A Benzinga API alternative you can start yourself
Benzinga's API price is sales-quoted. MarketNewsAPI Pro is $15/month, self-serve, with a 7-day trial.
Benzinga sells a professional newswire: in-house stories, low-latency delivery, and a price the public page does not list. MarketNewsAPI sells aggregated US stock news you can start with a card. Those are different newsrooms. The alternative is for teams that need the wires and the headlines, not Benzinga's proprietary copy.
A quote vs a published price
The compare page lists Benzinga's entry price as not published (sales-quoted) and the limits as contract-based, with one WebSocket connection per token. MarketNewsAPI Pro is $15 a month, or $162 a year, with 3 WebSocket connections and no sales call. The 7-day trial is the evaluation period. A card is required.
| MarketNewsAPI | Benzinga | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 100 requests/day, 15-min delay, 1 year of history | Basic tier: headline, teaser and link (via AWS Data Exchange) |
| Entry paid price | $15/mo Pro ($13.50/mo annual). 7-day trial, card required | Not published (sales-quoted) |
| Request limits | No request quota on paid plans (20 req/s burst) | Contract-based; 1 WebSocket connection per token |
| Asset classes | US stocks | US stocks (plus other Benzinga datasets) |
| WebSocket stream | Yes: 7 channel types, 3 connections | Yes |
| AI summaries | Yes, AI summary on every article | No |
| Full article text | Press releases (full text) | Premium tiers |
| History | Full archive | Contract-based |
| Commercial use | Yes, on paid plans | Yes, by license |
The figures in the table are the ones on the Benzinga compare page, last checked 7 October 2026. Re-check that page before you quote a price in your own docs. Plans move.
What you give up
Benzinga's listed strengths are an in-house newsroom, TCP as well as WebSocket and webhooks, and extra datasets such as ratings, calendars, and squawk. MarketNewsAPI does not have that newsroom and does not sell squawk. If a desk needs Benzinga's editorial and a contract SLA, this page will not talk you out of it.
What you get instead
You get US publisher stories, full-text press releases from the major wires, and legal notices, each with a summary and tickers. You get a key in the browser, three stream connections, and MCP on the same plan so an agent can query the same feed. You do not get a promise that the story was written by Benzinga.
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.
Evaluate it without a sales cycle
A Benzinga evaluation is a call and a contract. A MarketNewsAPI evaluation is a key. Sign up, put the key in the same worker that would have held the Benzinga token, and subscribe to the channels that match the desk's filter: a list of ticker: channels, or type:press_release if the desk only wants wires. You get 3 connections on Pro. Benzinga is listed at one WebSocket connection per token, so a staging connection plus a production connection is a reason to look at the connection cap before you promise four environments.
Compare stories on a symbol you know, for one session, against what the desk already sees. You are not looking for the same sentences. You are looking for whether the wire and the publisher headline arrived, whether the ticker tag is right, and whether the summary is something you can put in an alert. If the requirement is "the Benzinga sentence," stop. This API will not produce it.
Write the price you were quoted next to $15 a month only after you re-read the compare page. Their number is not published there. Ours is. 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. Start the trial at signup.