A Free Alternative to Forex Tester

What Forex Tester actually is (there are two products)

The first thing to get straight, because it causes most of the confusion: Forex Tester is now two separate products. There's the original desktop application, currently on version 6, distributed as a Windows .exe installer. And there's Forex Tester Online, a newer browser-based version that the company's own site now steers new users toward.

The desktop app is the one with the long reputation. It's sold as a licence plus a data package: the site lists the software with Basic Data — described as 25 years of medium-quality historical data across 18 symbols, updated monthly — and then paid tiers that add Super Data, described as 25 years of premium data across 860 symbols with daily updates, tick data, floating spreads and news for nine currencies. At the time of writing the sale prices run from $149 for software plus Basic Data up to $469 for software plus lifetime Super Data.

Forex Tester Online is priced as a one-time lifetime purchase instead: Starter at €135 covering 80 symbols (28 forex pairs, 16 stocks, 10 indices, 10 ETFs, 6 commodities), and Pro at €239 covering 283 symbols across forex, crypto, stocks, indices, futures, commodities and ETFs. Both advertise up to 23 years of tick-by-tick data per symbol, and there's a free demo with no card. Those are sale prices on a page that runs sales constantly — check Forex Tester's current pricing yourself rather than trusting any comparison page, including this one.

Where CRTLAB is different

It runs in the browser and the free tier has no card. No installer, no Windows requirement, no Wine or Parallels if you're on a Mac, no data package to choose before you've decided you like backtesting. Open it, pick a market, start stepping through candles. The free tier covers every market and every timeframe, including intraday, across the most recent two weeks of real data. Pro opens the same replay across ten years per market.

Trades log themselves. This is the difference that actually changes outcomes. In most backtesting software, replay is the feature and recording results is your problem — you mark the trade, then alt-tab to a spreadsheet. In CRTLAB, marking an entry, stop and target writes the trade to your record automatically and recalculates win rate, average R and profit factor as the sample grows. The single most common reason a backtest gets abandoned is the friction of logging, and forty abandoned trades tell you nothing.

It's built around the way smart-money traders actually test. Automatic Asia, London and New York session boxes, the drawing tools you'd reach for on a sweep — trendlines, fibs, rectangles, long/short position tools — and charts rendered with TradingView's own open-source Lightweight Charts library, so they'll feel familiar immediately. The price data is institutional-grade and sourced from Databento: real to the tick, never synthesised.

Where Forex Tester is still the better tool

A comparison page that only lists the competitor's weaknesses isn't worth reading, so plainly: Forex Tester covers far more instruments than CRTLAB does. Its Super Data package advertises 860 symbols and the online Pro tier 283. CRTLAB covers eight — NAS100, US30, SP500, EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, gold and bitcoin. If you trade a specific equity, an exotic pair or a futures contract, that's the end of the conversation and Forex Tester is your answer.

It also does things CRTLAB deliberately doesn't. The desktop app lets you import your own historical data, run custom indicators and automated strategies, and test against tick data with floating spreads and modelled commission — which matters a great deal if you're validating an algorithm where a fraction of a pip per trade decides whether the system is profitable. CRTLAB is built for discretionary setups read by eye, not for spread-sensitive automation.

And it works offline. If you backtest on a plane or on bad internet, a desktop application is simply the right architecture and a browser tool is not.

The honest summary: these tools are aimed at different jobs. Forex Tester is a deep, paid, instrument-rich simulator for people who have already committed to backtesting as a practice. CRTLAB is for proving whether one specific discretionary setup is real, on the eight markets most smart-money traders actually use, without paying to find out.

What actually matters when you're choosing

Whether your instrument is covered. Check this before anything else — every other feature is irrelevant if the market you trade isn't in the list. Eight markets is a real constraint and it disqualifies CRTLAB for plenty of traders.

What it costs to find out you don't like backtesting. Most people who buy a backtesting licence use it for a fortnight. A free tier isn't a marketing gimmick here — it's the difference between discovering the habit doesn't suit you for nothing and discovering it for $149.

Whether hindsight can leak in. Any tool that lets you scroll freely forward and back also lets you quietly grade yourself on information you wouldn't have had. Committing before the next candle prints is what makes a result mean anything — the backtesting mistakes that make results worthless covers how this creeps in without you noticing.

Whether the results end up somewhere you'll actually read. Data quality arguments get all the attention, but the thing that kills most backtests is a spreadsheet the trader stopped updating in week two. Ask what the tool does after you close the trade, not just what it does before you open it.

How big a sample you can realistically reach. Whichever tool you pick, the number of setups you get through decides whether you learn anything. Fifty is a starting point, not a verdict — the backtest sample size calculator will tell you what your own win rate and reward:risk actually require.

Trying it without uninstalling anything

There's nothing to download and no licence key. Pick one of the eight markets, drop into real historical price, and step forward a candle at a time with the right edge of the chart hidden. When your setup forms, mark entry, stop and target by your written rules, then step on and let it resolve — win or lose, it's recorded.

If you're coming from Forex Tester, the habit that transfers best is testing one rule at a time. Size each test with the position size calculator so the drawdown you record is the one you'd genuinely have taken, and if you want the full process end to end, the ICT backtesting walkthrough runs through it step by step.