PlatformScore rates 20 of the most popular futures trading platforms on a single, transparent 0-100 scale. The goal is simple: give traders an apples-to-apples way to compare platforms objectively, on price, tools, and real usability, before committing money or months of learning to one.
I built this scoring model to be front-facing on purpose. You can see exactly how every number is produced, and the same rubric is applied to every platform, whether it pays us an affiliate commission or nothing at all.
Every platform is scored across seven weighted dimensions. The weights reflect what actually matters most when choosing a futures platform: what you get for your money, and the quality of the order-flow tools you'll trade with.
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Value | 20% | Pricing across tiers (monthly, annual, lifetime) relative to the features and data you get for it. |
| Order Flow | 20% | Depth and quality of order-flow tooling, footprint/cluster charts, DOM, volume profile, tape reading. |
| Automation | 15% | Strategy automation and backtesting capability, from simple alerts to full systematic execution. |
| Ease of Use | 15% | How usable the platform is out of the box, setup friction and the learning curve to becoming productive. |
| Broker / Data | 10% | Flexibility of broker and data-feed connections (e.g. Rithmic, CQG, dxFeed) and how locked-in you are. |
| Prop-Firm Support | 10% | Breadth of compatibility with funding/prop firms via connections like Rithmic. |
| Community (Reviews) | 10% | Aggregated public sentiment from independent review sources. |
Weights total 100%. A platform's final PlatformScore is the weighted sum of its seven dimension scores.
Value, pricing, features, broker/data, and prop-firm data come directly from the official platform and broker websites. Rithmic and other broker/data compatibility is verified against the platforms' own published compatibility pages, so pricing and specs reflect what the vendor actually states.
Community is aggregated from independent public review sources like Trustpilot, G2, Google reviews, and app-store ratings, rather than from testimonials we select. This keeps the sentiment signal independent of us and of the platform.
Editor review (added by me, Rick Castro): For platforms I have personally traded on, I add a hands-on editor's perspective covering real-world usability, setup friction, and how the tools actually perform in live conditions. To keep this honest, the editor's hands-on review appears only on platforms I've genuinely used, currently TradingView, Tradovate, Sierra Chart, Quantower, and Jigsaw Daytradr. Platforms I haven't personally traded on are scored on the objective, source-verified rubric above, and are clearly marked as not yet editor-tested.
Pricing and specs are on a monthly re-check schedule, since platform pricing and tiers change often. Scores are re-evaluated when the underlying data changes materially. Each review reflects the most recent check.
There are far more than 20 futures platforms, but I focused on the most popular and widely used ones. That's deliberate: the aim is to cover the platforms most traders are actually deciding between, so anyone on the fence gets a genuine apples-to-apples comparison of the value proposition, features, tools, cost, and time-to-productivity, before they commit.
This is the part I care about most. PlatformScore earns affiliate commissions on some platforms and brokers we link to, at no extra cost to you. This never affects a score. Every platform is rated on the identical seven-dimension rubric above, using the same public data sources, including platforms that pay us nothing (for example, Sierra Chart). Scores are calculated from the rubric alone; there is no tilt, up or down, based on whether a platform is an affiliate partner.
If you ever see a score that looks off, the inputs are public, check them against the source and let me know.
Last updated: July 10, 2026 · Methodology v1