FXMacroData vs TrueFX: Free FX Tick Data vs FX Macro Release Data

This comparison is for FX traders, quant developers, and researchers who have found TrueFX while looking for free FX tick data and want to know whether it also covers the macro side of their workflow. The two products are often mentioned in the same breath, but they answer different questions: TrueFX tells you where the interbank market was quoting at a given millisecond, while FXMacroData tells you what an economy published, when it was published, and how that release fits a currency pair.

The core finding: TrueFX is still live in 2026, and its historical tick downloads remain free after registration, but its real-time product is now a paid institutional FIX stream starting at $4,950 per month. It does not publish macroeconomic release data. FXMacroData does not sell tick archives. For most FX research desks the right answer is to use the two together: price ticks from an archive such as TrueFX, and timestamped release rows from FXMacroData to tell the tick data where the events are.

Decision snapshot

Choose TrueFX when

You need free top-of-book FX tick history for backtests, or a paid institutional FIX price stream sourced from an ECN.

Choose FXMacroData when

You need official macro releases, second-level announcement timestamps, a release calendar, and pair context through REST or MCP.

Quick answer

They are complements, not substitutes. Tick data shows the price reaction; release data explains what caused it and when.

Takeaway: If your question is "what did EUR/USD do at 12:30:00 UTC?", you need tick data. If it is "what was released at 12:30:00 UTC and how big was the surprise?", you need release data.

Pricing And Access

TrueFX now has two very different price points. Its historical downloads page describes tick-by-tick history offered "at zero cost to you" once you log in or register. Its streaming market data, by contrast, is sold as two plans on the TrueFX homepage: Professional at $4,950 per month (bid and offer, event-driven stream via FIX, internet connectivity) and Institutional at $7,450 per month (adds three-level depth of book and low-latency cross-connects in New York, London, and Tokyo). Both stream plans are bought through an enquiry form rather than a self-serve checkout.

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

FXMacroData Individual

$50/month

Macro releases across 22 currencies, calendar, FX rates, COT, API keys, and MCP. 14-day trial; free USD tier with no key.

TrueFX historical downloads

$0*

Top-of-book tick history for 16+ pairs after free registration. Price data only.

TrueFX streaming

$4,950+/month*

Professional FIX stream; Institutional with depth of book is $7,450/month*. Enquiry required.

Takeaway: TrueFX is free for archived ticks and institutional-priced for live ticks. FXMacroData covers a different dataset at a self-serve price.

Monthly list price, USD (paid plans)

FXMacroData plans in mint; TrueFX streaming plans in cyan. Hover a bar for the exact price.

Takeaway: The products are not like-for-like, but the chart sizes the budget: a live institutional price stream costs roughly 100 times an FXMacroData Individual plan, while the free TrueFX archive and the free FXMacroData USD tier both cost nothing.

What TrueFX Offers In 2026

TrueFX is a service of Integral Development Corp., a financial technology company that runs the Integral OCX trading network. The site was active in October 2026, with a copyright line running from 2009 to 2026 and no discontinuation notice. Its public pages describe three things:

• Historical tick downloads. Top-of-book, tick-by-tick data for 16+ major currency pairs, with fractional pip spreads in millisecond detail, free after registration. The exact archive start dates and file list are only shown to logged-in users.
• Paid streaming market data. Indicative bid and offer prices aggregated from multiple liquidity sources, delivered as an event-driven FIX stream on the Professional and Institutional plans. Optional cryptocurrency prices come from Mint Exchange.
• Indicative, not executable, quotes. The TrueFX FAQ states that the prices cannot be traded on and lists price verification, historic back-testing, and base prices for onward distribution as typical uses.

Older guides describe a free registration-based TrueFX web API for real-time top-of-book quotes. TrueFX no longer documents that interface on its site; its former developer page now returns a "page not found" result, and the product pages direct real-time buyers to the paid FIX plans. A legacy public quote snapshot for about ten majors still responded in October 2026, but because it is undocumented it is best treated as unsupported for anything that matters. If you built a pipeline around the old free API, plan for the paid stream or another source.

Side-By-Side Comparison

* Competitor pricing retrieved from the TrueFX public homepage and historical downloads page in October 2026.

Tick Data Versus Release Data

Tick data and macro release data sit at opposite ends of the same trade. A tick archive is a dense record of quotes: thousands of bid and offer updates per hour on a major pair, each stamped to the millisecond. It is the right input for spread modelling, slippage estimates, intraday volatility, and any backtest that needs to know what price was actually available. It contains no information about why the price moved.

