FXMacroData vs Econdb: Macroeconomic Data API Compared for FX Workflows

This comparison is for FX traders, quant developers, and research analysts who are deciding whether Econdb or FXMacroData should sit underneath their macro workflow. Both products serve macroeconomic data through an API, both are priced for individuals rather than institutions, and both are often found by the same search. They are, however, built around different centres of gravity.

The core finding: Econdb has grown into a container-shipping intelligence platform that also keeps a broad, multi-source macroeconomic database, and its paid Premium plan is priced and described around ports, services, and trade lanes. FXMacroData is built for one job, turning official macro releases into timestamped, FX-ready rows across 22 currencies, with a release calendar, pair dashboards, and MCP access. If your edge depends on container trade or on breadth across thousands of statistical datasets, Econdb is a strong and inexpensive choice. If your edge depends on knowing exactly when a release hit and joining it to a currency pair, FXMacroData is the better fit.

Decision snapshot

Choose Econdb when

You need container shipping data (port congestion, dwell times, vessel calls, trade-lane volumes) or a wide catalogue of macro datasets from many statistical sources for country research.

Choose FXMacroData when

You trade or model currencies and need second-level release timestamps, a release calendar, pair context, COT, yields, and an API or MCP server built for FX workflows.

Quick answer

Econdb is the better maritime-trade and broad-macro research tool. FXMacroData is the better release-timed FX macro API. The sticker prices are close; the product focus is not.

Takeaway: Decide on the job first. Shipping and dataset breadth point to Econdb; release timing and FX pair workflows point to FXMacroData.

Pricing And Access

Econdb publishes its pricing. Its pricing page lists a free Basic account with 10 views a day, a Premium plan, and a custom Enterprise tier for multiple seats, ad-hoc data extracts, and research or consulting. Premium is shown in the visitor's local currency; the page we checked displayed AUD $60 per month or AUD $400 per year (a 44% saving on annual billing). Premium removes the daily view limit, and the pricing FAQ states that Premium includes CSV downloads and an API. Every feature listed under Premium is a shipping dataset: ports, services, trade lanes, transshipments, and supply.

FXMacroData offers an Always Free tier with no key (USD data only, 100 requests a day, USD announcements delayed 15 minutes), Individual at $50/month or $500/year with a 14-day trial and 1,000,000 requests a month, and Business at $250/month or $2,500/year for companies and teams of up to 10 people with the same allowance and priority support. Enterprise is by custom agreement, and a self-serve Commercial Redistribution add-on costs $10/month per block of up to 100 measured users or 1,000 public-feed followers. Full details are on the pricing page.

FXMacroData Individual

$50/month

Or $500/year. 14-day trial, 22 currencies, 1,000,000 requests/month, release timestamps, calendar, COT, FX rates, MCP.

Econdb Premium

AUD $60/month*

Or AUD $400/year*. No daily view limit, CSV downloads and API; feature list centred on ports, services, and trade lanes.

Free entry points

Both have one

Econdb Basic: 10 views a day*. FXMacroData Always Free: USD data, 100 requests a day, no key.

Takeaway: Econdb Premium is slightly cheaper on paper, especially on annual billing. What you pay for differs: Econdb Premium is sold on shipping intelligence, FXMacroData Individual on release-timed FX macro data.

Monthly list price, approximate USD

FXMacroData plans in mint; Econdb Premium in cyan. Hover a bar for the value.

Takeaway: At monthly billing, Econdb Premium and FXMacroData Individual sit within about $10 of each other, so price alone will not decide this comparison. FXMacroData Business is a team plan and has no direct Econdb equivalent below Enterprise.

Side-By-Side Comparison

* Competitor pricing retrieved from their public pricing page in October 2026. Econdb shows prices in the visitor's local currency.

Product Focus: Shipping Intelligence Versus FX Macro

Econdb started life as a macroeconomic data aggregator, and that heritage is still visible: its macro section offers country profiles with GDP, inflation, unemployment, retail trade, government balance, current account, and long-term yields, and its public dataset listing draws on sources such as Eurostat, the ECB, the OECD, the World Bank, the ONS, and the BEA. Today, though, the homepage describes Econdb as container shipping intelligence, and the API documentation states that it covers shipping-related indicators and macroeconomic data. Of the five endpoint groups in the documented API, four are shipping groups (ports, vessels, global shipping indicators, and point-to-point trade) and one is a generic macro time-series endpoint keyed by ticker.

