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Moving from FinLab to TW Market Data
These are different kinds of tool and the honest framing is that they can coexist. FinLab's documentation describes reading data through its Python package with an api_token, inside a research and backtesting platform. We are a data API: no backtester, no strategy tooling. Teams commonly keep the research environment they like and change where the data underneath it comes from.
What maps to what
| FinLab | TW Market Data |
|---|---|
| data.get('...') inside the finlab package | An HTTPS request to a dataset endpoint, from any languageThe practical consequence is not Python versus REST — it is that a REST API is reachable from whatever else you run: a scheduler, a Go service, a spreadsheet, an agent. |
| api_token configured in the package | X-API-Key header on each request |
| A DataFrame returned to your notebook | JSON rows you load into a DataFrame yourselfOne extra line in pandas. It is the price of the data being reachable from things that are not Python. |
| Free accounts reach the end of 2021; VIP reaches the latest trading day | The free tier reaches the latest trading day, with a monthly request quotaStated on FinLab's own FAQ and cited on our comparison page. The limits are shaped differently rather than simply larger or smaller: theirs is a history cut-off, ours is a request count. |
When to stay with FinLab
- You want a backtesting engine and strategy tooling. We do not have one and are not building one — if that is why you are there, that reason has not changed.
- Your research lives entirely in Python notebooks and a package-native workflow is what you want.
- You need markets beyond Taiwan. We are Taiwan-only.
Questions
Can I use both?
Yes, and for a research team that is often the sensible answer: keep the environment you are productive in, and pull the underlying data from an API that states where each figure came from. Nothing in either tool prevents it.
Do I lose my backtests?
The backtests are yours and stay where they are. What changes is the input. Re-run a period you have already tested and compare before you rely on the new source — that is worth doing when changing any data supplier, including changing to us.
The four-way comparison table sets out the same ground with every factual cell cited to the vendor's own documentation.
Statements about FinLab on this page reflect its own published documentation, read on the date shown on the comparison page.