Finnhub news API vs MarketNewsAPI
Finnhub's self-serve market-data plans start at $49.99/month and are personal use. This compares the news feed only.
Finnhub is a market-data platform that also has company news. MarketNewsAPI is a news API. Compare them on the news job, not on prices and fundamentals, or Finnhub wins a contest it was built for and MarketNewsAPI wins one it was not.
The license is the first line
The compare page lists Finnhub's self-serve plans as personal use, with commercial use by contract. Entry market-data plans are $49.99/mo market data plans (billed quarterly, personal-use license). MarketNewsAPI Pro includes commercial use of the news in your own product at $15 a month. If you are shipping a paid app, that sentence matters more than the per-minute cap.
| MarketNewsAPI | Finnhub | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 100 requests/day, 15-min delay, 1 year of history | 60 calls/minute, personal use, 1 year of company news |
| Entry paid price | $15/mo Pro ($13.50/mo annual). 7-day trial, card required | $49.99/mo market data plans (billed quarterly, personal-use license) |
| Request limits | No request quota on paid plans (20 req/s burst) | Per-minute limits by plan |
| Asset classes | US stocks | Stocks, forex, crypto market data; news for North American companies |
| WebSocket stream | Yes: 7 channel types, 3 connections | Yes, but real-time news over WebSocket requires premium access |
| AI summaries | Yes, AI summary on every article | No |
| Full article text | Press releases (full text) | No (press releases premium) |
| History | Full archive | 1 year free; 20 years on top tier |
| Commercial use | Yes, on paid plans | Self-serve plans are personal use; commercial by contract |
The figures in the table are the ones on the Finnhub compare page, last checked 7 October 2026. Re-check that page before you quote a price in your own docs. Plans move.
If you only need the headlines
Finnhub's free tier is generous for a personal project: 60 calls/minute, personal use, 1 year of company news. Real-time news over its WebSocket requires premium access, and press releases are listed as premium. MarketNewsAPI puts the news WebSocket, AI summaries, entity tags, and full-text press releases on Pro. You do not buy a price feed to unlock the stream.
You also do not get Finnhub's prices, estimates, or alternative data. Keep Finnhub, or any other market-data vendor, for those. Point the news calls here.
Which API owns which request
- Quotes, fundamentals, estimates: Finnhub or another market-data API.
- Personal research on company news, inside Finnhub's free limits: Finnhub.
- A commercial product that streams US stock news, press releases, and legal notices: MarketNewsAPI Pro.
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.
Two keys, two jobs
Keep the Finnhub key in the price service. Create a MarketNewsAPI key named for the news service, and do not reuse it in a notebook that you might paste into a chat. Every key on the account shares the plan and the burst of 20 requests per second, so a runaway notebook can 429 the product. Revoke the notebook key on the dashboard. It stops within a few seconds. The price service does not notice, because it never held that key.
On the news side, stop polling Finnhub's company-news endpoint on a timer if the timer was only there to fake a stream. Subscribe to ticker:{SYMBOL} for the names you already chart. If you also want every press release, add type:press_release and filter to your book in the client. Channels do not AND together.
Finnhub's free tier, 60 calls/minute, personal use, 1 year of company news, remains a good place to learn their price endpoints. It is a poor place to run a commercial news product, because the compare page puts commercial use on a contract and puts real-time news over WebSocket on premium access. Read that page again when their pricing changes. The date we checked is 7 October 2026.
The first hour of a switch
- Sign up and confirm
X-Planisproduring the trial. A card is required, so the trial is not an anonymous key. - Call
GET /v1/news?tickers=AAPL&limit=5withAuthorization: Bearer. Check that each item has a ticker, a source, and a URL. - Open one socket, subscribe to
ticker:AAPL, and wait for a message or for proof the connection stayed up. You have 3 connections. Leave two free. - Point the product's news client at this host. Leave the price client on Finnhub.
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 notes live on the Finnhub compare page. Channel names for the stream are in the WebSocket docs.