FX Replay Alternative — Backtest Free in Your Browser

The real difference: what each one meters

This is the part that gets lost in feature grids, and it matters more than any individual line item.

FX Replay meters activity. Its plans are defined by how many backtesting sessions you can create, how many trades you can take in each, how long your data is retained and how long a single session can run. Use it more, and you move up a tier.

CRTLAB meters history depth. There is one boundary: the free tier replays the most recent two weeks; Pro replays up to ten years. Within your tier, nothing is counted — not sessions, not trades, not how long you sit there.

So the question isn't "which is cheaper". It's which wall you hit first. A trader grinding 300 setups on recent price hits FX Replay's trade caps and never touches CRTLAB's. A trader who needs 2019 to check whether their edge survives a different regime hits CRTLAB's wall on day one and never notices FX Replay's.

Plans and limits, side by side

FX Replay publishes three tiers. Here is what each actually gives you, against CRTLAB's two.

FX Replay's plans and prices were checked against fxreplay.com's own pricing page on 2026-08-20. Both products change their plans — check the current pricing yourself before deciding, including ours.

The 50-trade free plan is the number worth thinking hardest about

Not as a criticism — as arithmetic that applies to any capped free tier, and it's the single most useful thing on this page.

Fifty trades is below the sample size at which a backtest means anything for most edges. A win rate measured over 50 trades carries a confidence interval wide enough to contain both "this works" and "this is noise" unless the edge is very large. Run the numbers yourself in the backtest sample size calculator: a strong edge of about +0.5R per trade clears the bar in under 50 trades, but a realistic +0.1R edge needs a sample in the high hundreds before the interval clears zero.

So on a 50-trade cap the honest outcome of a free backtest is usually "inconclusive" — which is a real result, just not one you can act on. That's the trade a capped free tier asks you to make, and it's worth going in knowing it rather than discovering it at trade 50. The full reasoning is in how many backtests you actually need.

CRTLAB's free tier makes the opposite trade: log as many trades as you like, but only across two weeks of history. You can reach a conclusive sample on a frequent intraday setup without paying. You cannot check whether that setup also worked in 2022 — that's what Pro is for, and we'd rather be clear about which half you're getting.

Where FX Replay is genuinely the better choice

Three cases, and we'd send you there ourselves.

You need sub-minute data. FX Replay's Pro tier advertises seconds-level data. CRTLAB's finest granularity is one minute. If your entry model turns on what happened inside a minute — scalping a news release, reading the first seconds of an open — that's not a preference, it's a requirement, and we don't meet it.

You trade futures. FX Replay's Pro tier includes futures and CME data. CRTLAB covers 38 markets as index CFDs, spot FX, metals, energy, crypto and US equities — no futures contracts, no roll handling. If you trade ES or NQ futures specifically and contract-accurate data matters to you, we don't have it.

You want checklists and structured review built in. FX Replay leans into checklists and trade-review tooling as first-class features. CRTLAB logs and scores every trade automatically — win rate, average R, profit factor, equity curve — but it isn't a checklist app, and if that workflow is what keeps you disciplined, use the tool that has it.

Where CRTLAB is the better choice

You want to actually finish a sample without paying first. No trade cap, no session cap, no retention timer on the free tier. The constraint is two weeks of history, not your effort, so you can reach a real sample on a frequent setup and decide with evidence whether the tool is worth $29 to you.

You want depth rather than granularity. Pro opens up to ten years per market. That's what lets you test whether an edge survives a regime change instead of a fortnight of conditions — the difference between a result and a story, and the reason out-of-sample testing is possible at all.

You want a method to test, not just a tool to test with. Pro includes the CRT × Mitigation strategy and a complete ICT course. A replay tool with no strategy is a very expensive way to discover you don't have rules yet — which is the most common reason a backtest goes nowhere. If you're at that stage, writing rules you can actually test comes before choosing software.

You're weighing $29 against $35 on the same job. If neither the seconds-level data nor futures matters to you, the top tiers are doing the same work and the cheaper one includes a course.

How to decide in five minutes

Answer two questions honestly. Does your entry depend on anything faster than a one-minute candle? If yes, use FX Replay — that's the end of the comparison. Do you need history older than two weeks to answer your current question? If no, CRTLAB's free tier will let you finish a sample without a card and without a trade cap, so start there.

If you need both depth and speed control, the honest answer is that both top tiers do the job and the difference is $6 a month and a course. Try both free tiers — they cost nothing but an evening, and an evening of clicking tells you more about which one you'll actually keep opening than any comparison page, including this one.

Whichever you pick, the thing that determines whether it works is not the software: it's whether you can get through enough setups to reach a conclusion. The time arithmetic behind that is worth ten minutes before you commit to either.