A release record is sparse by comparison: one row per publication of, say, US CPI or Non-Farm Payrolls, with the value, the prior, and the exact second it became public. It cannot tell you where EUR/USD traded, but it tells a backtest which ticks to look at and what the market was reacting to.

Where each dataset enters an FX event study

1. Event list

FXMacroData supplies each release, its announcement_datetime, value, and prior.

2. Surprise

Compute actual minus prior or forecast to size each event.

3. Price window

Slice tick history, for example from TrueFX, around each timestamp.

4. Reaction

Measure move, spread widening, and recovery time in the ticks.

5. Model

Regress reaction on surprise, by pair, session, and indicator.

Takeaway: The release timestamp is the join key. Without it, a tick archive cannot be aligned to the events that move it.

Release Timing And Timestamps

TrueFX timestamps are about price: each tick carries a millisecond time, and the Institutional plan adds cross-connects in the major FX centres for lower network latency. That is a genuine strength for anyone measuring microstructure.

FXMacroData timestamps are about publication. Every release row carries a second-level announcement_datetime, so an event study anchors on the moment the number became public rather than on a scheduled calendar time or a date. Releases are typically available within seconds of official publication, against a target of one second from publication; the measured record by source, including every release that took longer, is published on the release speed page. Upcoming events are on the release calendar, and session timing is on the FX sessions dashboard, which matters because the same surprise often moves a pair differently in Tokyo hours than in the New York overlap.

Coverage And History

TrueFX covers 16+ major currency pairs in its archive, such as EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, and AUD/USD, with metals on the stream and optional crypto. The archive spans multiple years, though the exact start dates per pair are visible only after login. It is a price archive only: there are no economic indicators, central-bank decisions, or positioning data.

FXMacroData covers 22 currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD, CHF, NZD, BRL, CNH, CNY, DKK, HUF, ILS, KRW, MYR, NGN, NOK, PEN, SEK, THB, TWD) and more than 700 indicator series, including the Fed policy rate, the eurozone policy rate, US unemployment, GDP, PMIs, retail sales, trade, and wages, each sourced from the official statistics agency or central bank with source metadata. Alongside releases it carries central-bank statements from the Federal Reserve, ECB, Bank of Japan, and Bank of England, CFTC COT positioning, government bond yields, commodities, and FX spot rates for pair context. Those spot rates are reference prices, not a tick archive, which is exactly why a tick source remains useful next to it.

API Access And Licensing

TrueFX delivers history as file downloads and live data as a FIX stream. FIX is the institutional standard and fits trading infrastructure well, but it needs a FIX engine and a session set up through TrueFX's sales process. FXMacroData is a REST JSON API with an OpenAPI specification, header-based keys, SSE streaming for release events, GraphQL, Python and JavaScript SDKs, and an MCP server for AI assistants. A first call takes one line:

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

Example response (abridged, illustrative values):

{
  "currency": "USD",
  "indicator": "non_farm_payrolls",
  "data": [
    {
      "date": "2026-08-01",
      "val": 142.0,
      "prior": 98.0,
      "pct_change": 44.9,
      "announcement_datetime": 1788525000
    }
  ]
}

Fields that join to ticks

• announcement_datetime is epoch seconds; multiply by 1,000 to match millisecond tick times.
• val and prior size the surprise.
• date is the reference period, not the release day.

What a tick row adds

Pair, millisecond time, bid, and offer. Join on time to see the quote path in the seconds before and after the release.

Takeaway: One release row unlocks a precise tick window; mixing up reference period and release time is the most common event-study error.

On licensing, FXMacroData publishes its plans and a self-serve redistribution add-on, so a developer knows the commercial terms before building. TrueFX does not publish the terms attached to its free downloads on public pages; they are presented at registration. Its FAQ names onward distribution as a use case for the paid stream, with terms handled by enquiry. If you plan to show TrueFX-derived prices to customers, confirm the licence with Integral first.

Use Case: An NFP Reaction Study On EUR/USD

Suppose a quant wants to know how EUR/USD reacts in the first five minutes after US payrolls, split by the size of the surprise. Neither dataset answers this alone.

Pull events

One FXMacroData call returns every NFP print with value, prior, and publication second.

