Trade Ideas is the better platform if you want the software to develop, test, and even execute strategies for you. Scanz is the better platform if you want a fast, readable cockpit for finding your own trades, especially around news, and you want to start at $89 a month with a real free trial.
Choose Trade Ideas if you trade momentum strategies and want the full machine: event-driven scans built from 500+ alert and filter data points, OddsMaker backtesting, Holly’s AI entry and exit signals, and live order routing to Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, E*Trade, or Alpaca. The AI and backtesting live on the Premium tier at $178 a month billed annually. Full breakdown in our Trade Ideas review.
Choose Scanz if you do your own analysis and want scanning, news, Level 2, and alerts in one window that a new user can run on day one. Real-time data starts at $89 a month, every plan is month-to-month, there’s a 7-day free trial, and the desktop app runs natively on Mac. Details in our Scanz review.
Side by side
| Trade Ideas | Scanz | |
|---|---|---|
| Core strength | Real-time event scanning plus AI strategy signals and backtesting | All-in-one trade discovery: scans, news, Level 2, alerts |
| Entry price | Basic: $127/mo, or $1,068/yr ($89/mo equivalent) | Starter: $89/mo, month-to-month |
| Top retail tier | Premium: $254/mo, or $2,136/yr ($178/mo equivalent) | Pro: $199/mo (a $999/mo Ultra tier adds concierge scans and API access) |
| AI | Holly: live entry and exit signals from 60+ strategies backtested nightly (Premium) | Scanz Assistant: a chatbot that answers platform questions, not a signal engine |
| Data | Real-time US stocks on both paid tiers; 500+ data points for alerts and filters | Real-time US stocks (NYSE, Nasdaq, AMEX, OTC), scans refresh every 500ms, sessions from 4:00 am to 8:00 pm ET |
| Platforms | Windows desktop plus a browser version; Mac desktop via Parallels or a cloud VM | Web and mobile web on every plan; native desktop app (Windows and Mac) on Pro |
| Trading from the app | Live and paper trading via Brokerage Plus; auto-trading on Premium | Not shipped; broker integrations are on the roadmap, you execute at your broker |
| Trial | $11.11 Test Drive, 10 trading days on fixed quarterly dates; free account with 15-minute delayed dashboards | 7-day free trial on Starter and Pro (card required, auto-converts); permanent free plan with 30-minute delayed Nasdaq data |
| Refunds | All sales final, store credit or exchanges only | All sales final, no refunds |
| Our rating | 4.2 | 4.0 |
Ratings follow the weighted criteria in how we rate; every sub-score derives from documented features, pricing, and policy terms. All facts on this page were verified in June 2026 against the Trade Ideas pricing page, the Trade Ideas billing policy, the Scanz pricing page, the Scanz refund policy, and both platforms’ official documentation.
Scanning: Trade Ideas on depth, Scanz on accessibility
Both are genuine real-time scanners, which already separates them from the screener crowd. Past that, they’re built differently.
Trade Ideas runs an event engine. Alert windows stream the moment a stock triggers your criteria, drawing on more than 500 data points across alerts and filters: opening range breakouts by the minute, VWAP crosses, new highs filtered for quality, gap reversals, block prints, high relative volume. Both paid tiers get the full filter library, customizable scans and screeners, premarket and after-hours data, and an in-app formula editor for custom metrics. The Premium tier adds the Channel Bar with 20+ curated scan templates and multi-strategy windows.
Scanz splits the job across modules. The Pro Scanner builds custom scans from the documented filter set (the official filter reference covers 65+ filters across price, liquidity, technical, and fundamental categories), runs in real time from 4:00 am to 8:00 pm ET, and ships with a library of 70+ preconfigured scans: gappers, momentum, crossovers, dead cat bounces. The Easy Scanner is the one-click version: the whole market in a sortable window, with sector, ETF, index, and short squeeze views. The Breakouts module streams signal events such as new highs and lows, moving-average breaks, volume surges, and block trades.
Two documented constraints matter on the Scanz side. Filters combine with AND logic only; for OR logic you build separate scans. And the Starter plan runs one scan at a time and saves one scan per type, so the multi-window radar setup that defines this style of trading effectively requires Pro at $199.
