Yahoo Finance API and Alternatives (Code & No Code) - Wisesheets Blog (2024)

Yahoo Finance is one of the most frequently used sources of news and stock financial data, and it's not without reason. The number of stocks covered and the data available is very useful in making good investment decisions. However, the data is often limited for deeper analysis, and large-scale analysis is difficult to execute. In this post, you'll learn how you can navigate third-party Yahoo Finance APIs that allow you to retrieve the data programmatically and a no-code alternative to get this data right on your Excel or Google Sheet spreadsheet.

What is the Yahoo Finance API?

The Yahoo Finance API is a variety of methods that allow you to retrieve historical and real-time data for various markets and securities. All of the data comes directly from the Yahoo Finance website.

Did Yahoo Stock API shut down?

Back in the day, Yahoo Finance was famous for having an API that investors could use to access stock financial and price data. The API was easy to use and well documented by Yahoo and the community of users.

However, after some time, Yahoo decided to shut it down, leaving many investors that relied on it unable to get the data they required for their stock analysis. For many years few viable alternatives provided the same coverage and data, but now several providers can fulfill this need for data-driven investors.

Still unwilling to give up, third parties created open source APIs that scrape Yahoo Finance and allow users to still retrieve historical and real-time data from the infamous website.

Should I use the Yahoo Finance API?

It depends on your situation and what you are looking to do with the data. Here are the pros and cons of using the Yahoo Finance API

Benefits:

• There are free ways of using it.
• Impressive range of data that covers stocks, crypto, commodities, foreign currencies, ETFs, and more. Including historical and real-time data.
• You can use the data in any of the available programming languages.

Drawbacks:

• You can get rate limited/blacklisted by Yahoo Finance for making too many requests to their website since you are scraping their data unofficially and causing them to spend additional resources to support it.
• It lacks the specialization of dedicated APIs, so although you can access a lot of data, you can have difficulty performing calculations to find specific key metrics and ratios (ex., ROIC).
• Functionality is not guaranteed and may not be sustainable. Furthermore, since these APIs are not official, a change in how Yahoo Finance presents its data can cause your code to be unstable.

Other alternatives you can use might be better for you, especially if you are looking for a simpler no-code solution.

How do I access the Yahoo Finance API data?

You can use 3 main Yahoo Finance API's depending on your use case and programming language preference.

RapidAPI

RapidAPI provides an API marketplace where you can get all types of data using 15 different programming languages.

There is a free version of the Yahoo Finance API where you can get 500 requests per month. However, if you are a more intensive user requiring more data requests, you can sign up for one of their paid plans that offers many more monthly requests. The paid plans range from 8.44 to 244 euros per month.

The only downside of this option is the request limit and the fact that the API returns quite a lengthy JSON object, so you might have to do additional programming to get only those data points you are looking for.

On the other hand, this option is one of the best because of the data range that includes fundamentals, pricing, options, market news, and analysis.

Yfinance

Yfinance is a popular open-source project that Python users can leverage to get historical and real-time stock data from Yahoo finance.

The setup and installation is simple all you have to do is enter the following command on your console (assuming you have Python setup on your local machine).

pip install yfinance

This library is very easy to use, all you have to do is call the ticker object, and all available data will be returned.

Keep in mind, unlike RapidAPI, you won't be able to access stock news and analysis, which can be very useful for stock analysis tasks.

Yahoo_fin

The last option is Yahoo_fin. Like Yfinance, you can easily get real-time and historical stock data using Python. Although it still lacks stock news and analysis data.

Which open-source library is better?

The last two options come down to your personal preference and how you'd prefer to receive the financial data. Yfinance provides a simplified approach that some users prefer over the more elaborate Yahoo_fin, which contains many methods to access specific data.

Check out the documentation of each option below

https://theautomatic.net/yahoo_fin-documentation/

https://pypi.org/project/yfinance/

Is the Yahoo Finance Stock API free?

The answer is it depends on which of the alternatives you use. The good news is that some options are completely free while others offer additional features for a cost.

More specifically, the RapidAPI, which could be superior in terms of data and reliability, is free for up to 500 requests per month, whereas Yfinance and Yahoo_fin are completely free. If you require additional requests, check out their pricing below:

Remember that even though these last two options are free, you are still limited to a certain number of requests you can make before you get blacklisted by Yahoo Finance. Moreover, you are still vulnerable to API changes that can make your code unusable.

If you want to have more peace of mind and find a better data provider for a relatively low price, you can use the alternatives we suggest below.

Is the Yahoo Finance API the best way to get stock market financial and pricing data?

The answer depends on your needs. First, you should ask yourself what type of analysis you want to do with this data? And do you really need coding to make it happen?

Answering these questions will help you learn the best API alternatives and no-code option.

API Alternative

When it comes to API alternatives, the benefit they have over the other methods is that you can be assured your code will work since the API is unlikely to change, you can potentially have a lot more requests per month for a lower cost, and these API's may include data not available on the Yahoo Finance API's. We have included one of the best alternatives below, but here is our full review of API options.

Iexcloud

Similar to Yahoo Finance, Iexcloud offers a huge range of data available that goes beyond real-time and historical stock data. Check out their documentation for a detailed list.

This data source suits those looking to build their own mobile and web applications with an extremely low latency response and low downtime.

The pricing can be a bit difficult to navigate as it depends on your usage and the type of data you are accessing. Therefore, before deciding on this option, you should get familiar with the pricing structure and run turn calculations to see if it is worth it for you.

Wisesheets (No Code)

For most investors that are looking to perform traditional analysis on their spreadsheet, Wisesheets is the best no-code option.

With Wisesheets, you can get up to 20 years of historical financials, key metrics, and growth metrics on different tabs on your spreadsheet by entering the ticker.

For more custom analysis, the same data is available to access individually via the =WISE function, which allows you to quickly get the data you need for your stock models.

And if real-time data is critical to you, you can use the =WISEPRICE to access real-time data such as volume, price, PE, etc., and press the refresh button to update it right when needed.

The pricing for Wisesheets is simple, at $60 for a whole year of access, it is available both on Excel (Mac and Windows) and Google Sheets.

Get a free trial account to see how Wisesheets can help you on this link.

Now you know all the best ways to access financial data programmatically or right on your spreadsheet through Wisesheets!

We hope this guide helps you to find the best option for you, and we wish you the best in your investing journey.

To your investing success,

Wisesheets