Scanr vs. MarketSurge: which stock scanner is right for you?

Trade growth stocks for long enough and you'll run into MarketSurge, IBD's flagship research platform and the successor to MarketSmith. It's the home of the CAN SLIM methodology and of the proprietary IBD ratings a generation of O'Neil-style traders grew up on. Scanr.ai attacks the same problem, finding the right names, from a different direction.

We build Scanr, so read this with that in mind. We've tried to be fair. MarketSurge is a serious, battle-tested product with data and ratings you can't get anywhere else, and plenty of traders should be paying for it. If something here is wrong, email us and we'll fix it.

TL;DR

• Scanr.ai builds scans out of composable, deeply configurable filters. Stack study modifiers (slope, correlation, crossovers, divergences) on any indicator, mix in fundamentals, generate scans from plain-English prompts, reach all of it from a public API or MCP server, and let a background system re-scan your saved scans so you can see which ones pay. Suits traders who want to express a precise idea as a filter, then find out whether the idea works.
• MarketSurge is the institutional-grade home of CAN SLIM. Its center of gravity is IBD's proprietary 1–99 rating system (Composite, RS, EPS, SMR, Acc/Dis), curated expert lists like the IBD 50 and Growth 250, AI pattern recognition tuned to O'Neil bases, and charts that fuse fundamentals with price. Suits dedicated CAN SLIM traders who want the original ratings and a proven methodology inside every screen.

Want the deepest filter logic, AI-assisted scan building, an API and MCP server, a useful free tier, and feedback on which of your scans pay? Try Scanr. If your entire process runs on IBD's ratings and the CAN SLIM framework, and the price doesn't scare you, MarketSurge is hard to beat at what it was built for.

Feature comparison

How the scanners compare

1. The IBD ratings

MarketSurge's biggest advantage comes first, because it's real. IBD's 1–99 rating system (Composite Rating, Relative Strength Rating, EPS Rating, SMR for sales, margins and ROE, plus Accumulation/Distribution) is proprietary, computed across roughly 18,000 stocks, and available nowhere else. If your process is "screen for Composite ≥ 95 and RS ≥ 90," MarketSurge is the only place you can run it against the actual IBD numbers.

Scanr hands you the raw ingredients instead: relative strength, earnings and sales growth, margins, ROE, institutional accumulation signals, all composable into your own ranking. You gain flexibility and you stop depending on one vendor's formula. You also don't get O'Neil's ratings computed O'Neil's way, so this category goes to MarketSurge outright.

2. CAN SLIM as a first-class citizen

MarketSurge doesn't merely support CAN SLIM. It is built around it. Buying checklists, the Earnings Line, David Ryan's Ants indicator, pattern recognition tuned to O'Neil bases (cup-with-handle, flat base, double bottom), and curated lists like the IBD 50 and Growth 250 all assume you trade the methodology. For a committed CAN SLIM trader, that cohesion is the whole point: platform, education and screens speak one language.

Scanr stays methodology-agnostic. You can build a CAN SLIM-style scan in Scanr today, with high EPS growth, strong relative strength, accumulation and a breakout from a base, and it will run fast. You'll be assembling it from parts rather than dropping into a pre-built O'Neil world with coaching attached.

3. Scan flexibility and filter depth

Here Scanr gets the better of it. Both products screen on fundamentals and technicals; the gap opens the moment you want something outside the built-in vocabulary.

In Scanr, every preset is a typed filter payload you can edit, fork, and combine. Mix a technical condition ("price closing above the 50-day EMA for 3 sessions") with a fundamental one ("free cash flow yield > 5% and net debt/EBITDA < 2") in the same scan, against a ~7,000-symbol universe, narrowed without a page reload.

The wider gap is modifier depth. Most scanners, MarketSurge included, let you filter on an indicator's value. Scanr filters on how the indicator is behaving: put a slope on RSI to catch momentum that's picking up, correlate a stock's SMA against its sector, or layer crossovers and divergences onto any study. "14-day RSI sloping up while price diverges from the 50-day SMA" saves as one reusable filter, and the same composition carries across chart patterns, supply/demand zones, relative strength, insider (Form 4) activity, short interest, and order-book microstructure.

MarketSurge's screener is powerful within the IBD worldview, and the January 2026 rebuild added 100+ indicators and studies. It was designed to surface CAN SLIM candidates rather than to compose arbitrary modifier logic, and it does that job well.

4. Knowing which scans work

Most scanners end at the list of matches, MarketSurge among them. Scanr's scan-performance system goes a step further: it re-runs your saved scans in the background and tracks what the symbols they surface do next, so each scan accumulates a win rate, edge analytics, and a per-ticker breakdown.

