QuantConnect Reviews 62

Hello.
I've read all the reviews to date and thank those who contributed. While I understand some of the negative sentiments, I strongly disagree with them.

While, many years ago, I had more than a decade of paid software engineering/coding experience, I'm not the smartest or best I've ever met and I mostly worked in VBA with a smattering of C++, Java, and various scripting languages.

My situation is that I evaluated numerous back testing platforms including those on popular trading applications and others, and none offered everything I needed. Quantconnect was the only platform which allowed me to import essential data from outside sources. (Ex-Dividend dates and amounts from IEX Cloud).

I use QuantConnect in conjunction with an options-hedged dividend stock fund. My needs are to evaluate different fundamental statistics and technical measures and to correlate those to profit/loss where the downside is protected by puts. We sell calls to offset the cost of the puts, but these can limit our upside. Thus, we need to "tune" the trade.

So, with that background, let me get to the point.

I've been a minimum-charge account/user for 4 years and recently upgraded. The entire team from Jared and Alex, to so many others have been impressively responsive, incredibly knowledgeable and reassuringly passionate every step of the way.

Yes, Quantconnect can be daunting and I agree the documentation may seem cumbersome at first. However, if your needs are a step beyond what the top 5 trading platforms offer in backtesting or you don't want to pay extra for data or expend the time learning and setting up such a platform, then QuantConnect is for you!

Pros--
-Scalable: I've run a universe of 700+ stocks for 2 years (as of writing this) with Options +/- 4 strikes and <=1 year expiration. QC processed over a 2 billion data points and completed in 90 minutes.
-Support: As other reviewers noted, there is complexity and often more than one approach. The support engineers have been great. They're attentive and patient and have ALWAYS found a solution.
- Comprehensive: I have found no other platform that allows the complexity, breadth and depth that QuantConnect does.

Cons - none that I can think of

Wish List -- I would like to understand better the inner workings or "how the sausage is made" That would probably help me develop faster, but at the same time, LEAN is open source on GitHub. I could/should acquire the understanding I need.

I hope this helps you evaluate QuantConnect for your needs.

Thank you,

Craig

I speak from the standpoint of a data scientist who uses Python, if you are a software engineer I'm sure your experience will be smoother:

Pros:
- wide range of assets and indicators available (although many are premium).
- out-of-the-box backtesting capabilities
- many powerful built-in functions such as different position sizing, fee assumptions, execution assumptions, risk management, etc...

Cons:
- not beginner-friendly: unnecessarily complex API, it forces you to use OOP; runtime errors are common and often hard to debug.
- poor documentation, can never find what I'm looking for. And on the occasion you find it on their forums, the code may already be outdated and won't work anymore

My suggestions would be to provide a few code templates with different use cases, this would make it a lot easier to start, improve the documentation and also rework on the platform's interface, it's very annoying to find past projects for example. It definitely has a great potential.

I've been using Quantconnect for about two years but they've just released new capabilities for options research, based on user feedback, that prompted me to add a review.
They listen to, care about, and build new features for their users (free features).
Highly recommend.

I wasn’t a programmer, took a python basics course on youtube and their free bootcamp course and I was surprised how quickly I picked up object oriented programming and algorithmic trading coding on their platform. The stocks data is free up to seconds timeframe, after a long research on competitors I choose quantconnect and it was up to my expectations.

I have been using QuantConnect for over a year now.

I started out using their free tier, which basically lets you do everything that you need to do to get started and more (coding, backtesting, access to historical data).

Due to this I was able to learn how to use platform at my own pace without feeling pressured by any fees or costs.

When I first started the documentation was still pretty spotty and it was difficult at first but I have always received fast and detailed replies by their staff and other community members, they have since improved their documentation and I have improved from being a beginner on the platform to being one of the helpful community members,

I couldn't be happier with how QuantConnect and my own trading journey is evolving!

QuantConnect has been an invaluable partner for my personal trading and for a university class that I teach. The community is incredibly supportive, and the leadership team are accessible which is almost unheard of in trading platforms these days. In my class, my graduate level students have been able to personally engage and implement constructs like Fama French factors, and QuantConnect has been an active supporter to facilitate my students learning. It's incredible to join the community, have access to a variety of detailed trading algorithms, instructional videos, and see my students feel confident implementing week-to-week. I don't think there's anything like QuantConnect out there today, and I'm a big supporter of their efforts. I can't imagine my own trading or teaching my class without it!

