Every TradingView feature and price claim below was read on 2026-10-17 and 2026-10-18 from TradingView's own properties: its pricing page, its market data coverage page, two of its own announcement posts (dated 2025-09-11 and 2026-09-23), its help articles on open interest and on funding rate, and the live derivatives tab of a symbol page. None of it comes from an affiliate roundup. Where its documentation does not say something, this piece says so rather than calling the feature missing. One thing is worth settling in the first paragraph: TradingView is the better charting platform, and nothing here is an argument that it is not.
Which one should I actually open?
If your question is about one instrument over time, open TradingView. It has the larger symbol universe, the alerting, the drawing tools and Pine Script, and its free Basic tier will chart a perpetual contract perfectly well. If your question is cross sectional, meaning you are comparing the same metric across venues at the same moment, then the answer now depends on which metric, and the part that cuts against this page should go first. TradingView's own derivatives tab breaks open interest and liquidations down by exchange, free, with no indicator spent. Funding is the metric that tab does not break down, and funding dispersion is what Athenum's explainer on the open interest weighted funding rate is about. For that one question the chart model is still working against you, because a chart is a time series of one symbol and the question has venues on its other axis.
The two free tiers meter the same two things in a different order
Both companies give away a real product and both put a meter on it. Both meters touch the canvas and the data. What differs is which one bites first, and on a cross venue funding question that ordering decides everything.
TradingView's free plan is named Basic, and it is metered mostly on the canvas. Its Compare plans table gives Basic one entry in the "Charts per tab" row, against 2, 4, 8 and 16 on the paid tiers, and the indicator tooltip says it directly: "Free accounts support up to 2 indicators per chart, Essential supports 5, Plus handles 10, and Premium accounts unlock up to 25 indicators per chart!" The tooltip stops at Premium; the Compare plans row runs on to 50 on Ultimate. Basic is also the only tier without the ad free benefit, which the paid cards carry as "No ads".
It meters some data too, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise: the same table caps Basic at 5,000 historical bars against 10,000 to 40,000 on the paid tiers, and marks the fastest data flow and the extra market data subscriptions as paid only. What it does not do is restrict which venue you may look at.
Athenum's free plan is metered on the data. The live pricing card reads "$0 /mo" with the bullets "Free access to get started", "1 analysis domain", "Delayed data; no real-time entitlement", "1 venue per feature", and "Up to 24 hours of history". The same card also carries "1 saved layout", "No alerts", and an interval and symbol lock, which are the limits a comparison page written by us has the least incentive to quote, so they are quoted here.
So the same sentence, "the free tier is enough for me", means two unrelated things depending on which product you say it about.
Comparison table
| TradingView Basic (free) | Athenum Free (free) | |
|---|---|---|
| What the meter counts most | The canvas: charts and indicators, plus a historical bar cap | The data: venues, history, freshness |
| Free limits, as the page states them | Compare plans rows: "Charts per tab" 1, "Indicators per chart" 2, "Historical bars available" 5K, and the two "Ad-free" rows crossed. The paid cards carry "No ads"; the page never writes the phrase "contains ads" | "1 analysis domain", "1 venue per feature", "Up to 24 hours of history", "Delayed data; no real-time entitlement" |
| Venue restriction on free | None stated | "1 venue per feature" |
| History on free | Capped at 5,000 historical bars on Basic, against 10,000 to 40,000 on paid tiers | "Up to 24 hours of history" |
| Real time on free | Crypto streams real time on Basic: TradingView's market data coverage page lists the real-time fee for Binance, Bybit, OKX, Kraken and Coinbase as zero, in the requesting region's currency. The pricing page separately gates the fastest data flow and the number of market data subscriptions to paid tiers | "no real-time entitlement" |
| Derivatives metrics offered | Funding rates, liquidations, long/short ratios, open interest, as chart indicators, as their own tickers, as screener columns, or on the symbol's derivatives tab | Funding, open interest, order flow, basis, options max pain, ETF flow, macro |
| How you reach a derivatives metric | Open interest and liquidations: an "Exchanges breakdown" panel on the symbol's derivatives tab, free. Funding: an indicator or a ticker, one venue's one contract at a time | Read it as a field in a cross venue view |
| Paid tiers, as rendered on each site 2026-10-17 | Essential, Plus, Premium, Ultimate, plus Enterprise plans. The page's own structured data also carries an Expert SKU that the visible pricing cards do not render | Lite $27/mo, Pro $97/mo, Pro+ $37/mo on a Founder Launch offer |
| On chain data | Some, via third party scripts and feeds | None. Athenum does not touch on chain |
| Trial | The free tier block is headed "Free, until you're ready" and says "No credit card needed". The paid plans carry a separate "Try free" button, and the page states no number of days for it | "Start with 7 days of Pro+. No credit card required." |
Prices are quoted as each site rendered them on 2026-10-17. TradingView's pricing page serves figures in the currency of the requesting region, so the number you see may not be the number quoted to someone else. Read it yourself before citing it, and note the currency when you do.
Does TradingView have crypto funding rates and open interest?
