TradingView's Strategy Tester runs your Pine script on the chart you already use, on every market it charts, with no trading costs unless you set them and the history your plan loads. Alpha Charts runs the same Pine v6 on its own US stock data, charges costs and checks every run on held-out data by default, and writes the script with AI. Here is how to choose.
TradingView Strategy Tester's column is what tradingview.com says, checked on 24 October 2026.
| ALPHA CHARTS | TRADINGVIEW STRATEGY TESTER | |
|---|---|---|
| What runs your script | The Strategy Tester runs the Pine v6 script you paste, on its own Pine runtime, on real market data | TradingView's own Pine engine and broker emulator, the engine every Pine script is written against |
| Markets | US stocks and ETFs; NQ, MNQ, ES and MES futures for signed-in accounts | Every market TradingView charts: stocks worldwide, crypto, forex, futures and more |
| History in a backtest | Stocks live from IEX, the full US tape after 15 minutes (Alpaca); daily history from 2016, intraday from one minute | The bars loaded on the chart: 5K on Basic, 10K on Essential and Plus, 20K on Premium, 40K on Ultimate; Deep Backtesting on Premium and higher runs on all available history, up to 2 million bars and 1 million trades, with results in the report tab only |
| Trading costs in a backtest | 5 bps commission and 2.5 bps slippage per side on every run, by default; a commission the script declares wins | None unless set: the documentation says that if not specified, the strategy applies no commission to filled orders; commission and slippage are set in the script or in its Properties |
| Order fills | At the next bar's open; the script never sees future data | A one-tick delay by default, on the next available tick after the bar closes; the Bar Magnifier (high detalization) refines fills with lower-timeframe bars on Premium and Ultimate; the on-order-fill setting can cause lookahead bias, with a warning in the report |
| Every backtest | Split into in-sample and out-of-sample with a verdict, drawdown analytics, the full trade list and every trade on the chart | A performance summary (key stats, returns, trades analysis, drawdowns, capital efficiency), an equity curve and the list of trades, kept up to the latest 9,000 trades on the default range; CSV and XLSX exports of trades on the paid plans |
| Held-out test | Every run: about the last third of the history is kept apart and judged on its own, with its dates and a verdict | Not built in; the usual way is a date-range input in the script, or Deep Backtesting over another period |
| Optimiser | Fits a script's inputs on the past, judges them on data it never saw, and compares the winner against the best of the same number of random tries (Pro and Max) | Inputs are changed by hand in the script's settings; no optimiser in the tester |
| AI | The Pine Copilot writes Pine v6 from plain words, checks it and backtests it | You write the Pine script; see the separate comparison with TradingView's AI copilot |
| Free start | Unlimited free backtests on a free account, no card; free tools with no account | The Basic plan is free: the Strategy Tester with the basic report metrics on 5,000 bars of chart history |
| Plans | $49.99, $99.99 or $129.99 a month, less on the yearly plan; every plan comes with 30 days money back | Essential, Plus, Premium and Ultimate, billed monthly or yearly; current prices on tradingview.com/pricing |
The Strategy Tester runs the Pine script itself on real data, not a rewrite of it. Orders fill at the next bar's open, the script never sees future data, and every fill pays 5 bps commission and 2.5 bps slippage per side by default.
Each run is split into an in-sample and an out-of-sample period, stated as dates. The held-out part gets a verdict: survived, decayed, did not survive, or too few trades to judge. Drawdown analytics and the full list of trades come with every run.
The optimiser fits a script's inputs on the past, judges them on data it never saw, and compares the winner against the best of the same number of random tries.
The data and its adjustments, the universe and its survivorship bias, the fill rules and the verdict's thresholds are written out in Data and methodology.
For traders of US stocks and ETFs who want trading costs and a held-out verdict on every run by default, and the AI to write the script, yes. TradingView's tester is the reference engine for Pine and covers every market it charts, so most people use both.
TradingView's engine is the one Pine is written for. Alpha Charts runs the same Pine v6 on its own runtime and its own data, charges 5 bps commission and 2.5 bps slippage per side by default, and fills at the next bar's open, so a result with costs will be lower than a result without them, and a script can occasionally behave differently.
Only if the script or its Properties set them: the documentation says that if not specified, the strategy applies no commission to filled orders. TradingView's own documentation warns that without modelling costs a strategy's historical profitability is overestimated.
On TradingView, the bars loaded on the chart: 5,000 on Basic up to 40,000 on Ultimate, and all available history with Deep Backtesting on Premium and higher. Alpha Charts tests daily history from 2016 and intraday history from one minute, on every plan and on the free backtests.
Alpha Charts keeps about the last third of every run apart and gives it a verdict. TradingView's tester has no held-out test built in.
For charting and for other markets, yes. Alpha Charts puts its indicators on your TradingView chart on the Pro and Max plans, and the Pine Copilot writes Pine v6 that runs on TradingView too.
Sources for TradingView Strategy Tester: tradingview.com/pine-script-docs/concepts/strategies, tradingview.com/pricing (the plan comparison) and TradingView's help pages on Deep Backtesting, read on 24 October 2026. If anything here has changed, tell us and we will correct it. TradingView Strategy Tester is a trademark of its owner; Alpha Charts is not affiliated with or endorsed by TradingView Strategy Tester. Every tool side by side: AI Pine Script tools compared.