FX Replay AlternativeBacktest Free in Your Browser

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 candles advanced, and nothing else. Every market, the full history on each, every indicator, every overlay, prop firm mode and the performance report are open before you make an account. There is no smaller version of the product. The one thing that runs down is the number of bars you have stepped forward — and reading the chart, drawing on it, changing timeframe, scrolling back and journalling a trade all cost nothing.

So the question is not "which is cheaper", it is what you are buying. FX Replay sells access to a tool for a period of time. CRTLAB sells the work you do with it. If you backtest every day, the subscription is the simpler deal and you should take it. If you backtest in bursts — which, on our own usage data, is what almost everyone actually does — a monthly plan bills you hardest in the months you did not open it.

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.

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 makes a different trade, and it is worth stating just as plainly. There is no cap on trades, sessions, indicators, markets or history — but there is a cap on candles, and 10,000 of them a week is roughly two hours of replay. On a frequent intraday setup that is enough to reach a real sample. On a setup that appears twice a week across several years, it is not, and you will be asked for $14.99 a month. We would rather you knew which half you were getting.

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.

You backtest in bursts. This is the whole argument. A subscription charges the same for the fortnight you worked eighty hours and the six weeks you did not open it, which makes cancelling the rational move and punishes the product for the exact usage pattern it is built around. Candles do not expire, so a balance bought during a burst is still there when the next one starts, and a quiet month costs nothing.

You want depth rather than granularity. The full archive is open on the free chart — no plan gates it. That is 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 the whole product free before you pay anything. Every market, tool and timeframe is in the free sample of 10,000 candles, so you can find out whether candle-by-candle replay suits you before spending a cent. If you are still deciding what to test, writing rules you can actually test comes first.

You want to run the arithmetic on your own usage. Count candles, not hours: stepping every bar, the free 10,000 a week is about 21 weeks of 15-minute forex history or 7 weeks of 5-minute. If that covers your testing, you never pay. If it does not, unlimited is $14.99 a month here, against $35 for FX Replay Pro.

Answer two questions honestly. Does your entry depend on anything faster than a one-minute candle? If yes, use FX Replay — that is the end of the comparison, and we do not meet the requirement. Do you open a replay tool most days, or in bursts a few times a year? A few hours a week often fits inside CRTLAB's free allowance entirely. Most days, compare the two monthly prices: $35 against $14.99.

Either way, try both before you pay either of us. FX Replay's Beginner plan and CRTLAB's 10,000 free candles both cost nothing but an evening, and an evening of clicking tells you more about which one you will 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.