Yahoo Finance’s API is the forefather of all the financial APIs that exist in the market right now. Before the introduction of Yahoo Finance’s API, people followed the traditional method of downloading CSV data from specific websites which was both tiresome and inefficient. But Yahoo Finance API revolutionized this process by offering a variety of readily available API endpoints that were easily accessible.
Though Yahoo Finance’s official API was discontinued long ago, and now only offers web access and download options for financial data, there are unofficial scraping-based libraries like yfinance. However, these do not provide fully reliable data or service. A great alternative would be other data providers offering API access to the same essential data as Yahoo Finance and more.
Quick jump:
What does Yahoo Finance offer today?
Yahoo Finance today offers a wide range of services designed for investors, providing essential tools such as real-time stock quotes, market news, portfolio tracking, and financial analysis. Data can be downloaded in CSV format, though API access has been discontinued. Premium options through Yahoo Finance Plus include advanced charting tools, exclusive research reports, and in-depth data insights. Subscribers also gain access to detailed portfolio management, personalized investment ideas, and insights on market trends. Additionally, Yahoo Finance offers stock screeners, global market data, and tools like currency converters to enhance investment strategies. For active traders, it also provides historical financial data, technical chart patterns, and specialized screeners for more sophisticated decision-making.
Types of Data Provided by YF Today
With the recent update to Yahoo’s pricing plan, institutional-level financial data such as income statements, balance sheets, cash flow reports, and years of earnings or historical EOD data are now available for download or access via the web platform, included in the highest-tier plan. The absence of an API requires developers to perform additional work to extract and implement data for their projects.
This shift in focus from data to other services like portfolio management, screeners, and chart patterns has led many data-driven users to seek alternatives that provide faster, simpler data extraction and implementation, typically via APIs.
yfinance library
yfinance is a Python library that allows users to easily access financial data from Yahoo Finance. It is an unofficial API that scrapes data from Yahoo’s website, providing tools to download stock prices, historical market data, financial statements, dividends, and more. With yfinance, users can retrieve data in a structured format for analysis, often used in Python for automating financial tasks such as portfolio tracking, stock analysis, and research. While reliable for many basic tasks, it’s not officially supported by Yahoo Finance and has occasional limitations due to web scraping.
Developed by enthusiasts, yfinance is completely free. It’s relatively easy to use and generally provides well-structured data. However, the library has some obvious drawbacks:
1. Reliability Issues
Being based on scraping has its downside— even small changes to Yahoo Finance’s website can disrupt functionality. As a result, relying on unofficial libraries for building applications carries a risk of instability, especially when there is no active support team behind the package.
2. Limited data
Yahoo Finance API library indeed covers the essential data but that might be not enough for analysts and investors to maintain an edge over the market. For in-depth analysis, just historical and fundamental data won’t be of much help. Alternative data like Economic indicators, news sentiment, and real-time data are very important and they are not covered here.
Alternatives to Yahoo Finance API
Now this is the most interesting part where we’re going to discuss the potential alternatives to Yahoo Finance API. According to my personal experience of trying out various financial APIs, these are some of the best ones:
- EODHD APIs (EOD Historical Data)
- Finnhub
- Twelve Data
- Alpha Vantage
- Finage
The APIs are ranked based on three criteria which are ease of use, documentation, and number of features provided. Let’s take a deep dive into each one of the APIs.
1. EODHD APIs (EOD Historical Data)
EODHD tops this list due to a varied number of reasons.
The first advantage is the wide range of API endpoints, covering everything from essential historical prices, fundamental data, and real-time feeds to stock screeners and economic calendars for stocks, ETFs, forex pairs, digital currencies, and indices. The stock tick data API is especially useful for backtesting. Check their pricing for the a whole list of available data.
Secondly, EOD Historical Data provides well-structured documentation and a comprehensive “EODHD Academy,” featuring real use cases and code examples. Plus, they offer live 24/7 support for assistance.
Lastly, their APIs deliver clean, ready-to-use data and no-code solutions, including Excel and Google Sheets add-ons, for easy data access without coding skills. This is an especially valuable feature for users who previously relied on downloading CSV files from Yahoo Finance.
Let’s talk about pricing. While the free plan is a great way to explore EODHD’s APIs, for $19.99 users gain access to over 30 years of global historical price data, which is significantly cheaper than Yahoo Finance’s Gold plan at $49.95, where data is only available for CSV download.
For analysts and developers, the All-in-one package at $99.99 includes historical, fundamental, real-time, and Intraday data, plus Financial News, 40,000 stock logos, the Screener API, and more, making it an extensive and valuable option.
One thing I truly appreciate about EODHD’s payment structure is its straightforwardness. While other companies use fuzzy terms like API credits and API messages, EODHD is very precise about the features offered in each subscription plan making things much clearer on their users’ side. Speaking of drawbacks and limitations, I personally think there are not any which is why it tops my list.
EODHD offers an innovative API Marketplace where users can sell their financial products, earn revenue, and gain marketing exposure through this collaboration. This platform provides a space for financial data providers and developers to share their tools and services with a wider audience. By leveraging the marketplace, customers can monetize their products while benefiting from EODHD’s established user base and marketing efforts. It’s an ideal solution for those looking to expand their reach and create new revenue streams in the financial data industry.
Apart from the mentioned points, there are a few more that are worth looking into. Their API usage dashboard is one of the best with a range of details, charts, and statistics. Following that, their marketplace is a great place for companies to buy data directly from exchanges.
Overall, EOD Historical Data is one of the best alternatives to Yahoo Finance API for both beginners who are just starting out and advanced users for research works and building commercial applications.
