The short answer
For most self-directed researchers, Finviz remains the best free screener on the open web — fast, dense, and forgiving of beginners. If you need to combine fundamental conditions with chart patterns in one screen, TradingView is the most flexible. For genuinely deep fundamental backtesting and custom formulas, Stock Rover is the only paid tool here that earns its monthly fee outright. Screening is not investment advice; it is a way to narrow the universe.
How we ranked these screeners
A screener is judged by the screens it lets you finish, not the filters it lists on a marketing page. Many platforms advertise hundreds of fields and quietly hide the useful ones behind a paid tier or a tickbox that turns out to fetch fundamentally different data. We picked five real-world screens — a quality-growth screen, a deep-value screen, a momentum screen, a high-quality dividend screen and an insider-buying screen — and ran each on every platform. The platforms that produced consistent, sensibly ordered, readable results moved up; the ones that needed three exports and a spreadsheet to compare moved down.
We scored each tool out of 100 across six weighted categories:
- Filter depth (25) — number of filterable fields, fundamental and technical, including custom or derived ratios.
- Data quality & freshness (20) — how recent the fundamentals are, how cleanly trailing-twelve-month figures are constructed, how stable historical splits are.
- Custom formulas & logic (15) — ability to write your own ratio, combine ANDs and ORs, save complex multi-condition screens.
- Free tier vs paid value (15) — what you really get without a subscription, and whether the upgrade earns its price.
- Results page usability (15) — readability, sortable columns, in-line charts, export quality.
- Speed & reliability (10) — how the screener behaved during heavy market days, page-load and rerun times.
Why "more filters" is not the same as "better screener"
It's easy to be impressed by a screener that lists three hundred filterable fields. It's also a slightly empty kind of impressed. The vast majority of useful screening can be done with somewhere between ten and twenty fields — basic valuation multiples, growth rates, profitability, balance-sheet strength, dividends, momentum and ownership. What matters far more than raw filter count is how easily those fields combine, whether the platform handles ratios cleanly (trailing-twelve-month versus forward, normalized versus reported), and whether the results page lets you compare a dozen names without exporting to a spreadsheet.
What we kept rewarding in this rebuild was screeners that respected the user's workflow. The best of the bunch let you save a screen, share it, return to it three weeks later and pick up where you left off. Several screeners we tested still treat each session as ephemeral, forcing you to re-enter the same conditions every time. That's not a missing feature; that's a missing memory.
The six screeners, ranked
Finviz
Finviz has been the default retail screener for a decade for a reason. The free tier exposes more than seventy filterable fields, the layout is dense in the right way, and the results page is the only one on this list where you can scan twenty tickers, their PE, dividend yield, EPS growth and price action without scrolling. The presets — overbought, undervalued, top dividend yield, insider buying — are a sensible starting point for newer users. Where Finviz earns its first place isn't depth; it's the absence of friction. You think of a question, you ask it, you get a readable answer in seconds. The interface looks like 2010 because the underlying tool is fast enough that nobody has had a good reason to slow it down.
- ✓Genuinely strong free tier
- ✓Dense, scannable results table
- ✓Useful presets right out of the box
- ✓Heatmap pairs well with screen output
- ✗Visibly dated visual design
- ✗Limited custom formula support
- ✗No real backtesting on the free tier
TradingView
TradingView's screener is what you reach for when you want to filter the universe on both balance-sheet quality and technical setup at the same time. You can ask for stocks above their two-hundred-day moving average that also have positive free cash flow and a debt-to-equity below one, and you get an answer on a single page with a tiny price chart beside each name. The screener integrates so naturally with the rest of TradingView's charting and watchlist tools that, for users who already live in that ecosystem, it's an obvious choice. The trade-off is depth on the fundamentals side: while the technical filters are best-in-class, the financial-statement filters are slightly shallower than dedicated fundamental tools.
- ✓Strongest technical filter set on the list
- ✓Combined fundamental + technical screens
- ✓Inline mini-charts beside each ticker
- ✓Global coverage across many exchanges
- ✗Fundamentals not quite as deep as Stock Rover's
- ✗Top features sit behind paid plans
- ✗UI can feel overwhelming for first-timers
Koyfin
Koyfin's screener feels like it was built by people who'd watched too many retail tools waste a great filter on a bad results page. The screen-builder is keyboard-friendly, filters can be combined with explicit AND/OR logic, and the results land directly inside the broader Koyfin workspace so you can flip between a watchlist, a screen and a fundamentals view without losing context. The depth of fields is genuinely impressive for the price, and the free tier is more generous than competitors at this caliber. The drawback is the same as it is for Koyfin generally: there's a learning curve, and you bring your own opinions — Koyfin will not suggest screens or rate the names that emerge.