That turns a hunch into a number. The scan you'd have named your best idea may be trailing a throwaway you forgot you saved, and you find that out without re-running anything.

MarketSurge brings decades of methodology and back-tested rules of thumb, but no feedback loop on your own saved screens. If you've ever wanted to know which of your scans is making money, that's the gap.

5. AI scan generation

Describe a setup to Scanr in plain English and you get back a scan you can run. "Small-caps breaking out of a multi-week base on rising relative strength with insider buying in the last quarter" comes back as an editable filter payload, ready to fork and refine. It's on the free tier too, with daily limits.

MarketSurge points its AI at a different problem: pattern recognition, identifying cup-with-handle and other O'Neil bases on charts algorithmically. That's useful, and it's a place MarketSurge leads us. What it doesn't do is turn a sentence into a filter. Pick by which job you need done.

6. Charts

MarketSurge's charts tie into its fundamentals: earnings and sales overlays, the Earnings Line, buy/sell signals, and the proprietary ratings share one canvas. The January 2026 rebuild on Dow Jones' data infrastructure added 100+ indicators and studies (ATR, Bollinger Bands, VWAP, regression channels) plus customizable chart types. For a fundamentals-on-the-chart workflow, it runs deep.

We took a narrower position. A scanner's job is to surface the right names, so that's where our engineering goes. Scanr's charts cover multi-timeframe analysis, indicator stacking, and fundamental events (earnings beats, guidance changes, insider activity) annotated on the time axis: enough to make a decision without drowning in it. If your day happens inside a richly-configured chart, MarketSurge will feel more powerful. If you find setups fast and glance at a chart to confirm them, ours is sized for that.

7. Maturity, ecosystem and education

MarketSurge is the more established product, by a wide margin. Investor's Business Daily backs it, decades of CAN SLIM research sit behind it, and it ships with an ecosystem most tools can't match: weekly webinars, free coaching, model-book studies, and a community of O'Neil traders. The education isn't an add-on. It's part of why people pay.

Scanr is younger. Our preset library and community are growing, and they don't carry the heritage of IBD's training apparatus; we won't pretend otherwise. Our iOS app is live on the App Store, with Android on the way, while MarketSurge's iOS and Android apps are older and better known, if occasionally dinged for stability in reviews. Our effort goes into filter depth and into giving you the tools to validate your own edge instead of adopting one methodology wholesale.

8. Pricing

The gap here is stark. MarketSurge runs $149.95/month or $1,499/year, with a paid 6-week trial around $49.95 and no permanent free plan. That's a premium price for a premium dataset.

Scanr's paid plans start at $39.99/mo, and the free tier is a real one, with real-time scans, a decent allowance of saved presets, and daily AI-generated scans. For traders who can't justify ~$1,500 a year, or who want to try serious scanning before paying anything, the difference decides it.

Both of us move prices. Check Scanr pricing for today's numbers and compare directly.

9. API and automation

Here Scanr does something MarketSurge doesn't: a public API and an MCP server. Any scan you can build in the UI also runs from your own code, or from inside an AI client like Claude or Cursor. A daily cron job that pings you when a setup fires across the Russell 2000 is a few lines against the Scanr API.

MarketSurge is a closed platform. You work inside its apps rather than on top of its data. For traders who build their own dashboards or LLM-driven research, that difference tends to settle the decision. Rate limits, tiers, and the full list of MCP tools are on the Scanr API pricing page.

10. Who each one is for

Pick MarketSurge if:

• You trade CAN SLIM / O'Neil style and want the methodology inside every screen, list, and chart.
• You rely on IBD's proprietary 1–99 ratings (Composite, RS, EPS, SMR, A/D), the real ones, which exist nowhere else.
• Curated expert lists (IBD 50, Growth 250) and AI pattern detection tuned to classic bases matter to you.
• You want decades of education, webinars, and coaching bundled in, and the price isn't a barrier.

Pick Scanr if:

• You want the deepest, most flexible filter logic: slope, correlation, crossovers and divergences stacked on any indicator.
• You want to combine technicals, fundamentals, chart patterns, supply/demand zones, relative strength, insider and short-interest data in a single scan.
• You want to generate scans from plain-English prompts.
• You want a system that tells you which of your saved scans pay.
• You want an API or MCP integration so your scans show up in your own tools, scripts, or AI clients.
• You want a useful free tier and paid plans from $39.99/mo rather than ~$1,500/year.

Final word

These are different tools built on different philosophies. MarketSurge puts methodology first: commit to CAN SLIM and IBD's ratings and nothing else replicates it. Scanr puts flexibility first: compose any idea, validate it, automate it.

Tell us what your workflow looks like and we'll tell you whether Scanr fits it. If it doesn't, we'll point you somewhere else. You can run your first scan without a credit card.