Thursday, June 5, 2025
finlight vs Finnhub: Comparing Two Powerful Financial News APIs
Finlight - Content Manager
In the data-driven world of finance and trading, accessing real-time news isn’t just a luxury — it’s a competitive edge. Whether you're building a trading dashboard, macroeconomic monitor, or algorithmic strategy, having access to the right financial news API is critical.
Two popular contenders in this space are Finnhub.io and finlight.me. While both provide real-time financial news, they take distinct approaches in terms of content delivery, coverage, and developer tooling. This article compares their key features and use cases to help you choose the right tool for your needs.
🔍 Feature Comparison Overview
| Feature | Finnhub.io | Finlight.me |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time news delivery | Yes (WebSocket & REST) | Yes (WebSocket & REST) |
| Full article content | No (headline, summary, source only) | Yes (complete article text included) |
| Sentiment analysis | Yes (basic scoring available Premium tier) | Yes (scoring + NLP from Premium tier) |
| Market data integration | Yes (stocks, forex, crypto, fundamentals) | No (news-focused only) |
| Source focus | Broad (only in Premium, US free tier) | Broad, Curated, premium financial & geopolitical sources |
| Multilingual support | No explicit multilingual support | Yes, depending on sources, language filters |
| News categorization | Tickers, industries, earnings, economic events | NLP tagging, topics, named entities |
| Free tier | Yes (60 API calls/min, limited scope) | Yes (5k req/month, 10k req/month via Viral Boost) |
| WebSocket support | Yes | Yes |
| Target use cases | Quant trading, retail finance apps, terminals | Institutional analytics, finance+geopolitics apps |
📈 Core Differences
1. News vs. Data API Philosophy
- Finnhub positions itself as a comprehensive financial data platform, offering news alongside stock prices, earnings calendars, crypto data, insider transactions, and more. Its news API is one of many endpoints, designed to complement market data for traders and analysts.
- finlight, in contrast, is laser-focused on news — particularly financial and geopolitical events. It doesn’t offer stock data or earnings calendars. Instead, it excels at providing full article access, curated sources, and sentiment-rich context for use in alert systems, macro tools, and risk dashboards.
2. Content Access
- Finnhub provides headlines, summaries, and links — ideal for basic monitoring or displaying snippets in applications. However, it does not include full article text.
- finlight offers complete article content, enabling in-depth NLP processing, keyword extraction, custom tagging, and sentiment analysis that goes beyond the surface.
3. Sentiment and NLP
- Finnhub includes basic sentiment scores for headlines and news items, useful for lightweight trading signals.
- finlight includes article-level sentiment, named entity recognition, classification, and topic grouping — especially useful for more advanced analytics or LLM-powered apps.
4. Developer Experience
Both APIs are modern and well-documented:
- Finnhub is REST-first with great SDK support and fast onboarding — especially for financial developers already pulling price and market data from one API.
- finlight caters to analysts and developers who want custom filtering, complex query logic, and WebSocket integration for streaming articles the moment they’re published.
Ideal Use Cases?
| Use Case | Best Fit |
|---|---|
| Need real-time news and stock prices in one API | Finnhub |
| Building sentiment models on full-text news | finlight |
| Creating a retail finance app or stock screener | Finnhub |
| Developing geopolitical or macroeconomic monitoring tools | finlight |
| Running a trading strategy based on news events | Depends |
| Building with open data and basic sentiment signals | Finnhub |
| Creating research dashboards with in-depth context | finlight |
Conclusion
Finnhub.io and finlight.me are both robust platforms, but they serve distinct purposes:
- Choose Finnhub if you want one API that handles both financial news and market data, ideal for retail apps, quant systems, and fast integration into trading UIs.
- Choose finlight if your application requires depth, full article analysis, and real-time precision, especially in contexts like macro research, geopolitical risk tracking, or AI-driven sentiment modeling.
As with any API, the best fit depends on what you're building — and how deeply you need to understand the news behind the markets.