- ✓Workspace integration with charts and watchlists
- ✓Explicit boolean logic in screen builder
- ✓Generous free tier with real depth
- ✗Steeper learning curve
- ✗No editorial overlays or preset themes
- ✗Mobile is secondary to desktop
Stock Rover
If the question on the screener is more granular than "stocks under twenty times earnings," Stock Rover is the platform that takes the question seriously. Custom-formula support is the deepest here, the field count is the highest, and the tool quietly handles things like five-year compound growth rates, dividend coverage ratios and capital efficiency without forcing you to rebuild them by hand. The historical-data depth supports actual screen backtesting, which is rare at retail prices. It's also the screener with the steepest learning curve: the UI is dense, the menus are old-school, and the mobile experience is best described as "tolerated." For dedicated fundamental investors, it's worth the climb.
- ✓Strongest custom-formula support
- ✓Real screen backtesting capability
- ✓Highest field count for fundamentals
- ✗Steep learning curve
- ✗Weak mobile experience
- ✗Best features live behind the higher tier
Zacks
Zacks has built a small empire around the idea that earnings revisions are the single most predictive signal for short-to-medium-term stock performance, and its screeners reflect that conviction. The "Zacks Rank" preset screens — for buy-rated names, for stocks with strong earnings momentum, for value-with-growth combos — are a useful starting point if you find a blank screen builder intimidating. The custom-screener depth is decent but not best-in-class, and the editorial tilt toward the proprietary rating system can drift into something close to a marketing funnel for the premium product. As a preset-driven workflow, Zacks does what it does well; as a build-from-scratch tool, it doesn't lead this list.
- ✓Strong preset screens around earnings revisions
- ✓Long-published methodology, transparent rules
- ✓Useful for income and growth tilts
- ✗Custom-screener depth trails the leaders
- ✗Persistent upsells to premium products
- ✗Site UX can feel cluttered
Yahoo Finance
Yahoo Finance's screener is the one most people who don't already research stocks have used. The filter list is shorter than serious competitors', the results page is friendlier than Finviz's, and the workflow is forgiving enough that a first-timer can land on a reasonable list within minutes. The catch is that the data freshness and depth lag the dedicated screeners on this list, and there's no real way to write a custom formula or run a backtest. It belongs in this ranking because it is the screener millions of investors actually open — and as a starting point, it does the job.
- ✓Familiar, low-friction interface
- ✓Completely free
- ✓Broad asset coverage beyond just stocks
- ✗Limited filter depth
- ✗No custom formula support
- ✗Occasional data-freshness lag
Side-by-side feature comparison
| Screener | Free tier | Filter depth | Custom formulas | Backtesting | FT Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finviz | Strong | Wide | Limited | Premium only | 92 / 100 |
| TradingView | Decent | Wide + technical | Pine Script | Yes (strategies) | 90 / 100 |
| Koyfin | Generous | Deep | Some | Limited | 88 / 100 |
| Stock Rover | Light | Deepest fundamental | Yes — robust | Yes | 86 / 100 |
| Zacks | Light | Moderate | Limited | Through premium | 80 / 100 |
| Yahoo Finance | Full | Light | No | No | 74 / 100 |
Editorial insights nobody else writes about
The trap of over-screening
The most seductive mistake in screening is to layer enough conditions that the result shrinks to a tidy list of five names. It feels rigorous; it is, more often, statistical overfitting. Every additional condition you add cuts the candidate set, and a screen with twelve filters will routinely return names that survive your tests not because they are excellent but because they happen to sit in the narrow corner where your criteria intersect. We aim for three to six well-chosen conditions, accept that the result might be eighty names, and do the real work in the per-ticker research afterward.
Trailing-twelve-month is not the same as last fiscal year
Most screeners default to trailing-twelve-month (TTM) numbers for ratios — the sum of the most recent four reported quarters. That's usually what you want, because it smooths out fiscal-year boundaries and captures the most recent earnings. But some platforms quietly mix TTM data on the income statement with point-in-time data on the balance sheet, producing ratios that don't quite match their published formula. When a screen result surprises you (a ratio looks wrong, or a name that should not pass clearly does), the first place to check is which time series the platform is actually using under the hood.
A great screen is the start of research, not the end
No screener in this list is going to tell you to buy a stock. The screen narrows the universe; the work that decides the position size lives outside the tool — reading the annual report, listening to the most recent earnings call, understanding how the management team thinks about capital allocation. We see readers spend hours fine-tuning screen conditions and minutes on the names that emerge. The ratio is backwards. Pick a sensible screen, run it, accept the list it gives you, and spend the time you would have used tweaking filters on actually reading what those companies say about themselves.