Why choose Marketstack over Alpha vantage
Features
Alpha Vantage
Marketstack
Free Tier Limit
Limited to 25 API calls per day, making meaningful testing difficult.
Allows 100 requests per month with access to one year of historical data, suitable for light experimentation.
Rate Limit
Tight per-minute throttling makes it hard for developers to test with ease.
Monthly-based limits give developers full control over when and how they use their quota.
Starter Paid Plan
$49.99/mo (75 req/min) with 15-min of delay
$43.99/mo(yearly billed) with no delay + 10 years of historical data
Overage Charges
Hard cut-offs can break applications once the quota is reached.
Soft limit ($0.0019 per extra req) with transparent per-request pricing ensures applications keep running.
Support
Basic community and email support with limited escalation options.
Multi-tier support model, including Platinum support for teams running production workloads.
Global Exchanges
Primarily US centric with limited international market coverage.
Built for global use, covering 70+ exchanges across multiple regions.
Data Points
Focused mainly on stock price data with minimal regulatory or company-level context.
Combines stock market data with EDGAR filings, enabling deeper financial analysis in one API.
Features
Free Tier Limit
Alpha Vantage
Limited to 25 API calls per day, making meaningful testing difficult.
Marketstack
Allows 100 requests per month with access to one year of historical data, suitable for light experimentation.
Rate Limit
Alpha Vantage
Tight per-minute throttling makes it hard for developers to test with ease
Marketstack
Monthly-based limits give developers full control over when and how they use their quota.
Starter Paid Plan
Alpha Vantage
$49.99/mo (75 req/min) with 15-min of delay
Marketstack
$43.99/mo(yearly billed) with no delay + 10 years of historical data
Overage Charges
Alpha Vantage
Hard cut-offs can break applications once the quota is reached.
Marketstack
Soft limit ($0.0019 per extra req) with transparent per-request pricing ensures applications keep running.
Support
Alpha Vantage
Basic community and email support with limited escalation options.
Marketstack
Multi-tier support model, including Platinum support for teams running production workloads.
Global Exchanges
Alpha Vantage
Primarily US centric with limited international market coverage.
Marketstack
Built for global use, covering 70+ exchanges across multiple regions.
Data Points
Alpha Vantage
Focused mainly on stock price data with minimal regulatory or company-level context.
Marketstack
Combines stock market data with EDGAR filings, enabling deeper financial analysis in one API.
Marketstack is a Global Stock Market Data API.
Alpha Vantage
Lead on Technical Indicators (50+ built-in indicators like RSI, MACD).
Marketstack Strength
Exchange Volume. Marketstack supports 70+ global exchanges and 125,000+ tickers. Alpha Vantage is heavily US-centric; their global data often requires specific "Market" parameters that are less documented. Marketstack doesn’t have the crypto data but we have a dedicated, easy-to-use API for that https://coinlayer.com/
Fetch Historical Stock Market Data with Ease.
Marketstack
Offers a cleaner `date_from` and `date_to` parameters at the API level, or use limit and offset for pagination, getting exactly what you need. Saving developers from parsing massive JSON just to get last week's prices.
# Marketstack example for historical data (last 30 days)
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
end_date = datetime.now()
start_date = end_date - timedelta(days=30)
url = f'https://api.marketstack.com/v1/eod?access_key={api_key}&symbols={symbol}&date_from={start_date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")}&date_to={end_date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")}'
r = requests.get(url)
data = r.json()
# Each item in data['data'] is a daily entry
Alpha Vantage
Historical data for many symbols is full (15+ years). You can only specify a `date` parameter to retrieve options data for any trading day in the past. Resulting in a massive JSON response and slow to parse.
Clean, Consistent JSON Responses for Developers
Alpha Vantage's JSON structure is messy: They use keys with spaces and numbers, which is a challenging for dot-notation in JavaScript or Typed classes in TypeScript.
"Time Series (Daily)": {
"2026-01-21": {
"1. open": "248.7000",
"2. high": "251.5600",
"3. low": "245.1800",
 : "4. close": "247.6500",
"5. volume": "54641725"
},
"2026-01-20": {
"1. open": "252.7300",
"2. high": "254.7900",
"3. low": "243.4200",
"4. close": "246.7000",
"5. volume": "77280987"
},
...
}
Requires: data["Time Series (Daily)"]["2024-05-20"]["1. open"]
Marketstack's JSON is clean: Standardized, snake_case, more data points, and flat array structures.
{
"open": 248.7,
"high": 251.56,
"low": 245.18,
"close": 247.65,
"volume": 54446100,
"adj_high": 251.56,
...
},
{
"open": 252.51,
"high": 254.79,
"low": 243.42,
"close": 246.7,
"volume": 77475520,
...
},
...
}
Requires: data.data[0].open
Comprehensive Global Data Coverage
Enterprise customers choose APILayer when usage moves beyond predictable patterns and into mission-critical workloads.
Marketstack provides:
125,000+
Stock Tickers
70+ Global Exchanges
(including NASDAQ, NYSE, XETRA, LSE, TSX, ASX, HKEX, and more)
Real-time, End-of-Day (EOD), and Historical Data
Currencies and Indices
(available in higher plans)
EDGAR data
get company information, CIK codes, submissions, and financial facts with ease.
APILayer Playground
Experiment with real API requests, tweak parameters, and understand the JSON responses before integrating into your app.