2. Finnhub
There is pretty much nothing wrong with Finnhub. They have a massive amount of API endpoints with never-before-heard data such as the analyst’s estimates data, thematic investing data, and deep historical data to name a few.
Though their website is not the best one, it is almost clear in conveying the message and the services being offered to their users. They have great documentation and they provide a varied range of subscription plans to choose from.
While all that is good to hear, here is the most frustrating part with Finnhub. The APIs that can be accessed using a free account are so limited and even miss some of the most basic ones. All the financial APIs mentioned before offer more than what we needed in a free-tier account but that’s not the case with Finnhub.
Though it is understandable that Finnhub is triggering us to opt-in for a plan using this strategy, the user experience is very annoying. Especially for someone who just wants to explore the API library of different financial APIs, Finnhub is going to be one of the hateful ones. But other than that, Finnhub could be a great resource for market data and a wonderful alternative to Yahoo Finance API.
3. Twelve Data
Moving on to the third alternative to Yahoo Finance API comes Twelve Data. It is interesting how I found this specific financial API. I was on a search spree for my next Yahoo Finance API alternative and then I eventually landed on Twelve Data (before getting to know about EODHD APIs).
Twelve Data nails their story-telling with their beautifully designed product page that is both intriguing and abstract in nature but more importantly, actually reveals what they offer through various code snippets and real-world examples.
When compared to EODHD, Twelve Data’s API collection is comparatively less but includes all the necessary ones. Coming to ease of use, it is equally significant to the previous ones providing some of the well-structured and cleanest API responses.
The documentation of Twelve Data’s APIs is a special one because apart from being well-maintained and systematically organized, each and every API is explained with examples consisting of the HTTP request URL and the JSON response received by calling it. This helps users to actually visualize how the data looks once it has been extracted and assists with planning the data cleaning and manipulation processes accordingly.
Another tiny feature I love about their documentation is how they labeled different API endpoints based on their importance. This doesn’t serve much purpose but helps acknowledge the APIs that are of most use and navigate to them easily and seamlessly.
One final feature I would like to add to their documentation is the efficient way of categorizing different APIs under separate heads. This incredibly boosts the user experience as it completely eradicates the frustrating process of searching ourselves the API endpoints’ documentation.
The place where Twelve Data lags is its confusing pricing system as the subscription plans are split based on the markets. This can be very confusing when companies and institutions require data from multiple exchanges across different markets. To do that, they might have to buy several subscription plans each for a specific market. From a user experience standpoint, this can be really frustrating.
Other than that, maybe it is not well-suited for building world-class massive applications given the limited number of API endpoints, but it is still one of the best alternatives to Yahoo Finance API.
4. Alpha Vantage
The next API in our list of Yahoo Finance API alternatives is Alpha Vantage.
It is not a big deal when you hear that Alpha Vantage is the go-to for everyone who is just starting out. This is mainly because of their incredible free tier plan that costs zero dollars providing 500 API calls per day with access to almost every API endpoint provided by them ranging from historical and fundamental data to technical indicators.
Let’s now talk about two of the major drawbacks of Alpha Vantage. The first is, of course, it is definitely not the place where professionals and developers aiming to build large-scale applications would look because when compared to the previously discussed financial APIs, the features provided by Alpha Vantage are relatively fewer.
Secondly, the range of data available is limited to only the basic ones like time series data, fundamental data, technical indicators, and specific data such as financial news, and sentimental data to name a few. But their advantage of having a great free tier plan almost negates these drawbacks.
The documentation of Alpha Vantage is very precise comprising live examples and code snippets. Also, the way the documentation is designed is almost identical to the twelve data’s documentation with separate sub-heads and labels to emphasize APIs that are used most frequently among the users.
Overall, for beginners, Alpha Vantage is the most recommended place to start as it has everything required for amateurs to master the basics and provides some of the greatest free-tier plans in all of the land. But for advanced users, maybe having Alpha Vantage as a second or an alternative option would be an optimal decision.
5. Finage
The last alternative on our list is Finage. Though it’s fairly new, Finage has made its way into the market positioning itself as a great platform.
Finage has a solid landing page that is beautifully designed and it conveys all the messages clearly. The page also features coding examples to showcase the ease of use that comes with their APIs.
Speaking of the documentation, Finage did a pretty good job at that. Though it’s not the best one, it ticks all the criteria of good documentation. I truly love the classification of the APIs within the documentation which saves a lot of time in searching for the API.
While it’s all good, Finage has two major drawbacks. Firstly, is their pricing system. Their subscription plans are way too expensive when compared to those of the other alternatives we have on our list. Many users won’t be able to afford such highly expensive plans making the platform inaccessible for a wide range of audiences.
The second drawback of Finage is its limited collection of API endpoints. While it covers all the basic ones, it misses out on several alternative data like sentiment data, economic data, and so on. Nowadays, people prefer platforms with such alternative data as it helps them get an edge in the market. So Finage not being able to provide such data can be highly disadvantageous.
On the whole, Finage is still a reliable alternative to Yahoo Finance API with quality data. But if you’re looking for a cost-effective option along with a wide array of API endpoints, Finage might not be the best one for you.
Conclusion
The primary choice for a financial Data API had long been the Yahoo Finance API, offering access to numerous endpoints and a vast array of stocks. However, the unexpected discontinuation of the Yahoo finance data API prompted users to explore alternatives. It led to the discovery of some excellent options that exhibited more reliable features compared to the previous choices.
These substitutes boasted multiple features, with some offering more useful options than the formerly dependable Yahoo Finance API. When selecting the optimal free version among the contenders, EODHD emerged as the leader, presenting the most prominent features and the widest stock availability. Consequently, it can be deemed the ultimate alternative to the Yahoo Finance API.