Yes, and anyone claiming otherwise has not checked. This matters more than the usual comparison page admits, so here is the primary source. In a post dated 2025-09-11, TradingView announced derivatives coverage for "Bitget, HTX, Kraken, Deribit, Bitmex, and Coinbase", spanning funding rates, liquidations, long/short ratios and open interest, and stated that "All indicators are available in the Indicators menu, Financials tab, ready to be applied directly to your charts."
That post is thirteen months old and it is not the current picture, so here is the newer one rather than the one that flatters this page. In a post dated 2026-09-23, TradingView writes that "Open interest and funding rate draw from nine exchanges: Binance, Bitget, Bybit, Coinbase, Deribit, HTX, Kraken, OKX, and Hyperliquid, while liquidations come from six: Binance, Bybit, Deribit, HTX, OKX, and Hyperliquid." Those are its words, not a count of ours. The 2025 list omits every venue a cross venue funding question is usually about. The same post says a "separate Derivatives tab collects the full derivatives picture for that coin and breaks each metric down by exchange", and names the screener columns: "open interest, OI change % 24h, OI/Vol 24h, funding, liquidations 24h, long liquidations 24h, and short liquidations 24h. You can also use them as filters".
Note the delivery mechanism, because it is the point rather than a quibble, and note that there are several of them, including two that cost no indicator slot at all: the Crypto Coins Screener and the symbol page's own derivatives view. The announcement delivers these as indicators you apply to a chart, which scopes each one to the symbol that chart is showing. Separately, some of this data is addressable as a symbol in its own right, through open interest and funding tickers derived from the contract's own ticker, so you can chart it directly without an indicator at all.
The indicator route and the ticker route share the property that matters here: the unit you are handed is one venue's one contract's one metric, even though the indicators and the symbol page offer an aggregated mode alongside the per venue view. The screener and the symbol page do not, and that difference runs against our case rather than for it. Both of TradingView's help articles, on open interest and on funding rate, still say that "Symbol pages show aggregated data only", and the live page has moved past that sentence: the derivatives tab of a symbol renders an "Exchanges breakdown" panel for open interest and an "Exchanges breakdown, 24h" panel for liquidations, split long and short, with no login and no indicator slot spent. For those two metrics a free user is handed the per venue spread. If you came here expecting a page that says otherwise, that is the correction.
Funding is the exception, and funding is the metric this page turns on. TradingView's own post says the tab breaks down each metric; on the live tab funding is the one that is not. The funding section there is a single chart with no breakdown panel beside it, and TradingView's own funding help article tells you to "select a futures contract" to get off the aggregate, which is one contract at a time. So a per venue funding comparison is still assembled by you: one symbol per venue, the funding indicator or that contract's funding ticker for each. Getting funding for one contract on one venue is one indicator or one symbol, and the free Basic tier allows two indicators per chart and one chart per tab. Comparison series are on every tier including Basic, so several funding tickers can share one pane; either way the assembly is yours.
What that costs you when the question has venues on an axis
Take a concrete question that derivatives traders ask constantly: which venue is paying the most to hold a long right now, and is that venue an outlier or is the whole market leaning the same way? We measured that spread directly: changing venue moved a funding bill several times more than changing coin did.
On the chart model you answer it by assembling it. One symbol per venue, the funding indicator applied to each, and the comparison performed by you, across tabs or in a single layout if your tier allows multiple charts. The data is real and the arithmetic is yours. Community scripts exist that pull several of these into one table, and the good ones work, but they depend on the ticker naming convention of each exchange feed and show nothing when the suffix does not match what the provider publishes.
On the cross venue model that comparison is the default view, because the venue is a column rather than a separate document. Athenum's free tier then meters exactly that: "1 venue per feature" means the cross venue comparison is the thing the free tier does not give you, which is the honest mirror image of TradingView's two indicator limit.
On funding, then, both products make the cross sectional question the expensive one. They just reach for a different lever first, one for the canvas and one for the coverage, and neither of them is only one or the other: TradingView caps the free tier's history, and our free tier caps layouts and alerts.
So which is the honest recommendation?
Three cases, and two of them are not us.
Buy TradingView if you are primarily charting, if you trade more than crypto derivatives, or if your derivatives questions are about one contract at a time. It is a deeper platform on every one of those axes. Four places its free tier simply beats ours, which is not a sentence we enjoy writing: crypto data streams real time on Basic where our free tier is delayed, Basic carries three active price alerts where our free tier carries none, Pine Script is on Basic rather than behind a paywall, and the derivatives tab gives away a per venue open interest breakdown that our own free tier meters at one venue per feature.
Use Athenum's free tier if you want to see whether a cross venue derivatives view answers the questions you actually have, accepting delayed data, one venue per feature and a day of history while you decide. The free calculators on the site need no sign up at all.
Use neither for on chain analysis. Athenum has none, and TradingView's coverage of it is indirect. That question belongs to a different category of tool, and we have written about those separately.
One honest complication before the link below. TradingView does publish an aggregated funding rate weighted by open interest, which is the same construction our own explainer argues for, so the gap is not that it lacks an honest aggregate. The gap is that an aggregate is one number, and the dispersion it averages away is the thing you were trying to see. If you want to see the cross sectional shape of funding before you decide anything, the clearest free explainer we have is on why an average funding rate across exchanges misleads, which is the same structural problem this page is describing from the pricing side.
Jackson Ly, founder, Athenum Analytics