Webull has the best paper trading app for 2026: stocks, ETFs, options, and futures with real-time quotes, unlimited virtual cash, and the same interface you’d trade live, on every device Webull makes. If you’d rather practice on a professional terminal, thinkorswim’s paperMoney is the stronger classroom, and Interactive Brokers runs the most honest simulation of the bunch.
This ranking covers broker paper modes and platform simulators only. It’s one slice of our full day trading app comparison, and it sits alongside the rest of our best-of rankings. Every pick was scored against the criteria in how we rate, with all features and account requirements checked against each platform’s official pages in June 2026.
Quick comparison
| Simulator | What you can practice | Virtual cash | What you need | Full review |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Webull | Stocks, ETFs, options, futures | Unlimited | A Webull account | Webull review |
| thinkorswim paperMoney | Stocks, options, futures, forex | $100,000 buying power | A Schwab account | thinkorswim review |
| Interactive Brokers | Nearly all TWS instruments (mutual funds excluded) | $1,000,000, resettable | An IBKR account | Interactive Brokers review |
| TradingView | Stocks, forex, crypto, futures | Resettable; multiple accounts | A free TradingView account | TradingView review |
| moomoo | Stocks, options, futures | $1 million ($10 million for futures) | App registration only | moomoo review |
| TradeStation | Stocks, options, futures | Unlimited, resettable | A funded brokerage account | TradeStation review |
1. Webull: best paper trading app overall
Webull’s simulator covers the full product range: stocks, ETFs, options, and futures, all with real-time quotes, price alerts, and the same charts you’d use live, per Webull’s paper trading page. You get 60+ technical indicators, 17+ charting tools, and the rapid-fire TurboTrader order entry inside the paper environment, and it runs on the mobile app, the browser-based WebTrade, and desktop. Opening a Webull account gets you in.
That breadth on a clean retail interface is why it wins the category. You can rehearse a premarket gapper on your phone at 8:50 and manage the same paper position on desktop at the open without anything changing underneath you.
The genuine drawback is the unlimited virtual cash. An account that refills itself can’t teach position sizing, and sizing is most of what paper trading is for. Pick the number you’d actually fund, write it down, and treat any drawdown past it as a blown account. Webull won’t enforce that discipline for you.
2. thinkorswim paperMoney: best for learning a professional platform
paperMoney is the virtual mode built into every thinkorswim platform, desktop to mobile. Schwab’s paperMoney page puts the numbers plainly: $100,000 in virtual buying power, real-time market data, and stocks, options, futures, and forex in a live market simulation, free for Schwab clients. It also tracks your virtual P&L so you can audit a strategy instead of just remembering it fondly.
The $100,000 figure is quietly the most realistic default on this list. It’s large enough to practice real position sizes and small enough that careless trades show up in the equity curve.
The trade-off is the venue itself. paperMoney lives inside thinkorswim, a terminal built for complex orders, scanning, and multi-leg options, so you’re learning a professional platform and the market at the same time. That’s a feature if thinkorswim is where you intend to trade, since the live version is the same software. It’s friction if you only wanted a quick sandbox. A Schwab account is required to log in; non-clients can try thinkorswim through Schwab’s Guest Pass first.
3. Interactive Brokers: best for a realistic, warts-and-all simulation
Every new IBKR individual account automatically includes a paper account that mirrors the live one: same trading permissions, market data subscriptions, and base currency, with simulated fills priced from real market prices and sizes. Per IBKR’s official guide, it starts with $1,000,000 in paper equity, and you can reset that to anything up to five times your live account’s value. Do that on day one. Practicing with a million when you’ll fund $10,000 teaches you nothing about risk per trade.
IBKR also does something no one else here does: it publishes its simulator’s blind spots. Fills come from the top of the book with no deep-book access, stops are always simulated, certain order types aren’t supported, and US options won’t receive penny fills. That documentation is exactly what a trader preparing for live execution needs to read.
The limitation is the mirror itself. The paper account inherits your live account’s configuration and can’t be set up differently, and IBKR states it runs as a margin-type account by default. You’re practicing your account, not a hypothetical one.
4. TradingView: best without opening a brokerage account
TradingView’s paper trading is available to every user, free, with no deposit and no brokerage relationship. One click on the Trade button connects it. You can practice stocks, forex, crypto, and commodity and index futures, place orders through the ticket, the depth-of-market panel, or directly on the chart, and run multiple paper accounts in different currencies, each resettable (a reset wipes history, orders, and open positions, so export anything you want to keep). The Leap, TradingView’s recurring paper competition, even pays real-money prizes.
For chart-first traders this is the lowest-friction practice environment that exists, and the charting around it is the best in the business.
The drawback follows from the design: you’re rehearsing the market, not your broker. TradingView’s simulator runs at the platform level, so it can’t reproduce the order entry, routes, or margin treatment of the account you’ll eventually trade. Pair it with your broker’s own paper mode before going live.