FXMacroData has no shipping product. Every surface is aimed at currency decisions: official releases for 22 currencies, a release calendar, pair dashboards such as EUR/USD, COT positioning, government bond yields, commodities, central-bank press releases, and FX session context.

Where each product puts its weight

Econdb centre

Ports, vessel calls and AIS positions, dwell times, transit times, lane capacity, and container trade volumes, with a broad macro database alongside.

FXMacroData centre

Timestamped official releases, release calendar, forecasts, FX spot, COT, yields, commodities, and central-bank communication across 22 currencies.

Overlap

Headline macro series such as CPI, GDP, and unemployment. Both serve them; they differ in timing detail and FX context.

Takeaway: The products overlap on headline macro series only. Everything around that overlap points in different directions: supply chains for Econdb, currency pairs for FXMacroData.

Macro Coverage And Data Model

Econdb's breadth is real. Its public dataset listing shows 13,852 datasets from 146 sources, many of them full statistical tables (national accounts by industry, financial balance sheets, labour surveys) rather than single headline series. For a researcher building a country profile or exploring a less common statistic, that catalogue is a genuine asset. Series are addressed by ticker, for example CPIUS for US consumer prices, and the documented response returns metadata (description, geography, frequency, source dataset) plus arrays of dates and values.

FXMacroData covers fewer series, more than 700, but each is curated for currency analysis and normalised into one schema across all 22 currencies. US CPI, Non-Farm Payrolls, unemployment, and the Fed policy rate return the same row shape as the ECB deposit rate or Japanese CPI, so a model written for one currency runs on another without new parsing logic. Each series carries source metadata pointing to the official publisher.

Release Timing And Event Precision

This is the attribute where the two products differ most for FX use. Econdb's documented series response is a time series of period dates and values: it tells you that March CPI was a given number, not when that number became public. Its dataset listing shows a last-update date and a sync timestamp at dataset level, which is useful for freshness checks but is not a per-release announcement time. Econdb does not publish a release-latency figure.

FXMacroData stores a second-level announcement_datetime on every release row, and releases are typically available within seconds of official publication. The target is one second from publication, and the measured record is public on the release-speed page, broken down by source, with every release that took longer listed. For an FX event study, an alert on a Federal Reserve decision, or a backtest that must not leak future information, that timestamp is the anchor that makes the analysis reproducible.

What each API tells you about a CPI print

Period value

Both: the reference period and the value. Econdb returns this as parallel date and value arrays.

Announcement time

FXMacroData: the second the release was published, on every row. Econdb: not part of the documented response.

Scheduled time

FXMacroData: release calendar per currency, with optional forecasts. Econdb: no release calendar endpoint documented.

Pair reaction

FXMacroData: FX spot rates and pair dashboards to measure the move. Econdb: no FX pair layer.

Takeaway: Econdb answers "what was the value for this period". FXMacroData also answers "when did the market learn it", which is the question an FX event study depends on.

API And Developer Experience

Econdb's current API documentation, released on 29 July 2025, is a clean OpenAPI schema with Redoc and Swagger views. Every documented endpoint uses token authentication sent as Authorization: Token YOUR_API_KEY, and unauthenticated calls to the series endpoint return an authentication error. Rate limits are not published. For Python users, Econdb maintains a fork of pandas-datareader, whose Econdb reader accepts a ticker or a dataset query and an API key; there is no separate Econdb SDK on PyPI.

FXMacroData sends the key in an X-API-Key header and documents every endpoint in the API reference. A US payrolls request looks like this:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.fxmacrodata.com/v1/announcements/usd/non_farm_payrolls"

Example response (abridged and illustrative):

{
  "currency": "usd",
  "indicator": "non_farm_payrolls",
  "data": [
    {
      "date": "2026-08-01",
      "val": 142.0,
      "prior": 118.0,
      "pct_change": 20.34,
      "announcement_datetime": 1788525000
    }
  ]
}

Fields that matter

• announcement_datetime anchors the event to the second.
• val and prior support surprise and revision analysis.
• The same shape repeats for every currency and indicator.

Econdb equivalent

The documented /v1/series/{ticker}/ response returns ticker, description, geography, frequency, dataset, and date and value arrays, which suits long-run charts and research notebooks.

Takeaway: Both APIs are easy to call. The difference is what comes back: Econdb returns a series for research, FXMacroData returns timestamped release events for trading workflows.

