Where CoinGlass wins
- It is built for watching. Liquidations, liquidation heatmaps, open interest and funding are published as web pages on coinglass.com (checked September 29, 2026). The priced plans on its pricing page are API plans.
- Breadth. Its pricing page lists 30 futures venues, 11 spot exchanges and 4 options platforms for the API (pricing, checked September 29, 2026). We cover three venues.
- Liquidations and options. CoinGlass offers liquidation data, including a liquidation heatmap endpoint (API docs, checked September 29, 2026). Aperiodic has no liquidation, options or ETF-flow data.
- Reach and UI. It is a charting product with a retail audience. If a human is the consumer, the UI is the product, and we do not compete there.
Where Aperiodic is the better alternative
Intraday history goes back years. CoinGlass lists its API history by plan and interval. At 1 minute its pricing page lists 6 and 12 days, at 5 minutes 30 and 60 days, and at 1 hour to 12 hours at most 720 days. Only the daily interval goes back all-time (pricing, checked November 5, 2026). Aperiodic Pro keeps 5 years at every interval from 1 minute to 1 day, and Prime keeps the full history, from 2020 on Binance and 2019 on OKX. A strategy that trades on 1-minute funding or open interest needs more than two weeks of it to test.
Bulk history is one request, not a pagination job. CoinGlass API plans are metered per minute: 30 requests a minute on Hobbyist ($29), 80 on Startup ($79), 300 on Standard ($299), 1,200 on Professional ($699) (pricing, checked November 5, 2026). Aperiodic hands you parquet files covering the date range you asked for.
Here is one real preview file, pulled with no API key:
# Install the Aperiodic CLI into ~/.local/bin
mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin"
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aperiodic-io/cli/main/install.sh | INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.local/bin" bash
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
aperiodic open_interest --preview --exchange binance-futures --symbol perpetual-BTC-USDT:USDT \
--interval 5m --timestamp exchange --start-date 2025-05-01 --end-date 2025-05-31 \
--output-dir ./data && echo "Saved to $PWD/data"One command, one parquet file: 8,928 rows, every 5-minute bar in May 2025 (31 × 288), in 272,027 bytes (266 KiB). The columns are open_interest, open_interest_notional, open_interest_pct_change, open_interest_volatility and oi_price_change_ratio, for Binance alone.
# pip install pandas pyarrow
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet("data/2025-05.parquet")
print(df.shape) # (8928, 6): time + 5 open-interest metricsOr have your agent run it and read the file for you:
Read https://aperiodic.io/start.md and follow it. Then pull the free `open_interest` preview and show me how open interest moved over the month.Per exchange, point-in-time. Every series is reported per venue, not blended across venues, and stamped with what was observable at that time. That is what a backtest needs and what a dashboard does not have to promise.
You choose the clock. Every metric comes on exchange time or on local time: when the data reached our collectors closest to the exchange. On local time a bar holds only what a live system could have seen by its close. CoinGlass does not document which timestamp its bars are built on (API docs, checked October 1, 2026).
More than derivatives. Order flow split by trade size with a toxicity score, slippage in bps, L1 and L2 order book imbalance and liquidity, and funding: 220 metrics across 19 datasets (catalog).
What it costs. Aperiodic is free for every metric over 2025 on BTC, ETH, SOL and 10 RWA perps, on all three venues. Paid self-serve starts at $199 a month billed yearly ($249 month to month, pricing). CoinGlass API plans run $29 to $699 a month; Hobbyist and Startup are for personal use, Standard ($299) and Professional ($699) for commercial use (pricing, checked November 5, 2026). Our Pro and Prime carry a personal licence; Prime Commercial carries a commercial licence for internal business use (licensing). Institutional adds negotiated terms and an SLA.
What every plan gives a backtest
- Every perpetual on Binance, OKX and Hyperliquid stays in the data after it is delisted, so a backtest sees the coins that were listed at the time, including the ones that later died.
- Published bars are never recalculated. A backtest you run next year reads the same history as one you run today.
- Every metric comes on exchange time or on local time (when the data reached us). On local time, a bar only holds what you could have seen by its close.
- Prime and above have no API rate limits, and Pro has high ones. The Python SDK downloads 10 files at a time by default.
Side by side
| CoinGlass | Aperiodic | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Watching markets | Feeding research pipelines |
| Coverage | 30 futures, 11 spot, 4 options venues (API) | Binance futures, OKX perps, Hyperliquid perps |
| Liquidations, options | Yes | No |
| Data shape | JSON API, paginated | Parquet files per date range |
| Intraday history | 6 or 12 days at 1m, 30 or 60 days at 5m, up to 720 days at 1h to 12h, by plan | 5 years at 1m to 1d on Pro; full history on Prime |
| Timestamps | Not documented which clock bars are built on | Exchange and local timestamps; every metric built on either clock |
| Delisted pairs | Listed; whether their history stays queryable is not stated | Kept, on every covered venue |
| Revisions | No revision policy published | None: published bars are never recalculated |
| Rate limits | 30 to 1,200 requests a minute; bulk export on Enterprise only | None on Prime and above, high on Pro; parallel downloads |
| One month of 5m BTC open interest | Paginated API calls | One 266 KiB file (measured on this page) |
| Paid plans | $29 to $699/month API plans; personal use below $299; Enterprise on request | Free for 2025 on BTC, ETH, SOL and 10 RWA perps; paid from $199/month billed yearly ($249 month to month); Institutional on request |
CoinGlass plans and history checked November 5, 2026, other facts September 29, 2026, against coinglass.com/pricing, coinglass.com/liquidations and the API docs. Plans change; check their site before you buy.
Moving a CoinGlass workflow to Aperiodic
| What you pull from CoinGlass | Aperiodic dataset |
|---|---|
| Open interest history | open_interest: open_interest, open_interest_notional, open_interest_pct_change |
| Funding rate history | funding |
| Perp vs spot spread | basis |
| Taker buy/sell volume | flow: taker_buy_volume, taker_sell_volume, volume_delta |
| Liquidations | Not available. Keep CoinGlass for this. |
Which one to buy
Choose CoinGlass when a human is the consumer: discretionary trading, risk monitoring, alerts, liquidation levels.
Choose Aperiodic when code is the consumer: backtests, ML features, execution cost models, cross-sectional signals on perps.
Plenty of teams run both. CoinGlass on the monitor, Aperiodic in the pipeline.
Comparing CoinGlass with CoinMarketCap instead? CoinMarketCap publishes a liquidations dashboard, a liquidation map, funding rates and a derivatives market page (checked September 29, 2026). The FAQ below covers it.