Migrating from IEX Cloud to Databento
IEX Cloud, an IEX Group company, has announced its closure and will be retiring its financial data products on August 31, 2024. As a result, we've seen a large number of users migrating over to Databento and we've prepared this guide to help users with this transition.
If you're an IEX Cloud user seeking an alternative, Databento provides real-time and historical data from over 40 trading venues—including IEX itself—alongside a familiar suite of features.
Read on to discover how Databento can support your market data and corporate actions needs, as well as answers to questions we've received from customers making the switch.
IEX Cloud covered prices from US equity venues only, whereas Databento provides price data from a wider range of 40+ venues and corporate actions from 215 exchanges.
Both IEX Cloud and Databento are official, direct distributors of IEX market data. As a licensed distributor of IEX data, we're well-positioned to support former IEX Cloud users who simply need a direct substitute for their entry level IEX Bid, Ask and Last Trade feed.
IEX Cloud charged users by message count, but Databento's usage-based plans charge per GB of data used.
IEX Cloud required users to prepay for credits each month, essentially still imposing a fixed monthly fee. On the other hand, Databento's usage-based plans don't require a monthly commitment.
Both IEX Cloud and Databento support any language over our APIs. However, Databento also provides official client libraries in Python, C++ and Rust.
IEX Cloud supported streaming real-time data over Server-Sent Events (SSE), whereas Databento's Raw API for live data uses a simple socket-based, subscription-style protocol with less latency overhead than SSE.
IEX Cloud's REST API and Databento's HTTP API are similar. While IEX Cloud's historical API is JSON-based, Databento's API supports multiple encodings, including binary, CSV, and JSON.
While IEX Cloud primarily caters to prosumers and retail users, Databento’s services are designed to support commercial needs and applications. This means you might find some major differences:
- Databento users can access full order book data (L3) and market depth (L2) data alongside top-of-book data (L1), while IEX Cloud focused on L1 data only.
- Databento's API is significantly faster because of its compressed, zero-copy binary format, which does not have the overhead of JSON serialization, and our use of primary colocation sites.
- Our entry-level Databento Equities Basic data includes IEX, NYSE Chicago and NYSE National data, providing a more accurate view of prices and liquidity especially during pre-market hours. On the other hand, IEX's entry-level IEX Bid, Ask and Last Trade data only sources from IEX.
- Our data is sourced directly from the same proprietary feeds used by the world's leading trading firms, not the SIPs.
- Databento also provides batch flat file downloads, packet captures, PTP timestamps, and other features that are designed for institutional traders.
Yes! IEX Cloud offered access to market data via three Data Bundles: Equities (IEX quote feed and 15-minute delayed quotes from the SIPs), Historical (stock prices for US equities), and IEX Bid, Ask, and Last Trade.
Users switching from an IEX Bid, Ask, and Last Trade bundle are recommended to use our Databento Equities Basic dataset in the MBP-1 schema. Most of our usage-based users spend less than $10/month on this dataset which has zero exchange license fees. We're also offering a discounted rate on our Enterprise Live plan at $500/month for users switching to us from IEX Cloud for the first year.
Users switching from an IEX Equities or Historical bundle are recommended to use our Nasdaq TotalView-ITCH dataset.
Yes! Databento provides upcoming and historical corporate actions impacting over 310,000 global securities, including every company announcement and 61 events like dividends, splits, mergers & acquisitions, listings, and more. The venue coverage is similar to IEX Cloud's and starts at $499/month. Learn more on our website.
If you're interested in migrating to Databento, our team can help direct you to the right solution to match your needs and current IEX Cloud plan. Feel free to get in touch via live chat or email, and we'll get back to you the same business day. In the meantime, you can always create a free Databento account, which includes $125 in credits when you sign up.