yfinance vs AKShare vs OpenBB vs EODHD APIs: which market data source for a quant project?
Published 12 Oct 2026 · repository data refreshes daily
Disclosure: this site is an affiliate partner of EODHD APIs. If you sign up through a link on this page we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. The other three tools are free and we have no relationship with them.
Short answer. These four are not interchangeable. yfinance and AKShare are free libraries that read public websites, with no guarantee they keep working. OpenBB is a layer that connects data providers you already have. EODHD APIs is a commercial service you pay for once free sources stop being enough. For personal research on US stocks, yfinance is usually all you need.
Side by side
| Tool | GitHub stars | Last activity | Licence | What it is | Covers | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| yfinance | 25.5k | 5 Oct 2026 | Apache-2.0 | Free library over Yahoo Finance's public endpoints | Tickers listed on Yahoo Finance | Free; Yahoo's terms say personal use |
| akshare | 22.9k | 7 Oct 2026 | MIT | Free library aggregating public data sites | Chinese markets and macro data first | Free; stated as for academic research |
| OpenBB | 74.1k | 11 Oct 2026 | Apache-2.0 | Open-source layer that connects many data providers | Whatever the providers you connect cover | Free software; some providers charge |
| EODHD APIs | — | — | Commercial service | Hosted data API | Global exchanges: prices, fundamentals, news | Free plan of 20 API calls a day; paid plans above that |
Stars and last activity (the most recent push GitHub reports for the repository) come from our daily snapshots and can lag by a few days. Licence and scope were checked against each repository on 12 Oct 2026.
yfinance: the fastest way to start
yfinance downloads data from Yahoo Finance's publicly available endpoints. It gives you historical prices for one or many tickers, live streaming over WebSocket, sector and industry information, and a screener. A few lines of Python get you a price history in a pandas DataFrame.
The catch is in the project's own README: Yahoo's finance API is intended for personal use only, and you are told to check Yahoo's terms for your rights to the data. Because the library depends on endpoints it does not control, it can break when Yahoo changes something. That is fine for a notebook and a risk for anything that has to run every day.
AKShare: the default for Chinese markets
AKShare collects data from public Chinese financial sites such as Eastmoney and Sina behind simple Python functions, and offers an HTTP API (AKTools) for other languages. If you work on A-shares or Chinese macro data, it is the natural first stop.
Its README is equally direct about the limits: the data is for academic research, it is reference only, and some interfaces may be removed because of factors outside the project's control. The documentation is mainly in Chinese.
OpenBB: a connector, not a data source
OpenBB's open-source platform describes itself as a "connect once, consume everywhere" layer. You plug in proprietary, licensed and public data sources, and the same connections serve Python, a REST API, Excel and AI agents through MCP servers. It is released under Apache 2.0.
It does not create data. What you can pull depends on the providers you connect, and several of those need their own API keys or subscriptions. It earns its place when you already juggle more than one provider. The analyst interface, OpenBB Workspace, is a separate enterprise product.
EODHD APIs: paying for coverage and a contract
EODHD APIs is a hosted service rather than a library. One API covers end-of-day and intraday prices, fundamentals, dividends and splits, news and more across global exchanges, over REST and WebSocket. You are a customer of a company whose business is providing that data, which is the real difference from the two scraping libraries above.
Be clear about the free plan: it allows 20 API calls a day, and dividend and split history on it is limited to one year. That is enough to check that your code works, not to run a strategy. Plans are split by what you need (end-of-day only, intraday, fundamentals, or everything), so check the current pricing before you design around it.
How to choose
- Personal research on US equities. yfinance. Do not pay for anything yet.
- Chinese A-shares or Chinese macro data. AKShare.
- Several providers and one code base. OpenBB on top of whatever you already use.
- A pipeline that must run every day, several markets, or commercial use. A paid source such as EODHD APIs, because the free libraries tell you themselves that they are for personal or academic use.
A sensible path is to prove an idea on free data first and move to a paid source only when reliability or coverage becomes the bottleneck. Keep the download step separate from the rest of your code so that switching sources later is a small change.
Nothing on this page is investment advice. Data from any of these sources can be wrong or delayed; check it before you rely on it.