Short version. Coinglass and Coinalyze cover derivatives for free and cover them well. CryptoQuant is the one I would pay for if I paid for anything. Glassnode is the one most people subscribe to first and open least. And the cheapest source on this page is not a dashboard at all β it is the exchange endpoint your browser can hit without an account.
Four aggregators, and where each free tier stops.
| Site | Built for | What the free tier actually gives | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coinglass | Derivatives dashboard and liquidation heatmap | Funding, open interest, long/short ratio and the heatmap, aggregated across a dozen venues, on majors | Short lookback without a plan; symbol coverage thins out quickly outside the large caps |
| Coinalyze | Derivatives with screening and an API | The same metric families, a longer history window, conditional screening, an API key that survives light automation | Fewer symbols than Coinglass, a plainer heatmap, and an interface that assumes you already know what you want |
| CryptoQuant | Exchange netflow, miner flows, stablecoin inflow | Netflow charts for the major venues on BTC, ETH and USDT | Deep time series, exchange reserve history and whale indicators sit behind the paid tier |
| Glassnode | On-chain valuation and holder cohorts | Enough to confirm a metric exists | MVRV, SOPR, NUPL, coin days destroyed, long-term holder supply β the entire reason you opened the site β give you a current snapshot at best, and the history behind them is paid |
Plan names and prices at all four move. Read the vendor's own pricing page before you assume what a tier includes; do not trust a comparison article for that, including this one.
Free tiers break in the same three places.
Whatever the site, the paywall lands on one of three things, and knowing which one saves you a subscription.
Lookback. Every dashboard gives you today. What costs money is a year of it. This only matters if your question has the word "usually" in it β "is funding usually this high", "how often does open interest fall this fast". If your question is "what is it right now", you are never going to hit that wall.
Symbol coverage. Aggregators cover the majors properly and get patchy fast as you go down the cap table. That is not a paywall, it is a data-sourcing limit: the small venues listing those contracts do not publish clean feeds. Paying more does not always fix it, so check the symbol before you check the price.
API quota. Free API keys are sized for testing, not for a script that wakes up every minute. If you want automation, Coinalyze is the one whose free allowance is closest to usable, and after that you are better off going direct to the venue.
Exchange endpoints are the free tier nobody uses.
Binance, Bybit and OKX all publish funding history, open interest and mark price on public REST endpoints that need no key and no signup. Deribit publishes options open interest and volatility data the same way. You can paste one of those URLs into a browser tab and read the JSON, or pull it into a spreadsheet and stop paying attention to dashboards entirely for that one number.
What you give up is aggregation and presentation. One endpoint is one venue, timestamps come back in milliseconds, and nobody draws you a chart. What you gain is the number that will actually be applied to your account, which is not the same thing as the blended cross-venue figure a dashboard shows you. If you are sizing a carry trade off funding, use your own venue's series and run it through the funding rate calculator rather than the aggregate. The aggregate tells you about the crowd; your venue tells you about your bill. The funding rate guide goes through why those two diverge.
If you trade from the US, a lot of this screen is not tradable by you.
This is the part a translated comparison would miss. The aggregated perp numbers on all four sites are dominated by offshore venues. Binance.com does not serve US persons, and Deribit has long excluded them too, so a US-based reader is looking at positioning data from a book they cannot trade into.
That does not make the data useless β crowding is crowding wherever it sits, and the offshore perp book is where most of the leverage actually is. But it changes what you do with it. Read the aggregate as sentiment and positioning. Price your own trade off the venue you can reach: Coinbase, Kraken, or CME futures if you want a regulated wrapper. CME runs its own calendar and its own basis, which is why a US reader can see a perfectly clean offshore funding signal and still have nothing to put on. Options skew from Deribit is the same story β information, not an instrument.
The practical version: if a dashboard number would change your position, check whether the venue behind that number is one you can trade. If it is not, downgrade it from signal to context.
Two numbers I do not quote without a second source.
Headline liquidation totals. Aggregators rebuild these from venue feeds, and those feeds are not uniform. Easiest way to see it for yourself: pick a violent hour, then look up the total for that hour on two different liquidation dashboards. They will not agree, sometimes not even to the same order of magnitude. Use the shape β where the clusters sit, whether they cleared β and skip the dollar figure. Our liquidation map guide covers reading the shape.
Single-day exchange netflow spikes. Netflow depends on somebody having correctly labelled which wallets belong to which exchange. When a venue rotates addresses, an internal reshuffle can print as a giant inflow until the label catches up β and by then the screenshot is already circulating. The 7-to-30-day direction is the part worth trusting; a one-day spike is a question, not an answer.
A stack that costs nothing and still holds up.
Derivatives: Coinalyze for anything where you need history, Coinglass for the ten-second glance at the heatmap. Flows: CryptoQuant free tier, read as a trend line only. Venue truth: the exchange's own public endpoint, for any number you are going to trade against. Valuation: this is the honest gap in a free stack, because the usable history on the cohort metrics really is paid β but if all you want is cycle position rather than a research chart, our perp versus spot volume and on-chain metrics pages cover the same ground with public inputs.
Which one you add first matters more than which ones are on the list. Subscribe when you can name the specific chart you would open and how often, not before. The most common way to waste money here is buying the most respected product on the list first and discovering three months later that the thing you actually check daily was free.
Context and references.
Free crypto analytics tools have proliferated since 2020, but quality and coverage vary materially. Glassnode's free tier covers most cycle-positioning metrics (MVRV, NUPL, exchange balance) but limits historical data to 24 hours. CryptoQuant's free tier covers similar metrics with different methodology. Coinglass free tier covers derivatives (funding, OI, liquidation) with full historical access.
For ETF flow data, Farside Investors and SoSoValue both publish full historical data free. Bloomberg Crypto provides syndicated coverage through major financial wire services. The Block and CoinDesk maintain editorial coverage that contextualizes the raw data.
For on-chain data without subscription, Etherscan, BscScan and Tron block explorer provide complete chain history. DefiLlama provides chain-by-chain stablecoin and TVL breakdowns. Token Terminal provides protocol-revenue and tokenomics aggregation. All four are free with no usage cap for normal user volumes.
For price and order book data, TradingView free tier covers most major venues with charting limited to 2-year history. Kaiko, the institutional-grade microstructure data provider, runs a research blog with free aggregated reports. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap provide free API access for basic price and volume data.
Crypto assets are volatile and not suitable for every investor. This page is editorial analysis, not financial advice.