Head to head · Market prices · October 2026 research run

Databento vs Intrinio

Databento scores 60.3 (C) on agent readiness against Intrinio's 54.2 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Intrinio leads on reliability. Both do market prices.

Best financial market data APIs for AI agents · All 55 markets comparisons

Which one, for what

Databento C

Best for An agent that needs exchange-level trades, quotes, order book and bar data for US and European futures, options and equities, or corporate actions and a security master, and can budget per GB.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 75 against 43
  • Agent ergonomics, 80 against 70
  • Security & auth, 61 against 35
  • Maintenance & community, 84 against 70

Watch for

Two critical and several major incidents on the status page in the 90 days to 3 November 2026, mostly Historical API outages and batch job delays

Intrinio C

Best for An agent doing US equity, options and fundamentals research on a paid plan that wants one vendor for prices, filings, estimates and an OAuth MCP server.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 83 against 50

Watch for

The API key is documented as api_key in the query string as the first option, with no scopes, rotation or expiry found

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reliability Intrinio +33

Databento 50

Graded as a hosted service. Atlassian Statuspage at status.databento.com with ten components, Portal, Historical, FTP and seven live feeds (20). The incident feed for the 90 days to 3 November 2026 lists a critical outage of the portal and Historical API on 6 August lasting about eight hours, critical live authentication timeouts in NY4 on 28 August for about seven hours, major batch job delays of about two days each opened on 6 and 12 October, a six-hour GLBX.MDP3 delay in the Historical API on 6 October, and a Frankfurt outage affecting XEUR and XEEE opened on 2 November and still in monitoring. Several majors (0 of 30). Per-IP limits are published with numbers (15). 429 with a Retry-After header and a code to sleep on it; streams cut off aren't billed for unsent data, batch jobs are billed once (15). No SLA found; the pricing page names none and the terms were unreadable (0). The HTTP API is at major version 0 and the docs say it is not considered stable (0 of 10). Total 50.

Intrinio 83

Graded as a hosted service. Atlassian Statuspage at status.intrinio.com with APIv2 and APIv1 components (20). The incident feed's newest entry is a delayed SIP feed for CTA on 24 June 2026, so the 90 days to 3 November are clean (30). Limits are published in part. Pages above 100 records and bulk requests are 1 a minute on free feeds and 1 a second on paid ones, free feeds are throttled at 100 requests a second, and the daily and per-minute caps for a plan are shown only on the account page (8 of 15). A 429 carries an explanation of the limit and a 503 marks throttling or the 25-second timeout, with no Retry-After or backoff guidance (5 of 15). The Enterprise plan lists an SLA (10). The REST API is generally available (10). Total 83.

Schema & documentation Databento +32

Databento 75

No OpenAPI document was found. The contract is the per-endpoint reference with typed parameters, the DBN schemas with field tables and enums, and a .http.md variant of every page (8 of 25). llms.txt and a Markdown twin of every page with language variants (10). Endpoint pages say what each call returns and the basics pages say when to use streaming against batch (15 of 20). Typed parameters with enums for schema, encoding, symbology type and split duration (13 of 15). Code in Python, C++, Rust and curl on every page, and an error table with codes, named error identifiers and a docs link in each body (14 of 15). Semantic versioning with dated release notes per component, breaking changes and deprecations called out (15). Total 75.

Intrinio 43

No OpenAPI document was found. The SDKs are generated from a spec that declares API version 2.135.4, but the spec itself isn't published, and the MCP server's tool definitions aren't in any public source (5 of 25). docs.intrinio.com/llms.txt and intrinio.com/llms.txt return 404, and there are no Markdown pages (0 of 10). Each endpoint page states what it returns with its parameters, with little on when not to use a call (12 of 20). Parameters are typed, with required ones marked and allowed values in prose (9 of 15). Code samples in six languages on every endpoint, and a response codes page that lists codes without a body format (10 of 15). The v2 path is versioned, but the version history lists 2.0.0 to 2.6.2 with no dates and is out of step with the SDK's API version (7 of 15). Total 43.

Security & auth Databento +26

Databento 61

Named API keys, up to 100 per account, rotated or deleted in the portal, with per-member permissions, sent only as the Basic auth username; no scopes per key and no expiry (25 of 30). Every API call is a read, and a monthly historical limit caps what a leaked key can spend; live usage is not capped (14 of 20). The API returns market data and reference records, not free text from third parties (10). A data usage page in the portal and a billing page per cycle, with no per-key call log documented (8 of 15). The vendor revokes keys it finds in public and documents key hygiene; security.txt returns 404 and no bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001 was found on readable pages (4 of 20). Total 61.

Intrinio 35

One account key with no scopes, documented first as api_key in the query string and second as a Bearer header, with no rotation or expiry found. Public keys for browsers are restricted to listed domains. The MCP server uses OAuth 2 with PKCE S256, dynamic client registration, a revocation endpoint and one scope (20 less 10 for the query string, so 10). Every endpoint is a read and the MCP page says the server cannot trade or change the account (15 of 20). News bodies and filing text are third-party content, with no guidance on treating them as untrusted (5 of 15). The account page shows limits and usage per subscription; no per-call log was found (3 of 15). security.txt returns 404, and no disclosure policy, bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001 was found. The privacy policy says the company processes data under the GDPR (2 of 20). Total 35.

