Dark pool data is public. Every off-exchange trade in a U.S. stock has to be reported through FINRA, and the prints reach the tape shortly after they happen. What you pay a dark pool scanner for is not access but speed, filtering and interpretation: how fast the prints arrive, how easily you can cut the noise, and whether the tool turns thousands of prints into price levels you can read.
That makes the differences between tools sharper than the marketing suggests. Some scanners stream prints in real time. Some delay them by 15 minutes or a full day. Some show individual prints; others show only a daily total. This guide puts seven dark pool scanners side by side on those points, using only what each vendor states on its own pricing, feature and help pages, and then covers the free data you can use without paying anyone.
Robinflow is one of the seven. We have tried to be fair, and we say plainly where a competitor is stronger. If dark pools themselves are new to you, start with dark pool trading, explained.
Key Takeaways
- Entry prices for a plan that includes dark pool prints range from $19 to $99 a month across the seven scanners compared here, based on each vendor's own pages, which we have followed over the past month (figures as of Oct 29, 2026).
- ChartExchange ($20 a month) and Robinflow ($19 a month through Nov 30, $39 from Dec 1) are the lowest-priced ways to get real-time dark pool prints and price levels.
- Dark pool data is often delayed or gated: Tradytics states its dark pool data is 15 minutes delayed, Cheddar Flow puts dark pool on its $99 Pro plan with no free trial, and free tiers show prints from one to two days ago.
- No scanner in this comparison labels a dark pool print as a buy or a sell, because the public report does not say which side started the trade.
- FINRA publishes free daily short sale volume files by the evening of each trading day, and weekly per-venue dark pool totals two to four weeks after each week ends.
- FlowAlgo, long a well-known dark pool tool, has paused new signups and cancels subscriptions on Oct 30, 2026, with a relaunch planned for the first quarter of 2027.
At a Glance
| Tool | Cheapest plan with dark pool | Free trial | Free tier shows dark pool | Dark pool latency | Price levels | Options flow in same plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Robinflow | $19/mo through Nov 30, then $39/mo | Yes, 7 days, full access | Preview only, 3 sessions delayed | Real-time | Yes | Yes |
| ChartExchange | $20/mo | Yes, 14 days, prints 15 min delayed | Yes, previous day, limited | Real-time on paid plan | Yes | No, $35 plan |
| Unusual Whales | $50/mo | Not listed | Yes, 2 days delayed | Not stated on dashboard | Via its API | Yes |
| Tradytics | $69/mo | Paid, $15 for 15 days | Not stated | 15 min delayed | Not stated | Yes |
| InsiderFinance | $75/mo | Not listed | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated | Yes |
| BlackBoxStocks | $79/mo | Not listed | Not listed | Real-time | Volume profile study | Yes |
| Cheddar Flow | $99/mo | No, trial is Standard plan only | Not listed | Real-time | Yes | Yes |
"Not stated" and "Not listed" mean the vendor's public pages did not say as of our latest check on Oct 29, 2026. The full comparison further down adds filters, history, alerts and each vendor's own wording.
What to Look For
Real-Time vs. Delayed Prints
Off-exchange trades are reported to FINRA within seconds for most prints, so a scanner that shows them 15 minutes or a day later has chosen to delay them, usually to sell the live feed at a higher price. For reading yesterday's positioning, delayed prints are fine. For seeing a large block hit while the stock is still trading near that price, they are not. Read the help pages: at least one vendor markets "live" analytics while its support page says dark pool data is 15 minutes delayed.
One delay applies to everyone. Certain trade types are allowed to report late under FINRA rules, so some prints arrive minutes or hours after they executed. A good scanner marks those reports rather than mixing them in with live blocks.
Individual Prints vs. Daily Totals
Some products show every print: time, size, price and dollar value. Others show a daily number per stock, such as off-exchange short volume or the percentage of volume that traded off-exchange. Daily totals are useful for spotting a stock with unusual off-exchange interest, but they cannot tell you the price where the size traded. If you want to know where institutions transacted, you need prints.
Price Levels
A single print says a block changed hands at a price. Prints that cluster at one price across a session or several sessions form a dark pool level: a price where a large amount of off-exchange volume concentrated. Traders often watch these as potential support or resistance. Check whether a tool computes levels for you and how far back they go, because building them by hand from raw prints is slow.
Filtering and Noise
The raw dark pool tape is noisy. Average-price reports, late reports, derivative-priced trades and other bookkeeping entries can look like giant prints. A useful scanner lets you filter by size and dollar value and separates those trade conditions from live block executions. Without that, the biggest print of the day is often not a trade in the usual sense.