5. moomoo: best free simulator with futures depth
moomoo’s paper trading is free and explicitly doesn’t require a brokerage account; registering in the app is enough. You get $1 million in virtual funds for stocks and options and $10 million for futures, real-time quotes, and 100+ tools, across desktop, mobile, and web, though moomoo states the web version currently handles stock trading only. There’s a social layer too: you can follow top-performing paper traders and join the paper competitions moomoo runs from time to time.
The futures allocation is the standout. If you want serious reps on index futures without funding anything anywhere, this is the cheapest route on the list.
The drawback is the same disease in a worse strain: eight-figure balances are fantasy money. A $10 million futures account makes every contract feel like a rounding error, which is the opposite of how your first live contract will feel. Useful for learning mechanics; useless for learning sizing unless you impose your own limits.
6. TradeStation: best for testing automated strategies
TradeStation’s simulated trading is the pick if your endgame is automation. The simulator carries the full desktop toolkit: 180+ built-in indicators for building and backtesting strategies, EasyLanguage for automating orders without real coding, OptionStation Pro for multi-leg work, and a one-click toggle between paper and live inside the same platform. Balances are unlimited and resettable, and real-time data is free for non-professional traders.
For a trader who wants to forward-test a coded strategy in real market conditions before letting it touch money, nothing else on this list comes close.
The catch sits in TradeStation’s own fine print: the simulator is only available to customers who have funded a brokerage account. Every other pick here costs nothing beyond registration or an unfunded account, which makes this the one paper mode you effectively pay to enter. Reasonable if you’re committing to the platform anyway; a poor first stop if you’re still shopping.
What the simulator won’t tell you
Paper fills are polite fictions. IBKR is the only one here that spells out how: its simulator fills from the top of the book, can’t see depth, and won’t give penny fills on US options. The same logic applies to every simulator on this list, because none of your paper orders ever reaches an exchange. Your 2,000 shares never move the market, never walk the book, never sit unfilled while a thin low-float name rips away from your limit.
That flatters exactly the strategies that need flattering least. On SPY the difference is noise. On a 2-million-share-float gapper, the spread, the slippage, and the partial fills are the trade, and the simulator edits them out. If your paper edge depends on getting filled at the printed price in fast, thin names, assume the live version is worse.
Then there’s the part no simulator can model: it isn’t your money. Most day traders lose money, and a meaningful share of that gap between paper results and live results is what real loss does to decision-making. Paper trading proves your process works. Only small live size proves you can run it.
How we picked these
Five things mattered for this category. Realism first: real-time data and fills priced from live markets, confirmed on each platform’s official pages rather than assumed. Asset coverage second, because practicing equities tells you nothing about how futures margin behaves. Entry cost third: what you must register, open, or fund before the simulator turns on. Platform parity fourth, since practice only transfers if the live software is the same software. And a realistic balance fifth, meaning a default or resettable figure you could actually fund, because unlimited paper dollars teach unlimited bad habits.
Rankings here follow the same scoring system as every review on this site, and no placement on this page is paid.
Who should skip these, and what to use instead
Skip the broker paper modes if what you actually want is replay: the ability to load a past session, run it bar by bar at night, and trade the same morning fifty times. Paper accounts only run on the live tape, which is useless if you work during market hours. That’s a different tool category, covered in our day trading simulator rankings.
Skip them too if you’ve been paper trading for six months and counting. At that point the simulator has become a way to avoid risk rather than rehearse it, and the next honest step is tiny live size, not another virtual million.
And whichever simulator you pick, log the trades. Paper results you didn’t record are paper results you’ll misremember. Our free trading journal template works the same for virtual fills as for real ones.
FAQ
Is paper trading free?
Almost always. Webull, thinkorswim, and Interactive Brokers include their simulators with a standard account that doesn’t need funding, and TradingView and moomoo only ask for a free registration. The exception is TradeStation, which states its simulator is available only to customers who have funded a brokerage account.
Does paper trading use real-time data?
Webull, Schwab’s paperMoney, moomoo, and TradeStation all state their simulators run on real-time data, with TradeStation noting free real-time data applies to non-professional traders. Interactive Brokers mirrors whatever market data subscriptions your live account carries, and you can share those subscriptions with the paper account at no extra cost.
Can you make money paper trading?
No. The profits are as virtual as the cash, and no broker converts them. The one narrow exception is competitions: TradingView’s The Leap awards real-money prizes for performance in its paper environment, and moomoo runs paper contests from time to time.
Can you paper trade options and futures?
Yes, on most of these. Webull, moomoo, and TradeStation simulate stocks, options, and futures; thinkorswim’s paperMoney adds forex; TradingView covers stocks, forex, crypto, and commodity and index futures; and Interactive Brokers simulates nearly everything tradable in Trader Workstation, with mutual funds the stated exception.
How long should you paper trade before going live?
Until your process is boring, not until your P&L is impressive. A reasonable bar: a few dozen trades of one defined setup, executed by your written rules, with the results journaled, at the position size you’ll actually fund. Anyone can grow a fake million. The skill that transfers is following the plan when the fill is bad, and you’ll only half-learn that until small real money is on the line.