Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Marketaux vs Finlight: Which Financial News API Should You Choose?
When building data-driven systems in finance, news speed and quality are everything. Whether you're designing a sentiment-powered trading bot, an economic intelligence dashboard, or a financial alert engine, choosing the right news API will make or break your product.
In this article, we compare Marketaux and Finlight, two news APIs geared toward financial and market-focused applications. We’ll break down article access, real-time delivery, sentiment features, and developer experience — so you can pick the right tool for your stack.
🔍 Feature Comparison: Finlight vs Marketaux
| Feature | Marketaux | Finlight |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time updates | REST only (polling) | REST & WebSocket support for real-time streaming |
| Full article content | No – summary/snippets only | Yes – full-text included |
| Sentiment analysis | Entity-level sentiment filtering | Full-article sentiment with polarity and confidence |
| WebSocket support | ❌ Not available | ✅ Yes |
| Source coverage | 5,000+ sources, global | Curated high-trust finance & geo sources |
| Multilingual support | Yes (30+ languages) | Yes (depending on the source) |
| Free tier | 100 req/day, 3 articles/request | 5,000 req/month (/10,000 via Viral Boost) |
| Entity filtering | Yes | Planned in upcoming releases |
| Financial focus | Broad market scope | Deep finance & geopolitical coverage |
| Pricing | Free Tier, Starts at $29/month | Free Tier, Starts at $29/month |
Feature Deep Dive
1. Real-time Delivery
Marketaux uses traditional REST polling — you send a request, you get results. It’s simple, but not truly real-time.
Finlight, on the other hand, includes WebSocket support. This enables instant delivery of news as it's published, crucial for algorithmic trading or macro-risk systems that need to respond in seconds.
➡️ Winner: Finlight for real-time capability via WebSocket.
2. Article Access & Sources
Marketaux offers summaries and metadata, but not the full article text. Offers hundreds sources.
Finlight delivers full article text, allowing in-line sentiment, keyword extraction, and entity recognition without external scraping. Offers curated finance sources.
➡️ Winner: Tie.
3. Sentiment Analysis
Marketaux uses sentiment at the entity level — useful for filtering articles about “Tesla” with positive sentiment, but it lacks full-article scoring.
Finlight provides article-level sentiment, complete with polarity (positive/neutral/negative) and a confidence score — ideal for training ML models or building dashboards.
➡️ Winner: Finlight for more detailed sentiment data.
4. Developer Experience & Integration
Both platforms are well-documented and easy to integrate. Marketaux is solid for REST-based applications with basic filtering needs.
Finlight goes further, offering:
- WebSocket quickstart SDKs
- Rich query language (
AND,OR,NOT) - Public incentive model (10k free reqs via Viral Boost)
➡️ Winner: Tie, but Finlight has more tools for real-time or high-frequency use cases.
Who Should Use What?
| You’re building... | Best Fit |
|---|---|
| A market research NLP system with sentiment & context | Finlight |
| A basic finance dashboard with broad source coverage | Marketaux |
| A trading AI or macroeconomic alert engine | Finlight |
| A lightweight news feed for global finance topics | Marketaux |
| A high-speed WebSocket-powered alerting system | Finlight |
| A multi-market news aggregator | Marketaux |
Conclusion
If you’re optimizing for scale and global source variety, Marketaux offers a flexible REST API with solid metadata and entity filtering — great for dashboards or research feeds that don’t need full-text or real-time capabilities.
If your goal is speed, signal, and context, Finlight delivers full-text financial news with sentiment and real-time delivery — making it ideal for trading systems, financial modeling, and macro monitoring.