Our rating: 4.0 / 5
Best for: active day traders scanning the full US tape, premarket through after-hours, who want scanner, news, signals, and Level 2 in one tool.
NOT for: options traders, international-market traders, buy-and-hold investors, or anyone whose whole strategy is one or two tickers.
Price: Free plan ($0, 30-minute delayed data, Nasdaq coverage) · Starter $89/month (real-time, all four US markets, web and mobile, one saved scan per type) · Pro $199/month (adds the desktop app, unlimited saved scans, alerts, watchlists, layouts) · Ultra $999/month (adds API access and concierge scan building). Monthly billing only.
Pros:
- Scans refresh every 500ms across premarket, regular, and after-hours sessions.
- Free delayed-data plan plus a 7-day real-time trial before paying.
Cons:
- Equities only: no options scanning and no international exchanges.
- No live broker integration yet; orders execute in your broker.
Scanz is one of the better-built scanners almost nobody prices correctly. Most reviews ranking for this term still quote a single $169 or $197 plan; the actual lineup, verified against the Scanz pricing page in June 2026, runs from a permanent free tier to $999 a month. That gap matters, because the $89 Starter plan changes who this scanner makes sense for.
This page is part of our day trading software hub, and the ratings follow our published methodology.
What is Scanz and who makes it
Scanz is a real-time scanning platform for US stocks. It grew out of EquityFeed, a market-data product with roughly twenty years of history; per the about page, more than 100,000 retail traders have used the underlying technology over that span. The product today is the scanner-first evolution of that lineage: one platform that handles market scanning, streaming news and SEC filings, breakout signals, watchlist alerts, charts, and Level 2.
The pitch is consolidation. Instead of duct-taping a screener, a news feed, and an alert service from three subscriptions, you run the whole top-of-funnel in one place: the scan surfaces the stock, the chart and Level 2 open in a panel, the news on that ticker is one click away, and you can drop an alert without leaving the screen. Execution still happens at your broker, which we’ll get to.
Feature walkthrough
The scanning engine
This is what you’re paying for, and it’s quick. Per the official docs, scan results update every 500 milliseconds, twice a second, across a coverage universe of Nasdaq, NYSE, AMEX, and OTC. Premarket (4:00 AM–9:30 AM ET) and after-hours (4:00 PM–8:00 PM ET) aren’t bolt-ons; every session-based filter accepts premarket, regular-hours, after-hours, or full-day codes, so a gapper scan built for the 6:00 AM tape behaves exactly like one built for the open. If your edge lives in the premarket session, that session-native design is the feature that separates this from a stock screener.
Two scanners share the engine. The Pro Scanner is the build-anything tool: stack price, volume, liquidity, technical, and fundamental filters in any combination. The documented filter reference covers 65-plus filters, there’s no cap on how many you stack per scan, and most working scans use three to seven. One structural quirk worth knowing before you build: filters combine with AND logic only. A stock must pass every filter to appear. Want OR logic, say, RVOL over 3 or a news catalyst? You build two scans and watch both. On the Pro plan that’s trivial since scans run simultaneously without limit; on Starter, where you run one scan at a time, it’s a real constraint on multi-setup mornings.
The Easy Scanner is the one-click version: the whole market in a single window, auto-sorted by volatility, liquidity, or momentum, filterable by exchange, sector, index, or stock type down to ETFs, preferred shares, and bankrupt tickers. There’s also a library of 70-plus prebuilt scans (gappers, crossovers, dead cat bounces) so you’re not starting from a blank filter panel.
Signals and alerts
The Breakouts module streams event signals as they fire: new highs and lows, price and volume breakouts, and block trade alerts that flag large prints you’d never catch scrolling time and sales. An alert counter tracks how many times a ticker has triggered during the day, which is a clean proxy for “in play.” Separately, personal alerts on individual tickers cover price, condition, news, and SEC-filing triggers, delivered in-platform or by email. SMS delivery is listed as coming later this year.
News and SEC filings
The News Scanner runs headlines through the same filter engine as the price scanner, which is the genuinely useful part: you can demand a headline AND a float under 20 million AND a price under $10 in one scan. Per the docs, the feed aggregates SEC filings plus the major press-release wires (Newsfile, PR Newswire, Globe Newswire, AccessWire, BusinessWire), with keyword search and news-type filtering. Filings often hit before the press release does, and Scanz streams both.
Montage, Level 2, and charts
The Montage window stacks chart, Level 1, Level 2, time and sales, fundamentals, and news for one ticker in a tabbed window. The Level 2 display is color-coded by price level with an order-book summary that groups orders by price, and the proprietary MM Activity Log flags when a market maker adds, pulls, or resizes an order. Charts stream in real time with the standard indicator set (VWAP, moving averages, MACD, RSI) and drawing tools. The charting is functional decision support, not a TradingView replacement, and Scanz doesn’t pretend otherwise; the product is organized around the scan, not the chart.
