pricing Plans:
Although Business Quant’s feature-set to pricey institutional research terminals, its pricing is quite affordable and doesn’t break the bank:
Who is it for: New, Seasoned and Professional Investors
Ziggma is another key contender in our list of best stock analysis websites. It was founded recently in 2019 with the mission of providing institutional-grade data to retail investors. The platform specializes in providing advanced investment portfolio management and analysis tools to individual investors and financial advisors alike. They leverage data-driven insights, allow investors to consolidate their holdings in one place, provide a user-friendly interface and they strive to be affordable.
As far as the feature set goes, Ziggma provides features such as:r
However, certain important features (like historic financial statements) are missing as of this writing, making it less suitable for serious investors.
Pricing Plans:
Ziggma has two straightforward pricing plans:
Who is it for: New investors
Finviz was launched in 2007 and it has, since, grown rapidly to become a popular stock analysis website amongst investors. It offers a range of data and tools, to help users analyze stocks, track market movements, and conduct stock research. Finviz website gained popularity among investors due to its user-friendly interface and its powerful and customizable stock screener, at a time when none existed for free.
Key features offered by Finviz are:
Pricing Plans:
Finviz used to be an ad-supported business but it has rolled paid subscription plan over the years:
Who is it for: New and Seasoned Investors
Alpha Spread was launched fairly recently in 2020. The platform was built by investors, to meet the needs of investors, with the guiding principle of having “skin in the game”.
They’ve developed intrinsic valuation tools (DCF valuation and relative valuation) that provides quick valuation scores for thousands of stocks. Like Business Quant, Alpha Spread’s scoring models are also divided into multiple sections: profitability and solvency.
To summarize, Alpha Spread offers the following tools:
Pricing Plans:
Alpha Spread’s pricing is as follows:
Who is it for: New Investors
FAST Graphs was founded in 1992 and it’s one of the oldest stock analysis websites in our list. The term “FAST” Graphs is an acronym for “Fundamental Analyzer Software Tool” which essentially allows users to visualize important company financials and key ratios.
FAST Graphs empower users to research stocks deeper and faster by allowing them to exploit the undeniable relationship and functional correlation between long-term earnings growth and the market price of a company.
The key features offered by FAST Graphs are :
These tools seem to be a better fit for income-seeking investors — dividends and REITs.
Pricing Plans:
FAST Graph’s pricing is as follows: categorized as follows :
Who is it for: Dividend and REIT investors
GuruFocus is another popular value-investing stock analysis website that was founded in 2004 by Dr. Charlie Tian. The website was initially built to track trades of renowned institutional investors, also known as Guru’s. As the platform gained traction over the years, its feature set was expanded to meet the needs of a broader investor audience.
The core philosophy behind GuruFocus is that wealth is created by investing for the long-term and in quality instruments. Accordingly, its feature set is tailor-made to suit the needs of value investors. For instance, they provide detailed breakdowns for a range of financial calculations, ratios and business metrics.
Some of the features offered by Guru Focus are:
Pricing plans:
GuruFocus offers a myriad of features that are important for value investors. At the same time, the platform isn’t as affordable as some of the other names on this list.
Its pricing is as follows:
Who is it for: Seasoned and Professional Investors
Morningstar is another prominent stock analysis website. It was founded in 1984 and is by far the oldest name on our list here. Over the years, Morningstar has grown to become a reputed name in the field of investment research and asset management, with subsidiaries in 32 countries.
Their focus seems to be geared towards providing portfolio management tools, along with data on Mutual Funds and ETFs.
To summarize, Morningstar offers the following features:
Morningstar seems packed with features. However, it doesn’t include a range of features advanced charting tools, timeseries analysis, comparison tables, KPI data, and industry financials that Business Quant and other websites offer, making Morningstar more suitable for investors who are starting their investment journey. For seasoned and professional investors, other platforms seem more suited.
Pricing Plans:
Morning star has two pricing plans:
Who is it for: New Investors
Simply Wall St was launched in 2014 and is based out of Sydney, Australia. The platform simplifies complex financial data, by providing a range of visualizations and charts. It’s not a typical stock analysis website where users can slice and dice the data.
On the contrary, Simply Wall St has preset templated-style reports on thousands of stocks, that provides a range of automated insights and fundamental data. This allows investors to quickly screen and analyze companies from the top level but it may not be suitable for investors that want to analyze companies at a deeper level.
