Google Finance API and Its Alternatives (Updated for 2019)

What is an API?

An application programming interface, or API, is a set of programming code that queries data, parses responses, and sends instructions between one software platform and another.
– per source

What is the Google Finance API?

There’s a lot of finance APIs out there that you can use to track the status of certain stocks. As a computer programmer, you are more equipped to make informed decisions when participating in the stock market.

Google’s Finance API might have a lot of weight in the industry given its association with the Google brand. However, it has gone several years with no maintenance.

There are definitely better options available on the market right now.

Google Finance API Overview

The Google Finance API has sparse documentation. It’s difficult to find any information about it published by Google. However, some third-party documentation covers the more basic aspects of its usage. As far as public endpoints go, the Google Finance API is very standard. It’s able to take REST requests, and it returns the desired data in JSON format.

To reiterate, the Google Finance API is no longer supported by Google so it’s undocumented and unreliable. Therefore, this API is best for private toy applications.

Public resources, such as RapidAPI, are a good place to learn about well maintained and available APIs.

Alternatives to Google Finance API

You will be able to find many alternatives for the Google Finance API in RapidAPI’s extensive database. Here are some of the top Finance APIs on the Marketplace to use instead of Google Finance:

1. Yahoo Finance API

The Yahoo Finance API is an obvious choice for replacing the Google Finance API. It’s one of the most popular and visited financial sites with extensive stock market data.

While the old Yahoo Finance API no longer works, there are still many ways to access the data.

There’s an unofficial Yahoo Finance API available on RapidAPI. The Yahoo Finance API allows you to query:

• Finance summaries
• Stocks
• Quotes
• Movers
• and more

How much does the Yahoo Finance API cost?

The API follows a freemium pricing model, meaning the API offers a certain amount of API calls for free. It charges for more requests past the threshold.

Under the Basic plan for the Yahoo Finance API, you’re allowed 500 API calls per month for free, then $0.002 per additional request.

The paid tiers allow higher usage, including a $200 Mega plan for unlimited usage.

See the pricing table here:

2. Alphavantage

Alphavantage is another good alternative to Google Finance because it’s regularly maintained. It also has public documentation and an enormous amount of available data options tailored to your data-tracking interests.

Like most APIs, it offers free public endpoints and it simply requires a key for tracking your usage.

Alphavantage does have a usage limit that might be prohibitive for some users. You can upgrade your account to allow 1200 requests per minute with no throttling or blocking.

They allow you to track cryptocurrencies, and track securities on FOREX. According to their website, they’re a trusted data provider for institutions like Ycombinator and Harvard University. This gives Alphavantage some authority within their field.

3. Currencylayer API

If Alphavantage isn’t your speed, check out Currencylayer (also listed on RapidAPI).

Their rate limit is fairly slow if you’re not paying for an API key, but they offer a high-quality paid solution if their product is appropriate for your goals.

Currencylayer offers real-time ticker updates, and they return data in a JSON format.

They also offer detailed instructions for getting started with their API for first-time users. This can be helpful even if you’re not new to programming, as it minimizes the amount of time spent fiddling with your code just to get a “HelloWorld” example up and running.

Their endpoints offer live, historical, time frame, and currency conversion data.

How much does the Currencylayer API cost?

The currency layer API is free to use on RapidAPI. All you need to do is to acquire an API key from https://currencylayer.com/product and add it to the “access key” form field.

4. Investors Exchange (IEX) Trading

Investors Exchange Trading, or IEX, is another viable alternative.

This option is preferable if you’re a developer that likes to make more rapid requests for data.

Their documentation does not disclose any limit to their API usage, and they have officially stated on their website that individual developers can make up to one hundred requests per second. This is much higher than most free APIs.

The IEX public endpoints are also free to use, and they have unofficial wrappers available in C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Go, and many others.

It’s difficult to find any drawbacks to this organization because the service they offer is quite exceptional.

This organization might also be of special interest to AI investors.

The IEX platform aggregates recently posted news articles, and they provide a quick and easy way to figure out what the latest updates are on the less technical aspects of a given stock.

This data is valuable if you consider the effectiveness of this trading technique in recent memory.

Their public endpoints are numerous, and they even offer an IPO calendar so you can track historical and upcoming public offerings for certain stocks.

If Cryptocurrency interests you, they also offer ticker data for a few of the more standard ones.

4. Tradier API

Finally, Tradier API offers a high-quality solution for programmers who want to trade on the same platform that they track stocks from.

Their rate limit for their free and public endpoints varies from 60-120 requests per minute, which should be more than enough for the vast majority of uses.

They offer endpoints for corporate calendars, historical data, ticker information, and many other pieces of data.

They also offer data streaming over HTTP.

Like Alphavantage, they provide usage examples for Python, Perl, Java, and Ruby.

Tradier is definitely one of the higher-quality options for programmatic or algorithmic traders looking for new API options.

Their endpoints do require the use of an authorization token and API key, but this is the case for most APIs and shouldn’t be too prohibitive.

Summary: Google Finance API Alternatives

What’s Next?

Google Finance API has been out of commission for quite a while, and it seems to have gone the way of Yahoo Finance. Fortunately, there are many other great options for programmatic traders who are looking for new public data endpoints.

In this article, we’ve gone over the functionality of Google Finance, which is now deprecated and not officially available to the public.

Some other alternatives include the Unofficial Yahoo Finance API, Alphavantage, CurrencyLayer, IEX, and Tradier.

If you’re interested in trading from the same platform that you get your data from, Tradier is definitely your best option.

If you’re looking for high-resolution data and an unbeatable rate limit, then IEX is a superior option.

And if you’re interested in further reading, RapidAPI.com has an excellent selection of Finance APIs & Stock Market APIs that can help speed up your research.