Platforms: web, desktop, mobile
The web app at app.scanz.com runs in any modern browser and carries the Free and Starter tiers. The desktop app, included with Pro, runs on both Windows and Mac and adds custom layouts and multi-monitor support, with layouts saved to the cloud. Worth flagging for Mac traders: Trade Ideas’ desktop software is Windows-only per its own pricing page, which tells Mac users to run Parallels or a cloud Windows instance. Scanz ships a native Mac desktop app. If you trade on a MacBook, that’s not a small difference.
Mobile is a touch-optimized web experience, not a native app; the docs say so plainly and describe it as built for monitoring, not building. Checking a saved scan, a watchlist, or whether an alert fired works well from a phone. Building a five-filter scan or reading Level 2 on a six-inch screen does not, and the official guidance is the sensible one: build on desktop, monitor on mobile.
What’s documented as missing
Credit where due: the Scanz docs publish an unusually honest “who this is for” page that states the product’s limits outright. US equities only; no LSE, TSX, or European exchanges. No options scanning, no unusual-options-activity screens, no IV filters. No direct crypto data (crypto-adjacent stocks like COIN and MARA are covered; coin markets are not). And broker integrations are on the roadmap but not shipped, so today the workflow ends at the alert: you find the stock in Scanz and place the order in your broker’s platform. For scalpers who measure their edge in seconds, that extra context switch is a genuine cost.
Pricing and plans
Verified against the official pricing page in June 2026. All plans bill monthly; there is no annual plan in the lineup.
| Plan | Price | Data | Platforms | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 30-minute delayed, Nasdaq | Web, mobile | The full feature set on delayed data; no card required |
| Starter | $89/mo | Real-time, all four US markets | Web, mobile | Run 1 scan at a time, save 1 scan per type, 1 watchlist (20 symbols), real-time news and filings |
| Pro | $199/mo | Real-time, all four US markets | Web, mobile, desktop (Windows and Mac) | Unlimited simultaneous scans, saved scans, alerts, watchlists; custom columns, layouts, multi-monitor |
| Ultra | $999/mo | Real-time, all four US markets | All | Adds API access, automated trading hooks, concierge scan development, dedicated support rep |
Which tier do you need? Starter is the test of whether scanning belongs in your routine: one live scan, real-time data, the full news feed. If your morning is a single gapper scan plus headlines, $89 covers it. The moment you want a gapper scan, an RVOL scan, and a high-of-day momentum scan running side by side, with alerts on top, that’s Pro. The $110 gap buys capacity and the desktop workspace, and the AND-only filter logic quietly pushes serious users toward Pro too, since OR-style strategies mean multiple simultaneous scans.
How does that price sit against the field? Scanz Pro at $199/month versus Trade Ideas Premium at $254/month on monthly billing is the live comparison, but it’s not the same product: the Trade Ideas plan lineup is built around its Holly AI signal engine, backtesting, and auto-trading, while the Scanz lineup is built around scanning capacity, news, and workflow. Closer in spirit: Scanz Starter at $89/month matches Trade Ideas Basic’s annual-billing rate exactly, except Trade Ideas asks $1,068 up front to get there ($127/month otherwise) while Scanz bills $89 month to month with no commitment. The full breakdown lives in our Trade Ideas vs Scanz comparison.
Billing, the trial, and cancellation
Read this part before you enter a card. Per the official refund policy (effective March 2026), all sales are final, renewals included, and refund requests based on forgetting to cancel or being unaware of auto-billing are explicitly refused.
That sounds harsh in isolation; it’s actually the category standard. Trade Ideas states “all sales are final” in its own billing policy, and TrendSpider, the most generous direct peer we checked, gives just a 72-hour refund window on charges. Nobody in this category refunds a monthly subscription you forgot about. Scanz’s monthly-only structure actually caps your downside at one month, and the free tier plus 7-day trial means you can evaluate everything before a dollar moves.
The two things to actually manage:
- The trial auto-converts. Starter and Pro trials require a card and roll into a paid subscription on day 7 unless you cancel. Set a reminder for day 5 or 6.
- Use the in-app cancel. The official policy accepts exactly two cancellation methods: the dashboard cancel button, which takes effect in real time, or an email to help@scanz.com, for which the policy puts the burden of proof on you to retain a copy. The dashboard route removes that ambiguity. Click cancel, screenshot the confirmation, done. You keep access through the end of the billing period either way.
Plan changes are friction-free: upgrade or downgrade anytime, effective immediately, prorated. Payment runs on major cards or ACH for US customers.
Learning curve and support
The point-and-click filter builder, the prebuilt scan library, and the Easy Scanner make the first session productive; getting from “running a prebuilt gapper scan” to “expressing your exact setup in filters” takes longer, and that’s the work no scanner does for you. The platform ships with docs, video tutorials, a filter reference, and an in-app AI assistant.