What the Data Cannot Tell You
No print says who traded or which side started the trade. A dark pool print is a match between a buyer and a seller, and the public report carries no buy or sell flag. Be careful with any tool that presents dark pool prints as bullish or bearish on their own. Direction comes from context: where the print sat relative to the market, what the options flow on the same symbol was doing, and whether the activity repeated.
Seven Dark Pool Scanners Compared
Every fact below comes from the vendor's own pricing, feature or help pages, which we have followed over the past month; figures are as of Oct 29, 2026. Where a vendor did not state something, the cell says "not stated" rather than guessing. Prices are list prices for monthly billing; Unusual Whales was running a temporary sale that we left out.
| Tool | Price with dark pool | Trial or free tier | Latency (vendor's words) | Levels | Filters | History |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Robinflow | $19/mo, $190/yr through Nov 30; $39/mo, $399/yr from Dec 1 | 7-day free trial, full access; free symbol pages 3 sessions delayed | "Real-time as prints are reported" | Volume-at-price levels on the chart | Symbol, size, time; late and bookkeeping reports marked | Levels over 1 to 60 days |
| ChartExchange | $20/mo, 17% off annual | Free: previous day's prints, limited; 14-day trial, prints 15 min delayed | "Real-time Dark Pool Prints" | "Complete Dark Pool Levels history" | Size, premium, price | Complete on paid; 12 months free |
| Unusual Whales | $50/mo, $504/yr | Free account: dark pool feed 2 days delayed | Not stated for the dashboard | "Darkpool Price Levels" in its API | Premium, size, % of volume, trade codes, hide cancelled | Not stated |
| Tradytics | $69/mo | Free basic tier; 15 days for $15 | "darkpool, which is 15 minutes delayed" | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated |
| InsiderFinance | $75/mo, $660/yr | No trial stated | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated | "On-Demand Historical Data" |
| BlackBoxStocks | $79/mo | None stated; "All sales are final" | "tracks these trades in real-time" | "Dark Pool Volume Profile" study | Prints and blocks in the alert stream | Volume profile back to Jan 2020 |
| Cheddar Flow | $99/mo, $900/yr | 7-day trial on Standard only, which has no dark pool | "All in real time"; signature prints "delayed by 24 hours" | "Dark pool levels" | Not stated | Searchable history |
A few things stand out.
Entry prices run from $19 to $99 a month. The two cheapest, Robinflow and ChartExchange, both include real-time prints and price levels. The spread above that mostly reflects what else is bundled: options flow, trading rooms, Discord communities and chart studies.
Real-time is not the default. Tradytics states its dark pool data is 15 minutes delayed. ChartExchange runs dark pool prints 15 minutes delayed during its free trial. Cheddar Flow's dark pool data is real-time, but only on Pro, which has no trial, so you cannot test the feature most people buy it for before paying.
Levels are less common than prints. ChartExchange, Cheddar Flow and Robinflow all describe computed dark pool levels on their pages. BlackBoxStocks offers a volume profile study that does a similar job on the chart. Unusual Whales lists price levels in its API documentation; we did not find them described for the dashboard.
Alerts go to different places. Unusual Whales alerts on its website, mobile app and push. BlackBoxStocks uses an in-app alert stream, its mobile app and Discord. Tradytics and Cheddar Flow lean on Discord bots, and Cheddar Flow sells them separately. Robinflow sends watchlist alerts and daily email digests.
Nobody labels direction, and nobody should. BlackBoxStocks tags prints by trade type, for example dark blocks and prints above the ask or below the bid, which is useful context. None of the seven claims a print is a buy or a sell.
Where Each Tool Is Strongest
Rather than a ranking, which depends on how you trade, here is where each one earns its place.
- ChartExchange is the best value if you want dark pool data on its own. Real-time prints, complete levels history and flexible size filters for $20 a month, with a free tier that still shows the previous day's prints. Options flow is a separate, pricier plan.
- Unusual Whales has the deepest filters we found, including percent of volume, extended hours and trade codes, and a free account that shows the full dark pool feed two days late. Its API offers live dark pool trades and price levels for traders who build their own tools.
- Tradytics packs the most into one plan, with dark pool dashboards, market-wide dark flow and Discord bots. The 15-minute dark pool delay is the tradeoff.
- InsiderFinance includes dark pool prints in its single plan alongside options flow, priced in the middle of the pack. Its public pages say little about latency or filters.
- BlackBoxStocks suits active day traders who want dark pool prints in a real-time alert stream next to scanners and trading rooms, with a volume profile study for levels. Dark pool starts at the $79 tier.
- Cheddar Flow has a mature dark pool product with levels, searchable history and data export, plus 24-hour delayed signature prints on major ETFs. It is the most expensive way in, and the trial does not include it.
- Robinflow is the lowest-priced plan here that combines real-time dark pool prints, computed levels and full options flow, and the 7-day trial includes all of it. Its feed marks late and bookkeeping reports apart from live blocks. It has no CSV export, no Discord integration and the smallest community on this list.