Maintenance & community Databento +14

Databento 84

Python 0.89.0 on 28 October 2026 and data release notes dated 20 October (30). Python 0.85.0 (25 August), 0.86.0 (1 September), 0.87.0 (22 September), 0.88.0 (21 October) and 0.89.0, plus Rust 0.64.0 and C++ 0.69.0 on 27 October and four dated data notes since 8 August (20). A Slack community, Intercom chat, support@databento.com, a public roadmap and a public issue tracker linked from the release notes; GitHub issue replies were not read because the GitHub API rate limit was reached (12 of 15). Official clients in Python, C++ and Rust released the same week as each other (15). The Python client is Apache-2.0 with releases on GitHub and PyPI; CI and dependency pins were not checked (7 of 10). Total 84.

Intrinio 70

The six real-time websocket SDK repositories were pushed between 22 and 29 October 2026, and the MCP server is labelled New on the vendor's page (30). The last tagged release found is intrinio-sdk 7.2.0 on PyPI on 27 May 2026, following 7.0.0 on 2 March and 7.1.0 on 24 March; the October pushes have no tags or dated changelog entries, and the API version history carries no dates (10 of 20). Support is live chat through HubSpot, an AI chat and support@intrinio.com, with a status page; GitHub issue activity was not read (8 of 15). Official SDKs are current in six languages (15). The Python SDK is generated by swagger-codegen with CI not checked (7 of 10). Total 70.

Agent ergonomics Databento +10

Databento 80

limit, time ranges to the nanosecond, schema choice from trades to daily bars, encoding choice and metadata.get_cost to size a request before paying (20 of 25). Symbol, date and schema filters, batch jobs listed and fetched by id, no cursor pagination because ranges are split by time (16 of 20). Errors carry an HTTP code, a named identifier, a message and a docs link, with 206 for partially resolved symbols (17 of 20). Reads only on the historical and reference APIs; a duplicate streaming request is charged twice, batch is billed once, and the portal can cap monthly spend (12 of 20). Few required parameters, and official clients in Python, C++ and Rust (15). Total 80.

Intrinio 70

page_size from 100 up to 10,000 sizes a response, and the MCP server batches ticker lists, but there is no field selection (15 of 25). next_page tokens, date and symbol filters on the data endpoints (18 of 20). Response codes are documented, 403 for an unsubscribed feed and 429 with a limit explanation, with no error body format or error code reference (10 of 20). Every call is a read and the vendor says the MCP server writes nothing back, but no readOnlyHint or safe-retry guidance was found (12 of 20). Few required parameters, and official SDKs in Python, C#, Java, JavaScript, R and Ruby (15). Total 70.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDatabentoIntrinioEdge
Reliability16%205083Intrinio +33
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27543Databento +32
Agent ergonomics13%16.28070Databento +10
Security & auth14%17.56135Databento +26
Payments & pricing10%12.52220Databento +2
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88470Databento +14
Transparency & trust7%8.84951Intrinio +2
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 60.3/100C 54.2/100

Facts side by side

FactDatabentoIntrinio
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorDatabento, Inc.Intrinio, Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://hist.databento.comhttps://api-v2.intrinio.com
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingPay per usePaid
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0 (clients)none
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-10-282026-05-27
Terms last updatedcouldn't be readno date given
Privacy policy last updatedcouldn't be readno date given
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be readyes
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be readyes
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be readyes
Popularity309 stars76 stars

Verdicts

Databento

Exchange-level tick and order book data metered per GB, with published per-IP rate limits, Retry-After on 429, dated release notes and clients in three languages. The HTTP API is still at major version 0, the status page lists two critical and several major incidents in 90 days, there is no OpenAPI document, and the legal pages were unreadable.

Intrinio

A read-only US equities, options and fundamentals API with a clean status history, SDKs in six languages, paging up to 10,000 records and an OAuth MCP server included in every plan. The REST key is documented in the query string, no OpenAPI document or llms.txt was found, the version history is undated, and plans start at $150 a month.

Before you call either

Databento

  1. Call metadata.get_cost before timeseries.get_range, and set a monthly historical limit in the portal; a duplicate streaming request is charged twice
  2. Send the key as the Basic auth username (-u $DATABENTO_API_KEY:) to hist.databento.com/v0; never put it in the URL or source code
  3. On 429 wait for the Retry-After header; keep under 100 time series requests a second and 20 batch submissions a minute per IP
  4. Check status.databento.com before retrying a slow or 504 Historical request, since several incidents since August were API outages or batch delays
  5. Use batch download for requests over 5 GB, split by time range or limit, and read schema and stype_in from the dataset page before querying

Intrinio

  1. Send the key as Authorization: Bearer, not ?api_key=, so it stays out of logs
  2. Expect 403 for a data feed the account isn't subscribed to, 429 with an explanation when a limit is hit, and 503 when a request passes 25 seconds; shrink the query rather than retry at once
  3. Keep page_size at 100 or below unless the plan is paid, since larger pages are limited to one request a minute on free feeds
  4. Confirm the plan before displaying or passing Intrinio data to anyone else; the Individual plan forbids it
  5. The MCP server returns a message naming the product that unlocks data outside the plan; don't retry the same call

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Databento or Intrinio?

Databento scores 60.3 (C) on agent readiness against Intrinio's 54.2 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Intrinio leads on reliability.

Do Databento and Intrinio need an API key?

Both need an API key.

Can an agent call Databento and Intrinio without installing anything?

Yes. Databento has a hosted endpoint at https://hist.databento.com and Intrinio at https://api-v2.intrinio.com.

Other comparisons with Databento or Intrinio

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