Winner: Trade Ideas for filter depth and event coverage. Scanz for how quickly a normal human gets a working scan on screen.
AI and backtesting: Trade Ideas, by the length of the field
This is the real category gap. Holly, the Trade Ideas AI, backtests its 60+ strategies every night, drops the ones that don’t survive, and enters between 5 and 25 trades per day on average with defined entries, exits, and stops, per the official AI guide. The OddsMaker backtester lets you test your own scan-based strategies over recent history, read win rate and profit factor, and see which filter values move the results. Both are Premium-tier features, and both carry honest caveats: Holly’s strategy parameters are proprietary and can’t be customized, and her signals reach every Premium subscriber at the same moment, so on a thin low-float name the fills you actually get will trail the model’s price.
Scanz doesn’t compete here, and its own documentation doesn’t pretend to. The platform describes itself as a discovery and analysis tool; strategy backtesting appears nowhere in its published feature set, and the only AI in its documentation is the Scanz Assistant, a help chatbot for platform questions. If you arrive with a strategy you trust and just need to find candidates, that’s no loss. If you want software to help you build and validate a strategy, only one of these two sells that.
Winner: Trade Ideas, and it’s not close.
News: Scanz
Scanz treats news as a first-class scan type. The News Scanner aggregates SEC filings plus the major press-release wires (Newsfile, PR Newswire, Globe Newswire, AccessWire, BusinessWire, per the official docs), and the filtering is the point: you can search headline keywords like earnings, merger, or halt, and filter the feed by the stock’s own characteristics, price, volume, and float, in the same scan. A catalyst trader can run a feed that only shows headlines on sub-$20 stocks with real volume, which is exactly the filter that separates tradable news from noise. News scans save like any other scan, and news alerts deliver in-platform or by email.
Nothing in the Trade Ideas published feature set is a news product; its pricing page lists scanning, charts, AI signals, backtesting, and trade execution. If breaking headlines drive your entries, Scanz covers that job natively, and if news is your entire workflow, the dedicated news terminal comparison in Trade Ideas vs Benzinga Pro is worth a read before you decide.
Winner: Scanz.
Trading from the platform: Trade Ideas
Trade Ideas Brokerage Plus places live orders through Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, E*Trade, and Alpaca accounts, with one-click order entry from charts and scans, a built-in real-time simulator on both paid tiers, and full strategy automation on Premium. You can find a setup and be in the trade without touching another window.
Scanz states plainly in its FAQ that broker integrations are on the roadmap but not shipped: you’ll need to switch to your broker to execute. The features page targets Interactive Brokers and TD Ameritrade as the first connections. Until that ships, Scanz finds the trade and your broker takes it from there, which adds seconds exactly where seconds cost money on fast movers.
Winner: Trade Ideas, today and by vendor admission.
Ease of use: Scanz
Scanz is built to be driven on day one. The Easy Scanner needs under a minute of setup, the 70+ prebuilt scans cover the standard setups, QuickView puts chart, Level 2, and news for any scan result in a slide-out panel, and the docs include a genuinely blunt “who this is for” page. The web app runs anywhere, and Pro’s desktop app installs natively on Mac.
Trade Ideas earns its learning curve. The pricing page itself carries a Mac compatibility notice (the desktop software is Windows-only; Mac users run the browser version, which includes all 500+ alerts and filters, or virtualize Windows via Parallels or AWS), the interface is a grid of independent windows, and the official onboarding is a 30-minute, 10-episode video series before you build scans with confidence. The power is real; so is the week you’ll spend learning to use it.
Winner: Scanz.
Price and billing: closer than the stickers suggest
Run the actual numbers. A year of entry-level real-time scanning costs exactly $1,068 on both platforms: Scanz Starter at $89 a month, twelve months, cancel whenever; Trade Ideas Basic at $1,068 billed annually up front. The difference is commitment, not cost. Pay Trade Ideas monthly instead and Basic runs $127, or $1,524 a year, a $456 premium for flexibility.
At the top, it flips. Scanz Pro at $199 a month is $2,388 a year. Trade Ideas Premium billed annually is $2,136, so the tier with Holly, backtesting, and auto-trading undercuts Scanz Pro by $252 a year, provided you commit up front. Month-to-month, Premium is $254 against Scanz Pro’s $199.