I have been programming on my bot for over 2 years.

In the beginning it was difficult to get to know the platform because there is a lot of possibilities coming at you. But once you understand how this platform works and were to find the information. It's a pleasure to work on your bot.

Pros:
- Strong community that mostly answers your questions in 24h or max 48 hours.
- Working locally or on the platform
- Possibility of coding 100% your own strategy
- Live Trading with a lot of markets (Equity, Crypto, Forex, Futures).
- They listen to proposals to improve the platform and take immediate action.
- If using the bronze membership your getting professional help within an hour. (It's normal they charge an amount for the professional help, nothing is free these days.)
- Implementing email, sms, telegram messages, ... of the orders the bot is making.

Cons:
- If u have zero experience programming in Python or C# it's hard to program your own bot despite their learning center.
- Maybe an app on the cellphone would be nice. So you can check your bot/code anytime you want (not would be something extra).

A tip:
Keep persevere once your bot is trading live it's a reward for all the hard work.

Some people like to make simple things complicated and charge a fee for everything... These guys are one of them. The end result should be a profit from the trading, but what will actually happen is that you will spend more on their software than you will earn from the trading. Waste of time...

It's absolute trash, bad documented and the debugging mode doesn't even have a console. Furthermore there is only very limited data available

- lack of transparency (deleting critical statements in forum)
- alpha market is a joke. there are no trading firms paying license fees for algos.
- many alphas in market are likely overfitted
- setting up LEAN for local machine is buggy and very very complicated if they only could KISS
- unnecessarily complex API, difficult to learn, poor docs (at least for python developers), LEAN is C# but most users need Python
- research (notebook) is slow, throwing time out errors when analyzing large datasets
- backtesting is slow when trading many assets with high resolution data, throwing time out errors all the time
- web ide limited, poor debugging tool
- switching between local (Skylight) and cloud is tiresome, no efficient workflow for algo development
- limited possibilities to analyze and visualize backtest results
- buggy API, bugfixes take too much time
- expensive for retail/invididuals (default pack = +800$/year)

Oh my lord I am too busy during day to write review but my experience with QuantConnect is sooo BAD I am compelled to write a bad review. Their website is extremely poorly designed and they should fire their UI designer immediately or maybe pay more for them to do a better job. I feel like I need a manual just to navigate the ugly and complex site. Their user documentation is abysmaI and their design of the web-based IDE to write your algo script is slow and buggy as it freezes alot and you have to refresh the page. Only their LEAN command line option is useful but its still a pain to setup and learn but still has bugs like local backtesting differs from the cloud.
I tried them out for a week before committing to pay for a "researcher license" to use the backtest quicker. I wanted to then buy a live testing node simply to see if their live prices work but when you try to order this from their website it automatically buys you a bundle with a massive support fee included which is not what I need. I only found this out after they email me the invoice to my disgust at a huge extra fee. I asked for a refund of this extra since I only wanted the live node not any extra support but they refuse. Extremely bad service so I'm warning others to be careful they will force you to pay extras you don't need when you order from the site.

I start to using Quantconnect after the shutdown of Quantopian. Unfortunately, Quantopian was far easier to use, more realiable, and quicker in backtesting. Quantconnect is still a good tool but a lot of work must be done.

QC is an extremely difficult system to use for the average trader (I'm comparing it to competitors products with respect to coding, flexibility and ability to live trade) Given reasonable investigation the data it uses for backtesting is questionable (they cut you off if you look at too much data) and most importantly it only allows you to back test and live trade on a small list of underlyings: good for Bitcoin and fx (I assume but don't know) but NOT for equities and listed securities and most futures.

QuantConnect enables algorithmic traders of all experience levels to turn an idea into a reality. I first found QuantConnect many many years ago while contemplating building my own backtesting platform. I was relieved to find QuantConnect and its open sourced LEAN project. The engineering philosophy that underpins the platform is one of unlimited customizability while also making the most common tasks simple or automatic.

The full QuantConnect platform provides its users many tools that improve the efficiency and most importantly reduce the time between idea and feasibility testing. As with any software product, time needs to be spent learning the APIs, but with documentation for the entire platform available directly in the browser combined with QuantConnect's algorithm bootcamp and extensive documentation of recipes detailing how to use each and every feature, this spinup time is greatly reduced, especially if you're already confident with your programming skills.

