Alpaca vs OpenFIGI

Alpaca's Market Data API v2 delivers realtime and historical quotes, trades, and bars for US equities and ETFs over REST and WebSocket, requiring an Alpaca brokerage/API-key account. The free plan gives 200 API calls/minute with 15-minute-delayed IEX-exchange data and 30-symbol WebSocket streams; the $99/month Algo Trader Plus tier removes the call cap, adds true realtime data from all US exchanges (plus real-time OPRA options quotes), and unlimited streamed symbols. Both tiers include 7+ years of historical data.

OpenFIGI is Bloomberg's free public API for the Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) standard, mapping third-party symbology (tickers, ISINs, CUSIPs, SEDOLs) to FIGIs across equities, options, futures, and indices, plus full-text search and a bulk spreadsheet-upload tool. A live test of the mapping endpoint returned real data with zero API key supplied, capped at 25 requests per 60 seconds — the entry's stored `API Key` auth is corrected to `None`, since registering for a free key only raises that throughput ceiling rather than gating access. A live Origin-header probe (an OPTIONS preflight and a real POST) found no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header on either response, correcting the stored `cors: yes` to `no`.