Alpaca vs SEC EDGAR Data

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.

SEC EDGAR's data.sec.gov REST APIs serve JSON-formatted company filing histories and XBRL financial-statement facts (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, and more) extracted from filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. No authentication or API key is required, but the SEC's fair-access policy requires a descriptive User-Agent header identifying the requester and caps traffic at 10 requests per second — requests without one are rejected with a 403. A live probe confirmed CORS is enabled (Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *) once that header is set.