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

If you've spent any serious time learning to scan, you've spent time inside thinkorswim — the desktop platform from Charles Schwab (formerly TD Ameritrade) whose Stock Hacker scanner and thinkScript language have shaped how a whole generation of traders think about finding setups. We'll say this plainly, because it's true: thinkorswim was a massive inspiration for Scanr.ai. Its deep, scriptable scanning model is one of the best ever built, and a lot of what we set out to do was build on its strengths rather than reinvent them from scratch.

This post is a head-to-head from the team that builds Scanr, and it's written with real admiration for the tool on the other side of the table. We've tried to be fair in both directions — there are things thinkorswim does that Scanr simply doesn't do yet, and we'll say so clearly. If you find anything inaccurate, email us and we'll fix it.

TL;DR

• thinkorswim is the legendary, deeply scriptable scanner. Its Stock Hacker filters tens of thousands of stocks, options, futures and forex products on hundreds of technical, fundamental, and pattern criteria — and thanks to thinkScript, you can write your own custom studies and scan on them. It's free with a funded Schwab brokerage account, includes real-time data, and is backed by a famously deep community. Best for traders who want a powerful, programmable scanner welded to a full trading platform and don't mind a steep learning curve.
• Scanr.ai is the modern, broker-agnostic, AI-assisted scanner. Every preset is a composable typed filter you can edit, fork, and combine; you can stack technical study modifiers (slope, correlation, crossovers, divergences) on any indicator, mix in fundamentals, generate scans from plain English, hit everything from a public API or MCP server, and let an automated system re-scan your saved scans so you can see which ones actually perform. No brokerage account required, and there's a genuinely free tier.

If you live inside a Schwab trading platform and want a battle-tested, scriptable scanner at no extra cost, thinkorswim is hard to beat at what it's built for. If you want a standalone, web-first scanner with plain-language scan building, an API/MCP server, scan-performance feedback, and no broker attached — try Scanr.

Feature comparison

How the scanners actually compare

1. A debt we're happy to acknowledge

Let's start here, because it frames everything else. When we sat down to design Scanr, thinkorswim's scanner was the reference point we kept coming back to. The idea that a scan should be a composable set of conditions, that you should be able to filter not just on an indicator's value but on logic you define yourself, that scanning should be a first-class power-user activity rather than a checkbox bolted onto a charting app — all of that is deeply thinkorswim DNA, and we don't pretend otherwise.

So this isn't a teardown. thinkorswim's deep scanning system is, in our honest opinion, one of the best ever built, and Scanr stands on its shoulders. What follows is where we think a modern, broker-agnostic, AI-assisted approach adds something — and, just as importantly, where thinkorswim is still ahead.

2. thinkScript custom indicators — thinkorswim is ahead

Here's the most important place thinkorswim leads, and we want to be completely honest about it. thinkScript is a full scripting language built into the platform. You can write your own studies, strategies, and watchlist columns, and — crucially — you can scan on them. In Stock Hacker's custom filter editor, you drop into either a human-readable Condition Wizard or the raw thinkScript editor and express things like multi-period moving-average crossovers, composite oscillators, or your own volatility metric, then run that across the whole universe. Around it sits an enormous community (useThinkScript, tosindicators, and others) sharing thousands of ready-made studies and scans.

Scanr does not have a thinkScript equivalent yet. Custom, user-authored scriptable indicators are firmly on our roadmap — it's a feature we want badly — but it is planned, not shipped. If your workflow today depends on writing and scanning your own scripted studies, thinkorswim is the clear choice.

What Scanr offers in the meantime is a different shape of customizability, which is the next section.

3. Modifier depth without writing code

thinkorswim's answer to "I want something the built-ins don't cover" is: write thinkScript. That's powerful, but it asks you to become a programmer. Scanr's answer is typed modifiers you compose in the UI.

In Scanr, every preset is a typed filter payload you can edit, fork, and combine, run against a ~7,000-symbol universe, and refine incrementally without page reloads. Where Scanr separates is modifier depth: most scanners let you filter on an indicator's value; Scanr lets you filter on how that indicator is behaving. Apply a slope to RSI to find momentum that's accelerating, correlate a stock's SMA against its sector, or layer crossovers and divergences on top of any study.

You're not limited to "RSI(70)" — you can express "14-day RSI sloping up while price diverges from the 50-day SMA" as a single, reusable filter, without writing a line of code. That compositional logic extends across chart patterns, supply/demand zones, relative strength, insider (Form 4) activity, short interest, and even order-book microstructure.

The honest framing: thinkScript can express more than Scanr's modifiers in absolute terms — it's a Turing-complete language. But it requires coding, and Schwab throttles complex scripts in the scanner for performance reasons. Scanr's modifiers cover a huge fraction of what most traders actually want from custom logic, with zero scripting and no throttling. Different trade-off, same goal.

4. AI scan generation

Scanr lets you describe a setup in plain English and get back a runnable scan. "Show me small-caps breaking out of a multi-week base on rising relative strength with insider buying in the last quarter" becomes a real, editable filter payload you can run, fork, and refine — and it's available even on the free tier (with daily limits).

thinkorswim has no plain-language scan builder. To build a non-trivial scan you either chain together predefined filters or write thinkScript. That's a more powerful ceiling for an expert, but a much higher floor for everyone else. If you want to go from a sentence to a scan in seconds, Scanr is the one that does that today.

5. Knowing which scans actually work

Most scanners — thinkorswim very much included — stop at "here are the matches." Scanr keeps going. Its automated scan-performance system re-runs your saved scans in the background and tracks how the symbols they surface actually go on to perform, so over time you get win-rate and edge analytics on each scan, plus per-ticker performance breakdowns.

