Finviz Free vs Elite: What $299.50 a Year Actually Buys
Finviz is a stock screener that happens to be free, which is why it shows up in so many trading workflows. The public version filters thousands of US-listed companies on dozens of fundamental and technical criteria, draws the market heat map everyone recognises, and costs nothing. The paid tier, Elite, adds real-time data, intraday charts, backtesting and alerts.
This guide covers what the free version does, what Elite adds at $39.50 a month or $299.50 a year, and how to build screens that produce a short list worth reading rather than four hundred tickers you will never open.
The free version
No account is required to use the core screener. You get delayed quotes, the full filter set across descriptive, fundamental and technical categories, the heat map, a news aggregator, insider-trading data and basic charts with common overlays.
For an investor screening on fundamentals — profitable companies in a sector, below a valuation threshold, above a moving average — delayed data changes nothing. A price that is fifteen minutes old is irrelevant when your holding period is a year. This is why so many long-term investors never pay Finviz a cent.
Where free stops being enough
Three walls. Delayed quotes matter if you act intraday. Charts are daily-only, so an hourly setup is invisible. And there are no alerts — you must remember to re-run the screen yourself.
What Elite adds
Elite costs $39.50 monthly or $299.50 for a year, which works out about $175 cheaper than paying month by month. The annual saving is real, but the same rule applies as with any tool: run monthly first, confirm you open it daily, then commit.
Real-time and extended hours
Quotes update live, and pre-market and after-hours data appear. For anyone trading around the open or reacting to earnings, this is the feature that justifies the subscription on its own.
Intraday charts
Elite unlocks intraday intervals, turning Finviz from a daily-bar scanner into something you can use during a session.
Backtesting
You can run a screen against history and see how the filter set would have performed. Treat this as a sanity check rather than proof — screener backtests ignore slippage, spreads, position sizing and the survivorship problem of delisted companies. A screen that looks brilliant here can still lose money live.
Alerts and correlations
Alerts fire on price levels and screener conditions, which removes the need to re-run screens manually. Correlation tools show how candidates move relative to each other and to the index — useful for avoiding a portfolio of five tickers that are effectively one bet.
Building a screen that is actually useful
The common mistake is stacking filters until the result set is small, then treating whatever survived as a recommendation. That produces arbitrary lists. A better approach is to decide the shape of the idea first, then express it in the minimum number of filters.
Start with three filters, not ten
Almost every good screen is built on three decisions: what universe, what quality, what timing. Universe is market cap, exchange and sector. Quality is a fundamental floor — positive earnings, manageable debt, revenue growth. Timing is technical — above a moving average, near a high, unusual volume.
One filter per decision gets you a workable list. Adding a fourth for each decision usually reflects hindsight fitting rather than insight.
Watch out for filters that quietly contradict
Deep-value criteria and strong-momentum criteria rarely coexist. If a screen returns nothing, it is often because two filters describe opposite kinds of company. Removing one usually reveals which idea you were actually testing.
Save screens as URLs
Every Finviz screen is encoded in its address, so a screen can be bookmarked and shared without an account. Keeping a folder of bookmarked screens — "quality large caps pulling back", "small-cap volume spikes" — turns Finviz into a morning routine of three clicks.
The heat map, used properly
The heat map is the most-shared Finviz image and the most misread. It shows relative performance by market cap, so a huge green block means one enormous company moved, not that the market is broadly strong. Switching to the equal-weight or sector view tells you whether a move is broad or carried by a few names — which is usually the question worth asking.
The data underneath
Fundamental figures come from filings and vendor feeds and are updated on a schedule, not continuously. For screening this is fine. For a final decision it is not: before committing money, verify the two or three numbers your thesis depends on against the company's actual filing. Screeners are for narrowing, not for confirming.
The same caution applies to ratios computed on trailing data around a large one-off event. A company that sold a division can show a valuation that is arithmetically correct and economically meaningless.
A workflow that fits in fifteen minutes
Open the heat map and note which sectors moved and whether the move is broad. Run two saved screens — one for quality, one for timing. Take the overlap, usually five to fifteen names. Open each chart briefly and discard anything whose shape contradicts your thesis. Put the survivors on a watchlist rather than trading them immediately.
The discipline in that loop is the final step. Screener output is a list of candidates, not a list of trades, and the gap between the two is where most of the money is made or lost.
Who should pay and who should not
Stay free if you invest on fundamentals with a horizon measured in months, screen weekly rather than daily, and never act on intraday moves. This covers most people.
Pay for Elite if you trade during the session, need pre-market data around earnings, want alerts instead of manual re-runs, or genuinely intend to use backtesting. If you cannot name which of those four applies, the free version is doing the job.
Frequently asked questions
Is Finviz free?
Yes, with delayed data. The screener, heat map, news and basic charts are free without an account. Elite is $39.50 monthly or $299.50 yearly.
Is Elite worth it?
Only for real-time data, intraday charts, alerts or backtesting. If your horizon is long, delayed data costs you nothing.
How much does the annual plan save?
$299.50 against twelve months at $39.50 — roughly $175 a year, about a 37% reduction on the monthly rate.
Does Finviz cover markets outside the US?
Coverage is US-listed equities and ETFs, plus futures and forex overviews. It is not a global equity screener.
Can I trade through Finviz?
No. It is a screening and analysis tool with no broker integration; orders go through your broker separately.
How reliable is the backtester?
Useful for sanity-checking a filter set, unreliable as evidence. It ignores slippage, spreads and position sizing, so treat a good result as "not obviously broken" rather than "profitable".
The short version
Finviz free is one of the best no-cost tools in retail investing, and most people should stop there. Elite earns its price for intraday traders who need live data and alerts, and the annual plan saves around $175 — but only after you have proven, on the monthly plan, that you open it every day.