Simply Wall St’s feature set includes:
Pricing plans:
Simply Wall St has three pricing plans, as follows:
Who is it for: Students and new investors
Koyfin is another powerful stock analysis website. It was founded by Rob Koyfman in 2016 and is headquartered in New York. They aim to revolutionize the stock research industry by giving investors access to live market data and powerful analytical tools.
Koyfin’s diverse feature set primarily caters to individual investors, traders, and finance professionals, although its pricing is higher than the other platforms on this list.
Some of the key features offered by Koyfin are:
Pricing plans:
Koyfin has four subscription plans, as follows:
Who is it for: Seasoned and Professional Investors
Stockopedia is another key stock analysis website that has become popular amongst investing circles. It was launched in 2008 and is headquartered in Oxford, UK. Like Business Quant, Stockopedia also simplifies stock-picking with its interactive charts, stock-scoring models, and a diverse range of features.
Besides, Stockopedia offers users various tools and data that are required for global investing. Its coverage has grown rapidly from 2,000 UK stocks in 2012 to over 40,000 global stocks now, spanning all continents.
Here’s a list of features that Stockopedia offers to its subscribers:
Pricing plans:
Stockopedia has region-specific pricing, as follows:
Who is it ideal for: Seasoned investors
Stock Rover is another strong contender in our list of best stock analysis websites for professional-level equity research capabilities. It was launched in 2008 by two software engineers to ease investment analysis and is headquartered in Massachusetts, US.
Stock Rover provides over 650 financial metrics and detailed financial data for over 40,000 stocks. Besides, users can also subscribe to the add-on package that unlocks access to research reports. All in all, Stock Rover offers a clean user interface for power users looking to deep dive into their stocks.
Stock Rover’s feature set includes:
Pricing plans:
Stock Rover has three pricing plans.
Who is it for: Seasoned investors
Yahoo! Finance is perhaps the most popular name on our list here. It was founded in 1997 but it has, since then, grown to become one of the biggest platforms that provides timely business, economic and financial news.
Yahoo! Finance’s core competency lies in its ability to aggregate financial data, stock quotes, key metrics, and related news. However, it doesn’t offer powerful analytical tools like Time-series Analysis, Comparison Tables, and KPI Data that Business Quant has.
Regardless, Yahoo! Finance is a useful platform and it includes features such as:
Pricing plans:
Yahoo Finance provides a free ad-supported version that allows users to access most of the basic features including stock quotes, interactive charts, news articles and watchlists.
However, to access historic financials, research reports, advanced portfolio tools, Yahoo Finance has paid subscription plans as follows:
Who is it for: Investors starting on their investment journey
YCharts was founded in 2009 and it’s based out of Illinois, US. Over the years, YCharts has become a prominent stock analysis website amongst institutional and professional investors. It was acquired in 2020 and is by far, the most comprehensive stock analysis website on our list. At the same time, YCharts is also pricier than all the other websites that we’re listing here today.
To put things in perspective, YCharts is catering to a client base of more than 5,000 registered investment advisors, financial planners, asset managers, enterprises, individuals, and educators who, collectively oversee more than $750 billion in assets.
The core competency of this modern investment research platform lies in providing a user-friendly platform for security research, portfolio construction, idea generation, and market monitoring, albeit at higher price points.
Like Business Quant, YCharts offers a plethora of features, such as:
Pricing plans:
Ycharts does not offer a free plan and its pricing plans are as follows:
Who is it ideal for: Finance professionals
WallStreetZen was launched in 2020 and is based out of Hong Kong, China. Its feature list is fairly limited when we compare it to other stock analysis websites on our list. However, they strive to compete with an easy user interface and simple automated insights. WallStreetZen itself claims that their platform suitable for “serious part-time investors”.
As a result, WallStreetZen seems like a direct alternative for Simply Wall St but not for more comprehensive analysis websites like YCharts, Koyfin, or Business Quant.
Regardless, WallStreetZen’s list of features includes:
Pricing plans:
WallStreetZen has two pricing plans:
Who is it ideal for: Students and investors who are just starting out
And that wraps up our list of best stock analysis websites for this year.
Conclusion
As we saw in this article that different stock analysis websites offer different sets of features. There is no one-size-fits-all solution on a budget. It’s up to you to decide which functionality you’d like to have and then go with that stock analysis website. For instance, Business Quant happens to be the most comprehensive stock analysis website that provides company KPI data, industry KPI data and a wide range of other stock research tools at just $19/month. So, I encourage you to check out Business Quant. But other than that, I hope you found this article useful.
Happy Investing!
(Image credits: Image by pressfoto / Freepik)