Beyond REST, FXMacroData offers SSE streaming for release events, GraphQL, Python and JavaScript SDKs, and an official MCP server that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and similar assistants query releases, the calendar, COT, and FX rates directly. The AI trading guides show how those pieces fit together. Econdb does not list an MCP server or streaming interface on its public pages.

Where Econdb Is Genuinely Stronger

Econdb is a serious, specialised product, and several of its strengths have no FXMacroData equivalent:

• Container shipping data. Port throughput, vessel calls, AIS positions, dwell times, transit times, schedule reliability, blank sailings, and lane capacity. If you trade freight-sensitive themes or study supply chains, this is the reason to subscribe.
• Dataset breadth. Thousands of datasets from well over a hundred statistical sources, including detailed tables that FXMacroData does not carry.
• Long history. Series go back as far as the underlying source allows, for example US CPI from 1947 in the documented example.
• Low annual price. AUD $400 a year for Premium is inexpensive for the shipping coverage it unlocks.
• Python familiarity. Researchers already using pandas-datareader can pull Econdb series with a reader they know.

For a supply-chain analyst, a trade economist, or a macro researcher who values breadth over release timing, Econdb is likely the more natural starting point.

Where FXMacroData Is Stronger

FXMacroData is stronger when the workflow starts with a currency pair and a scheduled release. Consider a trader preparing for US payrolls and watching USD/JPY: they need the release time from the calendar, the prior value, the actual print with its exact announcement second, the Bank of Japan and Fed policy context, positioning from COT, and the pair's reaction. FXMacroData serves all of that through one key and one schema; Econdb would supply the headline series but not the timing, calendar, or pair layers.

FXMacroData pros

• Second-level release timestamps and a public release-speed record.
• Release calendar, FX rates, COT, yields, and commodities under one key.
• Published rate limits, OpenAPI, SSE, GraphQL, SDKs, and MCP.

FXMacroData tradeoffs

• No shipping or supply-chain data.
• Fewer datasets than a general aggregator, by design.
• Individual list price is a little above Econdb Premium.

Econdb pros

• Detailed container shipping and port intelligence.
• Broad multi-source macro catalogue with long history.
• Public pricing and a low annual Premium price.

Econdb tradeoffs

• No per-release announcement timestamp in the documented response.
• No release calendar, FX rates, or MCP server documented.
• Rate limits not published; Premium feature list is shipping-led.

Takeaway: Econdb wins on shipping data and catalogue breadth. FXMacroData wins on release timing, FX context, and automation surfaces.

Decision Matrix

Recommendation

Choose Econdb if container shipping is part of your thesis, or if your research needs a wide catalogue of statistical datasets more than it needs release timing. Its Premium plan is reasonably priced, its API is cleanly documented, and nothing in FXMacroData replaces its port and vessel coverage.

Choose FXMacroData if your work starts with a currency pair and a release: preparing for payrolls or CPI, tracking the ECB and Fed, measuring how GBP/USD reacts to a surprise, or giving an AI assistant timestamped, source-labelled macro data. Compare plans on the pricing page, start with the API reference, and check the measured release-speed record against your own latency needs. Some teams will reasonably use both, with Econdb for freight signals and FXMacroData for the release-timed macro layer.

Bottom line: Econdb is the better choice for container shipping intelligence and broad macro dataset research. FXMacroData is the better choice for FX traders and developers who need official releases with second-level timestamps, a release calendar, pair context, and API and MCP access built for currency workflows.

Takeaway: With list prices this close, pick the product whose core data matches your edge.

Sources Checked

Claims about Econdb are based on its public pricing page, API documentation, and public API catalogue, checked in October 2026. Where Econdb does not publish a figure, this page says so.

Econdb pricing

Basic, Premium, and Enterprise tiers, Premium features, and API FAQ.

View source

Econdb API documentation

Endpoint groups, token authentication, series response, and release date.

View source

Econdb dataset catalogue

Public listing of datasets and sources used for coverage counts.

View source

Econdb Python reader

pandas-datareader Econdb reader for tickers and dataset queries.

View source

FXMacroData pricing and docs

Plans, request allowances, API reference, and MCP documentation.

View documentation

Takeaway: Both vendors publish their prices and API documentation, so every figure on this page can be checked against the source.

Related Reading

• FXMacroData vs DBnomics, another multi-source macro aggregator compared for FX workflows.
• FXMacroData vs Trading Economics, a broad indicator and calendar platform.
• Best macroeconomic data APIs in 2026, a wider survey of the market.