Alpha Vantage news vs MarketNewsAPI
Alpha Vantage news shares a quota with prices, from $49.99/month. MarketNewsAPI Pro is a $15 news plan.
Alpha Vantage is an all-round market-data API with a news endpoint on the same key as prices and indicators. MarketNewsAPI is only the news. Use Alpha Vantage when one vendor for prices and a simple news feed is the point. Use MarketNewsAPI when the news calls would burn a per-minute quota you bought for fundamentals.
One quota for every endpoint
Alpha Vantage's free tier is 25 requests/day (shared across all endpoints). Paid entry is $49.99/mo (75 requests/minute). The compare page lists further per-minute tiers up to $249.99 a month. A news poll and a price poll spend the same bucket. MarketNewsAPI's free tier is 100 news requests a day. Pro removes the daily quota and caps the burst at 20 requests per second.
| MarketNewsAPI | Alpha Vantage | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 100 requests/day, 15-min delay, 1 year of history | 25 requests/day (shared across all endpoints) |
| Entry paid price | $15/mo Pro ($13.50/mo annual). 7-day trial, card required | $49.99/mo (75 requests/minute) |
| Request limits | No request quota on paid plans (20 req/s burst) | Per-minute tiers up to $249.99/mo (1,200/min) |
| Asset classes | US stocks | Equities, crypto, forex, economic indicators |
| WebSocket stream | Yes: 7 channel types, 3 connections | No |
| AI summaries | Yes, AI summary on every article | Short summary from source |
| Full article text | Press releases (full text) | No |
| History | Full archive | Not clearly stated |
| Commercial use | Yes, on paid plans | Yes |
The figures in the table are the ones on the Alpha Vantage compare page, last checked 7 October 2026. Re-check that page before you quote a price in your own docs. Plans move.
What the news item contains
The compare page credits Alpha Vantage with a short summary from the source and per-ticker relevance scores. It lists no WebSocket and no full text. MarketNewsAPI adds a news WebSocket, entity tags, and full text on press releases. It does not add Alpha Vantage's prices, economic indicators, or those relevance scores. If the score is an input to your ranker, keep the endpoint that computes it.
A practical split
- Prices, FX, crypto bars, indicators: Alpha Vantage or another market-data API. MarketNewsAPI does not serve them. Crypto and forex news are not in this product yet either.
- US stock headlines, wires, and legal notices at volume: MarketNewsAPI, so the news loop is not bidding against your price loop for the same minute.
Try it for 7 days. Signup starts Pro. A card is required. Real-time REST, WebSocket, and MCP, with no request cap. After that it's $15/month, or Free if you stop.
A shared bucket, in requests
Alpha Vantage's listed entry plan is 75 requests a minute. The free plan is 25 requests a day across every endpoint. If each symbol is its own request, a dashboard that refreshes prices for 30 symbols once a minute already uses 30 of those 75, before indicators. A news poll for the same 30 symbols once a minute is another 30. Together that is 60 of the 75, and an indicators call can take the rest of the minute. The news did not get more expensive. It started competing with the chart.
Move the news poll off that key. One MarketNewsAPI call can take up to 50 tickers, so those 30 symbols are one request, not 30. A stream removes the poll. The chart key goes back to prices. The news key lives in a different environment variable so a rotation of one does not take down the other.
Alpha Vantage's relevance score, if you use it to rank headlines, does not appear on this payload. Rank by published_at, or rank in your own code. Do not invent a score and label it as theirs. Summaries here are the one-to-three sentence field on the article, not a sentiment model you can threshold.
What to leave alone
- Intraday prices, FX, crypto bars, and economic series stay on Alpha Vantage. This API will 404 your expectations, not those routes. It has no price endpoint.
- Crypto and forex headlines are not a hidden parameter. They are not in the product.
- Pro searches the full archive. Free is only the last year.
Pro is $15 a month, or $162 a year. The 7-day trial includes the live feed and the full archive, and a card is required. Free stays at 100 requests a day, delayed 15 minutes, with the last year of history. The side-by-side is the Alpha Vantage compare page. Signup is here.