Load ticks

Download the matching EUR/USD months from the TrueFX archive.

Align

Cut a window from one minute before to five minutes after each release time.

Measure

Bucket by surprise and compare mid-price move and spread widening.

Takeaway: The study takes two free or low-cost sources and one join. Without release timestamps it becomes manual calendar copying; without ticks it cannot measure spreads.

The same pattern works for other releases and pairs, and the free FXMacroData USD tier is enough to try it on US data before committing to a plan. For live trading, the release side can be streamed from FXMacroData while prices come from your broker feed, so the TrueFX stream is only needed if you want its institutional prices specifically.

Where TrueFX Is Genuinely Stronger

• Free tick history. Millisecond top-of-book data across 16+ pairs at no cost is valuable for students, independent quants, and anyone prototyping execution research.
• Institutional price provenance. Prices come from Integral OCX, an ECN connecting banks, brokers, and asset managers, rather than from a single retail broker.
• Depth and connectivity. The Institutional plan adds three-level depth of book and cross-connects in New York, London, and Tokyo, which FXMacroData does not offer.
• FIX delivery. Teams with existing FIX infrastructure can plug the stream in directly.

If the job is spread modelling, slippage estimation, or microstructure research, TrueFX or a similar tick archive is the right tool and FXMacroData is not a substitute. For another free archive with a different pair list and format, see our Dukascopy historical data comparison.

Where FXMacroData Is Stronger

FXMacroData is stronger wherever the question involves economic fundamentals: what was released, when, how it compared with the prior, and how it fits rates, positioning, and central-bank communication. It is also the more practical choice for developer-led and AI workflows, because access is self-serve REST and MCP rather than file downloads and FIX sessions.

FXMacroData pros

• 700+ official-source series across 22 currencies.
• Second-level release timestamps and a public speed record.
• Self-serve REST, SSE, GraphQL, SDKs, and MCP from $50/month.

FXMacroData tradeoffs

• No tick archive or depth-of-book data.
• FX spot rates are reference prices, not execution-grade quotes.
• Free tier is USD-only with a 15-minute delay.

TrueFX pros

• Free millisecond tick history after registration.
• ECN-sourced indicative prices.
• FIX stream with optional depth and cross-connects.

TrueFX tradeoffs

• No macroeconomic or event data.
• Live data starts at $4,950/month via enquiry; former free web API undocumented.
• Download licence terms and rate limits not publicly listed.

Takeaway: TrueFX is the stronger price-data source; FXMacroData is the stronger macro-event source. The tradeoff lists barely overlap, which is why they pair well.

Decision Matrix

Recommendation

Use TrueFX if you need tick-level FX prices: the free archive for research, or the paid FIX stream if your firm needs institutional indicative prices with depth. Do not expect it to tell you anything about the economic calendar.

Use FXMacroData if your strategy, dashboard, or agent depends on macro releases. Start on the free USD tier, check the API reference, review the measured record on the release speed page, and compare plans when you need other currencies or real-time USD data. If you are building release-reaction research, pair the two: FXMacroData for the event list and TrueFX or another archive for the ticks.

Bottom line: TrueFX is a price-data service with a free tick archive and an institutional-priced live stream. FXMacroData is a macro-release data service with second-level timestamps across 22 currencies.

Takeaway: For FX teams that trade around data releases, the practical setup is both: ticks for the reaction, FXMacroData for the cause and the clock.

Sources Checked

Claims about TrueFX are based on its public pages, checked in October 2026. Where TrueFX does not publish a figure, this article says so instead of estimating.

TrueFX homepage

Professional and Institutional plan prices, FIX delivery, 16+ pairs.

View source

TrueFX historical downloads

Free tick downloads after registration; Integral OCX sourcing.

View source

TrueFX FAQ and about

Indicative pricing, use cases, and Integral ownership.

View FAQ · View about

FXMacroData

Plans, API reference, and measured release speed.

View pricing

Takeaway: TrueFX publishes its stream prices and free-download offer clearly; archive start dates, rate limits, and download licence terms sit behind registration.

Related Reading

• FXMacroData vs Dukascopy historical data: another free FX tick archive, compared on the same terms.
• FXMacroData vs OANDA Exchange Rates API: reference FX rates versus macro release data.
• Best economic indicator feeds for algo trading: how release feeds fit automated strategies.
• How to use MetaTrader 5 Python with FXMacroData: combining broker ticks with release data in practice.