In practice that means you stop guessing which of your setups are pulling their weight. The scan you thought was your best idea might be quietly underperforming a throwaway you forgot about — and Scanr tells you which is which, automatically, without you re-running anything.

thinkorswim gives you OnDemand replay and the ability to backtest scripted strategies on historical data, which is genuinely useful. What it doesn't give you is a built-in, always-on feedback loop on your own saved scans. If "which of my scans is actually making money?" is a question you care about, this is a meaningful Scanr differentiator.

6. Fundamentals in scans

Both platforms let you bring fundamentals into a scan, and this is a closer match than people assume. thinkorswim's Stock Hacker exposes fundamental, technical, and options-related fields, and you can layer them with study filters.

Scanr's emphasis is on composability — mixing a fundamental condition ("free cash flow yield > 5% and net debt/EBITDA < 2") with technical and behavioral conditions in the same payload, alongside relative strength, insider activity, short interest, and order-book signals. Both are capable here; Scanr leans harder into combining fundamentals with the behavioral and microstructure signals in a single composable filter.

7. Charts and platform scope

This is where the two tools are most philosophically different, and it's not really a fair fight because they're not trying to be the same thing. thinkorswim is a full trading platform — charts, the Analyze tab, an Active Trader ladder, options chains, order execution, multi-monitor layouts, and the scanner all live in one deeply configurable desktop application (with web and mobile counterparts). For a trader who wants everything in one place and trades through Schwab, that integration is a genuine strength.

Scanr takes a deliberately narrower stance: a scanner's job is to scan. Our charts are clean and focused — multi-timeframe analysis, indicator stacking, and direct annotation of fundamental events (earnings beats, guidance changes, insider activity) on the time axis — enough to make a decision, not a do-everything trading cockpit. We're broker-agnostic by design: Scanr doesn't place trades, and you don't need an account anywhere to use it. If you want one application that scans, charts, analyzes, and executes, thinkorswim is more complete. If you want a sharp, standalone scanner that drops cleanly into whatever broker and tools you already use, that's the point of Scanr.

8. API, MCP, and automation

This is where Scanr leans into something thinkorswim doesn't offer. Scanr has a public REST API with auth keys and an MCP server: every scan you can build in the UI you can also run from your own code, or from inside an AI client like Claude or Cursor. Want a daily cron job that pings you when a specific setup fires across the Russell 2000? That's a few lines against the Scanr API.

thinkorswim's automation story is different. Schwab does publish a Trader API (the successor to the TD Ameritrade API), but it's built for trade execution, market data, and account management — not for building and running scans programmatically. The scanner itself stays inside the thinkorswim application; there's no plain-language scan API and no MCP server. For traders building their own dashboards or LLM-driven research workflows, Scanr's API and MCP server are often the deciding factor. You can see the rate limits, tiers, and the full list of MCP tools on the Scanr API pricing page.

9. Pricing — and why it isn't an apples-to-apples row

We deliberately avoided a misleading dollar-vs-dollar comparison in the table, because the two products don't sell the same thing. thinkorswim's scanner is free — but it's free with a funded Charles Schwab brokerage account. There's no standalone thinkorswim subscription; the scanner, the charts, real-time data, and the rest come bundled with being a Schwab client. There's no minimum funding to open the account, but you do have to be inside Schwab's brokerage to use it at all.

Scanr is a standalone subscription with a genuinely free tier (real-time scans, a generous number of saved presets, and daily AI-generated scans), and paid plans starting at $39.99/mo — no brokerage account, no funding, no broker relationship required. So the right way to think about it isn't "$39.99 vs free." It's: if you already bank with Schwab and live in their platform, thinkorswim's scanner costs you nothing extra; if you want a broker-agnostic scanner you can use without opening or funding a brokerage account, Scanr is a standalone tool you can start using for free. Pricing is a moving target — see Scanr pricing for the current numbers.

10. Who each one is for

Pick thinkorswim if:

• You want (or already have) a Charles Schwab brokerage account and want a powerful scanner bundled in at no extra cost.
• You want to write your own custom studies in thinkScript and scan on them — and tap a huge community of shared scripts.
• You want one application that scans, charts, analyzes, and executes trades, across equities, options, futures, and forex.
• You're comfortable with a steep learning curve in exchange for depth, and you want mature, native desktop/web/mobile apps.

Pick Scanr if:

• You want a standalone, broker-agnostic scanner — no brokerage account, no funding required.
• You want the deepest no-code filter logic — slope, correlation, crossovers and divergences stacked on any indicator.
• You want to generate scans from plain-English prompts.
• You want an automated system telling you which of your saved scans actually perform.
• You want a public API and MCP server so your scans show up in your own tools, scripts, or AI clients.
• You want a genuinely free tier and paid plans from $39.99/mo — and you don't yet need thinkScript-style custom indicators (which are on our roadmap, not in the product today).

Final word

There's no objective winner here, and we'd be a little embarrassed to claim one against a tool we admire this much. thinkorswim is a power-user landmark — a deeply scriptable scanner welded to a full trading platform, free with a Schwab account, and rightly beloved. Scanr is a younger, narrower, broker-agnostic take on the same idea: compose any scan without code, generate one from a sentence, validate which of your scans actually work, and reach all of it from an API or MCP server.

If you tell us what your workflow looks like, we'll honestly tell you whether Scanr is the right fit — and if thinkorswim is the better call for you, we'll say so. Want to try Scanr? Run your first scan — no credit card required.