Forex Tester vs FX Replay: Which Backtester Fits How You Test

Short answer: pick Forex Tester if you want to pay once and keep everything; pick FX Replay if you want a subscription that starts free and you trade futures alongside forex. Both run in the browser today, both replay history bar by bar, and both produce a performance report at the end. The meaningful differences are in the business model and the edges of the feature list, so that is where this comparison spends its time.

Prices and limits below were read from each company's own pricing page on 3 October 2026. Both change them often - Forex Tester in particular runs near-permanent promotions - so treat every number as a snapshot and check the source before you pay.

Forex Tester vs FX Replay at a glance

The free option: a demo against a tier

The two companies made opposite choices about free users, and it is worth being precise about them because "free" is usually the first filter people apply.

FX Replay's Beginner plan is a permanent free tier. No card, no expiry, no automatic conversion. You get 2 backtesting sessions, 50 records per session, 1 indicator, a one-month cap on how long a session can run, and one week of data retention. The full breakdown is on our page on whether FX Replay is free; the short version is that the retention window deletes your oldest work after seven days.

Forex Tester's free option is a demo, not a plan. You enter an email and get the interface with one month of historical data for any symbol and manual backtesting mode. Projects cannot be saved, custom indicators and EAs are not supported, and prop firm and blind testing modes are locked. Forex Tester itself describes it as a simplified preview. There is more on that in is Forex Tester free.

Measured against the job backtesting exists to do, neither gets you there. A usable sample is around 100 trades for one setup, and you need to be able to come back to it. FX Replay's free tier lets you log 50 records and then starts deleting them; Forex Tester's demo lets you trade but not keep anything. FX Replay's is the more usable of the two for a trial run, because you can at least close the tab and resume within the week.

Paying once against paying monthly

This is where the two products really diverge. FX Replay is subscription-only: Intermediate at $17.99 a month or $180 a year, Pro at $35 a month or $350 a year. Forex Tester still sells one-time lifetime licences alongside its subscriptions - on 3 October 2026 its page listed Starter lifetime at €169 and Pro lifetime at €299 before promotion, both including future updates. Its subscription prices vary by region and by whichever promotion is running, so we have not quoted them here.

Run the arithmetic over the life of a habit. Three years of FX Replay Pro is $1,050; three years of Intermediate is $540. A Forex Tester Pro lifetime licence costs the same in year one as in year three. If you are confident you will still be backtesting in eighteen months, the lifetime licence is the cheaper path by a wide margin. If you are not - and most traders who buy software in their first month of testing are not - the subscription caps your loss at the months you actually used, and FX Replay's paid tiers can be trialled without a card first.

Forex Tester's 30-day money-back guarantee narrows that risk on its side: you can buy the lifetime licence and still walk away inside a month.

Markets and data

On breadth, FX Replay is ahead. It lists 120+ forex pairs plus futures with CME data, stocks, indices, bonds and commodities, history back to 2003 for major pairs, and intervals down to seconds on its Pro tier. If you trade ES or NQ futures, or need sub-minute candles, that settles it.

On depth, Forex Tester makes the stronger claim: up to 23 years of tick-by-tick data per symbol, so a stop that would have been hit inside a one-minute bar is resolved in the right order rather than guessed from the bar's high and low. Its Starter plan covers 80 symbols - 28 forex pairs, 16 stocks, 10 indices, 10 ETFs and 6 commodities - and Pro widens that to 283, including crypto and futures. For a forex-only trader on H1 and above, both are more than enough history; tick precision matters most to scalpers whose stops and targets sit inside a single candle.

Workflow and features

Both do the core loop well: open a chart at a past date, hide the future, step forward, place trades, read a report. The differences are at the edges.

• Forex Tester leans into automation and rigour: up to 10 synchronised multi-timeframe charts that never reveal a finished higher-timeframe bar early, trading robots, an exit optimizer that searches stop, target and holding-time combinations, imported trade history from MT4, MT5, NinjaTrader and TradingView, and a blind mode that disguises dates, prices and symbols so you cannot recognise the chart. Most of that is on Pro.
• FX Replay leans into breadth and convenience: a wider market list, futures data, seconds candles, a scripting language, an AI assistant and a prop firm simulator, with the distinctive features concentrated on its $35 Pro tier rather than the $17.99 middle one.

If you want the tool to do more of the work - optimise exits, run a robot, hide the chart's identity - Forex Tester has more of it. If you want to test the widest set of markets in one place, FX Replay does.

Which one to choose

Choose Forex Tester if you are committed to backtesting for the long run, want to own the licence rather than rent it, test on lower timeframes where tick order matters, or want automation and blind testing to keep you honest.

Choose FX Replay if you trade futures or stocks alongside forex, want seconds-level candles, or prefer to start on a permanent free tier and move up a subscription only when you hit the caps.

Choose neither yet if you have not logged three weeks of consistent sessions. The most common way to waste money on trading software is to buy a year of it before the habit exists. Prove the habit on something free first, then buy the tool that fits the habit you actually have.

Where FxBacktest fits

This is our product, so weigh this section accordingly. FxBacktest sits under both on price: the free plan unlocks all 105 instruments and every timeframe from one minute to monthly, with full trade execution and the complete session report, capped at 3 saved sessions and 1 indicator at a time - and nothing you save is deleted on a timer. Pro is €12 a month and Ultra €39.

The trade-offs run against us and are worth stating: we have fewer markets than either (no futures, no seconds candles), no tick-level data inside the minute bar, and no robots or exit optimizer. If you need any of those, the comparison above is the one that matters. If what you need is to finish your first hundred trades without paying or losing them, that is the gap we built for. The wider field is in the best forex backtesting software.

Bottom line

Forex Tester vs FX Replay comes down to two questions. How do you want to pay - once, or monthly? And which markets do you test - forex and a few CFDs, or futures and sub-minute data too? Lifetime and depth point to Forex Tester; subscription and breadth point to FX Replay. Answer those two and the feature tables mostly stop mattering.