FX Replay and FxBacktest solve the same problem in the same place: replaying historical charts bar by bar in the browser and placing trades by hand. The difference is breadth versus price. FX Replay carries more markets and more tooling on a $35/month top plan; FxBacktest unlocks every instrument it has on a free tier and tops out at €39/month with an unlimited analytics suite. Which one is right depends almost entirely on whether you need the markets FX Replay carries and FxBacktest does not.
What FX Replay actually is
FX Replay is a browser-based manual backtesting platform. You pick a market and a date, the chart replays forward, and you trade it as if it were live. Around that core loop it has built an unusually wide product: a live journal, an AI assistant, its own scripting language, a prop firm simulator, multi-chart layouts, an economic calendar, a Monte Carlo simulation, and performance analytics broken out by time of day. Its market list runs to 120+ forex pairs, six futures markets, NASDAQ-listed stocks, crypto, indices, metals, bonds, and commodities, with major forex history reaching back to 2003 and timeframes going down to five-second candles.
None of that is a small product, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. If you have been using FX Replay and it fits, the honest advice is to keep using it. The rest of this page is for the specific traders it does not fit.
The two reasons traders go looking
In practice the search for an FX Replay alternative comes from one of two places, and they are worth separating because they point at different answers.
The first is the free tier. FX Replay's free Beginner plan allows 2 sessions, 50 records, and - the one that bites - one week of data retention. A week is shorter than the time it takes most people to accumulate a meaningful sample. You do forty trades over a fortnight and the first half is gone before the second half exists, which quietly defeats the entire point: backtesting is an evidence-gathering exercise, and evidence you cannot keep is not evidence. Traders hit this wall in week two and start searching.
The second is the price of the plan that removes the limits. Intermediate is $17.99/month and lifts you to 10 sessions, 200 records per session, six months of retention, three indicators and two charts. Pro at $35/month is where everything goes unlimited and futures, CME data and seconds-level intervals appear. That is fair pricing for the feature surface - but if you trade EURUSD, gold and the indices on H1 and H4, you are paying for six futures markets and 5-second candles you will never open.
The test that settles it in thirty seconds: write down the instruments and timeframes you have actually traded in the last three months. If every one of them is a major, a common cross, gold, silver, a big index, BTC or ETH, on M1 through D1 - the cheaper tool covers your whole workflow. If the list contains a futures contract, an exotic pair, or a sub-minute chart, it does not, and no price comparison changes that.
FX Replay vs FxBacktest, side by side
| Feature | FX Replay | FxBacktest |
|---|---|---|
| Runs in the browser | Yes | Yes |
| Manual bar-by-bar replay | Yes | Yes, with random-date start |
| Free plan: markets | Available, but capped at 2 sessions | All 93 instruments unlocked |
| Free plan: timeframes | Standard set | All 7 (M1 to D1) |
| Free plan: data retention | 1 week | 3 saved sessions, kept |
| Free plan: records / trades | 50 records | Full execution + full session report |
| Market breadth | 120+ FX pairs, futures, bonds, commodities | 93 instruments: FX, metals, indices, crypto, stocks, Brent |
| Lowest timeframe | 5-second candles | 1 minute |
| History depth | Majors from 2003 | From 2009-2013 depending on instrument |
| Futures & CME data | On the Pro plan | Not carried |
| Scripting language | FXR Script | No |
| Prop firm challenge mode | Prop Firm Simulator | Prop challenges, including on free |
| Top plan price | $35/month, $350/year | €39/month, €389/year, or €89 once |
| Mid plan price | $17.99/month | €12/month |
Prices are listed in the currency each site quotes - FX Replay in USD, FxBacktest in EUR - so the mid-tier gap is a little wider than the raw numbers suggest, not narrower. Both were read on 31 August 2026 and both are subject to change; check each pricing page before deciding.
Where FX Replay is genuinely ahead
Three things, and they are not small. Market breadth: 120+ forex pairs against 93 instruments is not a rounding error. If your strategy lives on USDMXN or a Nordic cross, FxBacktest simply cannot load it and the comparison ends there. Futures and sub-minute data: six futures markets with CME data and five-second candles put FX Replay in a category browser tools rarely reach - a scalper working ES or NQ off seconds charts has no alternative worth discussing here. Scripting: FXR Script lets you express a custom study; FxBacktest ships a fixed indicator set and no language. If you want to encode your own condition and see it drawn, that is a capability, not a preference.
History depth is a fourth, softer edge. Majors back to 2003 covers the 2008 crisis in full; our archive begins in 2009 for FX and metals, 2013 for indices, 2017 for crypto and stocks. For most strategies 2010-onward is more than enough to see trending and ranging regimes, but if you specifically want to test how a system behaved through 2008, that is a real reason to stay.
Where the alternative is ahead
The free tier is the honest headline. FxBacktest's free plan unlocks all 93 instruments and all seven timeframes, gives you full trade execution, and produces the complete session report - overall score, profit factor, Sharpe, expected payoff, win rate, average RR, expectancy, recovery factor, max drawdown in dollars and R, consecutive win and loss streaks, and average trade duration. The free limits are three saved sessions and one indicator at a time. That is a deliberate design choice: the cap is on how much you keep, not on what you may test, and nothing you save expires on a timer.
The second is price shape. €12/month for multi-timeframe charts, three indicators, 30 saved sessions and 200 trades per session covers the entire working setup of a discretionary forex trader. Above that, €39/month unlocks unlimited indicators, sessions and trades plus the analytics that actually change behaviour - session performance split across Sydney, Tokyo, London and New York, MFE percentiles answering how far your trades really ran, trade tag analysis for A+ versus FOMO versus revenge entries, and strategy stress testing that removes your sleep hours or your news trades and recomputes the curve. There is also a one-time €89 option in your first 17 days for traders who would rather not hold a subscription at all.