QuantConnect even provides a free tier, which is awesome. You can test your trading ideas using free backtesting and when you've built something worth trading you can run it through paper trading to make sure you haven't overfit your algorithm and then run it against your real brokerage account.

Even if you don't have your own capital to trade, if you've built a great algorithm you can license it out to other investors using QuantConnect's new Alpha Streams Marketplace.

All software products have bugs. What differentiates the good from the bad is the response. From everything I've heard, QuantConnect support is very timely with their responses and it's usually not a bug, but rather a coding error. When bugs are found, they are fixed in github and once the fix is merged its available on the QuantConnect platform within about 5 minutes!

I joined QuantConnect back in 2018 as a hobbyist trying to learn the basics of algorithmic trading. Three years later, and countless hours spent on LEAN and QuantConnect, I can only speak highly of this platform that helped me make the career change I was looking for.

* Complexity: This is not some drag-and-drop platform to build out-of-the-box trading bots. Yes, the API takes some time to learn but I think that should be expected of any serious software that offers this level of flexibility and robustness.
* Community: I've seen the community grow over the years and become this amazing mix of backgrounds that share creative ideas and help each other.
* AlphaStreams Marketplace: I've personally been developing and submitting alphas to the marketplace from the beginning, some of which got licensed by clients. The criteria to enter is strict to ensure statistical significance of results and competition is fierce, but this growing marketplace has the potential to revolutionize the open-source quant scene by providing a stable income to alpha developers.
* Team: I've worked closely with the QuantConnect team over the years and their professionalism and integrity are out of the question. Not only I trust them with holding my algorithms, but so do my institutional clients for whom I work in QuantConnect.

All in all, a fantastic platform for anyone looking for institutional-grade software, a thriving community of like-minded algo traders, and a hard-working trustworthy team of professionals.

Over two (fun!) years the QuantConnect team have assisted me in

(1) My programming...which at the beginning was all but non-existent. With this, the customer support, community help and other resources e.g. GitHub provided me with the required information to develop my algos.

(2) Connectivity....I can connect one of my algos to one of my Interactive Brokers accounts in about 2 minutes. Its that easy.

(3) Ability to license....Many of the systems I have developed over the last couple of years and submitted to the AlphaStreams marketplace are being licensed. Like any other endeavor in life - this takes hard work and a lot of effort.

I have had no problems with backtest times - but obviously the times will depend on the amount of data being crunched in the background.

So Im very happy - a friendly bunch of people doing real innovative stuff. I cant wait what the next few years bring!

cannot recommend

Cons:

- lack of transparency (deleting critical statements in forum)
- alpha market is a joke. there are no trading firms paying license fees for algos.
- many alphas in market are likely overfitted
- setting up LEAN for local machine is buggy and complicated
- unnecessarily complex API, difficult to learn, poor docs (at least for python developers), LEAN is C# but most users need Python
- research (notebook) is slow, throwing time out errors when analyzing large datasets
- backtesting is slow when trading many assets with high resolution data, throwing time out errors all the time
- web ide limited, poor debugging tool
- switching between local (Skylight) and cloud is tiresome, no efficient workflow for algo development
- limited possibilities to analyze and visualize backtest results
- buggy API, bugfixes take too much time
- expensive for retail/invididuals (default pack = +800$/year)

Pros:

- community provide support in forum
- open source (LEAN)
- large and reliable database including tick data for many securities
- L1 quote data available for equities
- live trading
- event-driven backtesting engine
- all-in-one ecosystem (research, backtest, live trading, data, optimization)

Shady site not sure if the team behind are trustworthy with holding your algos data. I found other frameworks like backtrader that are easier to pick up and get working with quickly than LEAN. LEAN is poorly documenting making learning a huge hurdle. Also, I question the stability of their site because of the amount of bugs you can find in their UI and some that I encountered in plotting during backtrading. If you need an online IDE, Quantopian is far more reliable and documented and quicker to work with but still could have issues with data privacy.

QuantConnect review :

QuantConnect is one of the great platform to implement automated quant trading strategies. However what makes me unhappy with this platform is that it is very slow at times. Refer to screenshot link below showing the wait time more than 1800 seconds.

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