FlowAlgo Is Paused
FlowAlgo was one of the first retail tools to put dark pool prints next to options flow. On its own update page it says it is taking the platform offline because Cboe is discontinuing a product its data pipeline depends on. New signups and trials are paused, current subscriptions are cancelled on Oct 30, 2026, and the company says a new platform is planned for the first quarter of 2027. We left it out of the comparison until it relaunches.
Free Dark Pool Data
You can get a lot without paying anyone, as long as you accept delays and daily totals instead of individual prints.
| Source | What you get | Delay | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| FINRA daily short sale volume files | Short sale volume and total volume by stock, per reporting facility (TRF and ADF), for off-exchange trades | Published by 6:00 pm ET the same day | Public website |
| FINRA OTC transparency data (ATS and non-ATS) | Weekly share volume and trade counts for each dark pool (ATS) by stock | 2 weeks after the week ends for the most active stocks, 4 weeks for others | Public website |
| SqueezeMetrics DIX | A single index-level number: the dollar-weighted dark pool short-sale ratio across S&P 500 stocks | Not stated | Public chart; full access $720/mo by invitation |
| Free tiers of paid scanners | Unusual Whales: full feed 2 days late. ChartExchange: previous day's prints, limited | 1 to 2 sessions | Free account |
Two cautions on the FINRA files. Short sale volume is not short interest; FINRA says so explicitly, and a high short volume ratio is normal for market makers who sell short to fill buy orders. And the weekly ATS data names the venue but arrives weeks later, so it tells you which dark pools a stock trades in, not what happened this morning.
How We Tested
We have followed each vendor's public pricing, feature and help pages over the past month, rechecking them as they change (most recently Oct 29, 2026), and recorded only what was stated there. Several sites block automated fetching and were read in a normal browser. Where a feature appears only in a vendor's API documentation, we say so. We did not subscribe to competitor products for this comparison, so we make no claims about their data quality beyond what they state themselves. Fintel, Market Chameleon and Quiver Quantitative publish off-exchange volume figures but did not describe a dark pool print scanner on the pages we could read, so they are not in the table. If you are a vendor and something above is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
How Robinflow Approaches This
The Robinflow dark pool scanner streams off-exchange prints as they report, across 18,000+ symbols. Each row shows time, symbol, size, price, dollar value and a Report column that marks live block executions apart from late and bookkeeping reports, so the biggest print on your screen is a real trade. Prints that cluster at a price roll up into levels drawn on the chart.
Dark pool data sits next to options flow, signals and GEX in one plan, because a print is most useful alongside the options activity on the same symbol. If you are comparing flow tools too, see the options flow scanner comparison.
One plan includes everything (see pricing), and the 7-day free trial locks nothing. To see the data before signing up for anything, the free symbol pages carry dark pool premium, print counts and levels for the most active names, 3 sessions delayed.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best dark pool scanner?
It depends on what you need. For dark pool data alone at the lowest price, ChartExchange's $20 plan has real-time prints and levels. For dark pool prints, levels and options flow in one plan, Robinflow is the lowest-priced option in this comparison at $19 a month. Unusual Whales has the deepest filters, and Cheddar Flow has a mature product at a higher price.
Is there a free dark pool scanner?
Not in real time. Free tiers show delayed data: Unusual Whales shows the full dark pool feed two days late, ChartExchange shows the previous day's prints with limits, and Robinflow's symbol pages are 3 sessions delayed. FINRA publishes free daily short sale volume files and weekly per-venue dark pool totals, but as totals, not individual prints.
Is dark pool data real-time?
Most off-exchange trades are reported to FINRA within seconds, so real-time dark pool prints are possible and several scanners offer them. Some vendors still delay their feed, by 15 minutes or by a day. A small share of trades is allowed to report late under FINRA rules, which affects every provider equally.
Can a dark pool print tell you if institutions are buying or selling?
No. A print records a trade between a buyer and a seller, and the public report does not say which side started it. Direction has to be inferred from context: where the print executed relative to the market, the options flow on the same symbol, and whether the activity repeats. None of the scanners compared here label prints as buys or sells.
What are dark pool levels?
Prices where a large amount of off-exchange volume has accumulated. They show where institutions transacted heavily, and traders often watch them as potential support or resistance when the stock returns there. ChartExchange, Cheddar Flow and Robinflow compute them; BlackBoxStocks offers a volume profile chart study.
How much does a dark pool scanner cost?
Plans that include dark pool prints range from $19 to $99 a month in this comparison as of Oct 29, 2026. Annual billing usually cuts that by 15% to 30%. Index-level research data such as SqueezeMetrics' full DIX access costs far more, at $720 a month.