Now the part that decides more of these subscriptions than any feature: both companies run all-sales-final billing. Nobody in this matchup refunds anything, which is the strict end of the scanner category, so the protection play is everything. Scanz gives you more of it: a 7-day free trial of real-time data on Starter and Pro (card required, and it auto-converts unless you cancel, which you can do in-app in real time), plus a permanent free plan with 30-minute delayed Nasdaq data to learn the workflow at zero cost. Its refund policy explicitly rejects “forgot to cancel” claims, so set the reminder anyway. Trade Ideas offers no free trial of the full product, citing exchange data requirements, and runs paid Test Drive events instead: $11.11 for 10 trading days of Premium on fixed quarterly dates that you can’t reschedule, with a free 15-minute-delayed dashboard account in between. The cancellation terms put the burden on you to confirm the cancellation went through, and on a $2,136 annual renewal that’s an expensive thing to get wrong. The current entry routes are laid out in our Trade Ideas free trial guide, and the annual-versus-monthly math in full lives on our Trade Ideas pricing breakdown.
Winner: Scanz on entry risk and flexibility. Trade Ideas on top-tier annual value, if you’ll actually use what Premium includes.
Verdict: two different purchases
There’s no universal winner because these aren’t the same purchase. Trade Ideas sells an edge engine: it generates, tests, and can execute trade ideas, and you pay for that in money ($178–$254 a month for the tier that matters) and in learning curve. Scanz sells a faster pair of eyes: one window where scans, news, Level 2, and alerts converge so you can run your own playbook, at $89–$199 a month with no annual commitment.
Pick Trade Ideas if Holly, OddsMaker, or automated execution is the reason you’re shopping, and take the annual Premium plan only after a Test Drive confirms you’ll use it. Pick Scanz if you trade your own setups, care about news catalysts, trade on a Mac, or want to risk seven free days instead of a four-figure annual charge. Most day traders lose money either way; a scanner finds candidates, and the day trading statistics on who survives this business haven’t changed because the tools got better. Where both platforms land against the whole field is ranked in our best stock scanners comparison.
FAQ
Is Scanz cheaper than Trade Ideas?
At entry, only on commitment terms: both cost $1,068 for a year of real-time scanning, but Scanz bills $89 month-to-month while Trade Ideas requires the year up front to get that rate (monthly billing is $127). At the top tier, Trade Ideas Premium billed annually ($2,136/yr) is $252 cheaper than a year of Scanz Pro ($2,388), and it includes the AI and backtesting.
Does Scanz have anything like Holly AI?
No. The only AI in the Scanz documentation is the Scanz Assistant, a chatbot that answers questions about the platform. Trade signals, nightly strategy backtesting, and automated entries and exits are Trade Ideas Premium territory.
Which one has a free trial?
Scanz: 7 days of real-time data on Starter or Pro, card required, auto-converting unless you cancel, plus a permanent free plan with 30-minute delayed Nasdaq data. Trade Ideas does not offer a free trial of the full product; it runs $11.11 Test Drive events on fixed quarterly dates and offers a free account with 15-minute delayed browser dashboards.
Can I place trades inside each platform?
Inside Trade Ideas, yes: Brokerage Plus connects to Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, E*Trade, and Alpaca for live or paper trading, with auto-trading on Premium. Inside Scanz, not yet: its FAQ states broker integrations are on the roadmap but not shipped, so you execute at your broker.
Which is easier to learn?
Scanz. Its Easy Scanner works in under a minute, 70+ prebuilt scans cover standard setups, and the whole platform runs in a browser. Trade Ideas recommends a 30-minute getting-started video series before building scans, and its multi-window desktop layout takes days to feel natural.
Can I get a refund from either one?
No. Both publish all-sales-final policies; Trade Ideas allows store credit or exchanges, and Scanz explicitly refuses refunds for forgotten cancellations. Cancel before renewal: in-app for Scanz, through Account Management for Trade Ideas, and keep written confirmation either way.
Does Scanz cover OTC stocks?
Yes. Starter and Pro include Nasdaq, NYSE, AMEX, and OTC; the free plan is limited to Nasdaq. Scanz covers US equities only, with no options, crypto, or international market data.