Two honest caveats. Support runs through in-app chat and email, with replies typically within a few hours during US business hours per the FAQ; there’s no phone line listed, and priority 24/7 support is an Ultra-tier feature. And the docs state plainly that Scanz is a tool, not an advisory service: no trade calls, no chatroom, no education program. For a scanner, that’s the right posture. Just know that nobody is going to teach you to trade here, and most day traders lose money with or without a fast scanner.
Who should buy Scanz, and who shouldn’t
Buy it if you’re an active US equity trader whose process starts with a scan: momentum and gap-and-go traders working the 4:00 AM tape, news traders who need filings and wires filtered by float and price, and swing traders building watchlists from end-of-day scans. The Free tier makes the decision cheap: every feature on 30-minute delayed data, indefinitely, no card. If you reach for it every morning during a week of delayed-data testing, the real-time upgrade will pay for itself in saved screen time.
Skip it if you trade options (no options scanning, full stop), trade non-US exchanges, hold positions for months, or trade only SPY and QQQ. A scanner’s value compounds with the size of the universe you’re hunting; with a universe of two tickers, there’s nothing to scan. And if what you actually want is AI-generated entry and exit signals rather than a faster way to run your own criteria, you’re shopping in the wrong aisle; see the alternatives below.
Alternatives
Trade Ideas is the heavyweight in this category: a bigger filter universe, backtesting, and the Holly AI signal engine, at a higher price and with Windows-only desktop software. The head-to-head is in our Trade Ideas vs Scanz breakdown. On the cheaper end, Finviz covers screening and visualization for a fraction of the cost, at nowhere near the same real-time speed. News-first traders should look at Benzinga Pro, which leads with the squawk and feed rather than the scan. The wider field is ranked in our best stock scanners list.
Verdict
Scanz scores 4.0 out of 5 under our rating system: excellent with real trade-offs.
- Core capability: 4.5. A 500ms scan refresh, session-native premarket and after-hours filtering from 4:00 AM, news and filings running through the same filter engine, and Level 2 with the MM Activity Log. The AND-only filter logic is the one structural limitation, worked around with multiple scans.
- Value: 4.0. Scored for the active US equity trader it’s built for: Starter at $89 undercuts the closest peer’s monthly rate by $38, Pro at $199 is fair for unlimited capacity plus a native Mac desktop app, and the free tier removes evaluation risk. It’s still a real monthly cost that only daily use justifies.
- Ease of use: 4.0. Point-and-click scan building, 70-plus prebuilts, and the Easy Scanner flatten the first week; mastering custom multi-filter scans is a longer climb.
- Trust & transparency: 4.5. A plainly published no-refund policy that sits at the category norm, a real-time in-app cancel, month-to-month billing with no contract, and docs that state the product’s limits (no options, no international, no live broker integration) more candidly than most marketing sites in this niche.
- Support & education: 3.5. Solid docs, videos, and responsive business-hours chat and email, but no phone support below Ultra and, by design, no education layer.
Weighted overall (core 40%, value 20%, ease 15%, trust 15%, support 10%): 4.2.
The next step is free either way: run the $0 delayed-data plan for a week against your current routine, and if the scanner earns a place in your morning, the 7-day real-time trial answers the rest. Before you commit at $199, read how it stacks up against Trade Ideas; the right answer depends on whether you want a faster scanner or an AI co-pilot.
FAQ
Is Scanz worth it?
Worth it if you scan the US market every trading day and want scanner, news, signals, and Level 2 in one subscription. At $89 to $199 a month, the math only works for active traders; a twice-a-week market checker gets most of the value from the free delayed-data plan and should keep the cash.
Does Scanz have a free trial?
Yes. Starter and Pro both carry a 7-day free trial with real-time data. A credit card is required, and the trial converts to a paid monthly subscription automatically at the end of day 7 unless you cancel first, so set a reminder.
Is there a free version of Scanz?
There is: a permanent $0 plan with the full feature set on 30-minute delayed data, with coverage limited to Nasdaq. No card required. It’s genuinely useful for learning the workflow before deciding whether real-time data is worth paying for.
How do I cancel Scanz?
From inside the app: click the logo (top left), then Manage Subscription, then Cancel. The in-app cancellation takes effect in real time and you keep access through the end of the billing period. Email cancellation to help@scanz.com is also accepted, but the policy requires you to keep proof of the email, so the dashboard route is cleaner. All charges are final, so cancel before the renewal date, not after.
Does Scanz have a mobile app?
Not a native one. Mobile access is a touch-optimized web app at app.scanz.com that works well for monitoring saved scans, watchlists, alerts, and news on the go. Building scans and reading Level 2 are desktop jobs.