The third is smaller but matters more than it sounds: automatic position sizing from wherever you drag the stop, so every logged trade is risk-normalised without you doing arithmetic mid-session. Comparable trade sizes are what make an edge readable a hundred trades later.
Moving a routine across
If you decide to switch, the workflow maps almost one-to-one and the retraining is measured in minutes, not evenings. Your FX Replay session becomes a saved FxBacktest session. Your chart setup rebuilds in about ten minutes - timeframe, the two or three indicators you genuinely use, your levels. Your "go to date" becomes the random-date or jump-to-date start; random is the better habit, because picking your own start date is a quiet form of curve-fitting before the test even begins. Your journal entries become tagged trades. Your analytics tab becomes the session report and, on Ultra, the dashboard analytics section.
One rule worth stating plainly: do not stitch the two tools' results into a single equity curve. Different data sources and cost models produce slightly different fills, so treat the switch as a new testing era, run a fresh 100 trades, and let the new baseline stand on its own. Comparing your own results to your own results, inside one consistent cost model, is the only comparison that ever meant anything.
Two other alternatives worth naming
FX Replay is not the only tool in this space, and the right answer for you may be neither of the two above. TradingView's bar replay is free with a subscription you may already hold, but it has no P&L, no position sizing and no stats - it scrubs history rather than backtests it. Forex Tester and the Soft4FX MT4 plugin are desktop tools with deep configurability and a licence fee, plus the historical-data import chore that stops most attempts before the first trade. If you want all five compared in one place, the best forex backtesting software roundup does that.
Measured: what the alternative actually carries
Instrument counts on comparison pages are rarely checked, so here is ours, counted from the archive rather than claimed, with the year each series genuinely begins:
| Class | Instruments | From |
|---|---|---|
| FX majors (6) | EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, USDCAD, AUDUSD, NZDUSD | 2010 |
| FX crosses (9) | EURJPY, GBPJPY, EURGBP, EURCHF, AUDJPY, AUDCAD, CADCHF, GBPCAD, NZDCHF | 2010 |
| Metals (3) | XAUUSD, XAGUSD, XAUEUR | 2009 |
| Indices (4) | US30, US500, US100, GER40 | 2013 |
| Crypto (2) | BTCUSD, ETHUSD | 2017 |
| Stocks (3) | AAPL, NVDA, TSLA | 2017 |
| Energy (1) | Brent crude | 2010 |
28 instruments and 2,199,262 hourly bars. Set against FX Replay's 120+ pairs plus futures and bonds, that is plainly the narrower list - and it is the whole list, available on the free plan, with no market held behind a tier. The question is not which number is bigger but whether the shorter list contains everything you trade.
Counted 2026-08-27 from the FxBacktest OHLC archive: 28 instruments, 2,199,262 hourly bars, earliest bar 21 July 2009. FX Replay figures read from fxreplay.com and fxreplay.com/pricing on 2026-08-31; both products change, so verify before you buy.
Bottom line
FX Replay is the broader product and it charges accordingly. If you need futures, CME data, seconds charts, an exotic pair, or your own scripted studies, it is worth the $35 and an alternative would be a downgrade dressed as a saving. If you trade the majors, crosses, gold, the big indices, BTC or a handful of US stocks on M1 through D1 - which is most discretionary traders reading this - you are paying for reach you do not use, and a free tier that deletes your first fortnight of work is an actively bad place to build a habit. Open the free plan tonight, run one session on the pair you actually trade, and compare it to the session you would have run instead. That comparison is more useful than any table on this page.
FX Replay Alternative FAQ
What is the best FX Replay alternative?
For manual bar-by-bar backtesting, a browser simulator like FxBacktest is the closest like-for-like alternative: the same replay-and-trade loop, all 93 instruments and all seven timeframes unlocked on the free tier, and saved sessions that are not deleted on a retention timer. FX Replay remains the better choice if you need futures and CME data, sub-minute candles, or 120+ forex pairs.
Is there a free alternative to FX Replay?
Yes. FxBacktest has a free-forever tier with every instrument and timeframe unlocked, full trade execution, and the complete session report including profit factor, expectancy, Sharpe and max drawdown. The free limits are on saved sessions and simultaneous indicators, not on which markets you may test.
Why do people look for an FX Replay alternative?
Price and the free tier. FX Replay's Pro plan is $35 per month, and its free Beginner plan caps you at 2 sessions, 50 records and one week of data retention - so early backtests disappear before they add up to a sample. Traders who mainly want reps on forex, indices, gold and crypto often find a cheaper tool covers their whole workflow.
Does an FX Replay alternative need to be installed?
No. Both FX Replay and FxBacktest run entirely in the browser - no MetaTrader install, no broker login, and no historical data to download and convert. Desktop alternatives such as Forex Tester or the Soft4FX MT4 plugin do require an install and a licence.
When should I stay with FX Replay?
Stay if your strategy depends on something the alternative does not carry: futures and CME data, seconds-level candles, an exotic forex pair outside the majors and common crosses, or scripting your own studies. Those are real capabilities, and no price comparison outweighs a market you cannot load.
Sources
- FX Replay — pricing page — the plan names, prices, and per-tier limits quoted above, read 31 August 2026.
- FX Replay — product homepage — the advertised feature list, asset coverage, and data range quoted above.