OptionsKing vs Barchart

Barchart covers the whole market: equities, futures, commodities, forex, with options screeners on top. OptionsKing covers one strategy family and applies a fixed confidence floor to it. Barchart will find you more covered call candidates. OptionsKing will show you fewer, and refuse to show any when nothing qualifies.

Barchart has been a market data business since long before retail options tools were a category. Comparing a young single-purpose app to it on coverage is not a comparison, it is a rout. So the honest version of this page is about what each one is for.

Pricing and features for Barchart were read off their own site on August 4, 2026. Prices move, and plans get renamed. Check the current number with them before you spend anything on the strength of this page.

What Barchart does better

Breadth. Equities, futures, commodities, forex, screeners across all of them, and a data business underneath that predates most of the retail options tools by decades. At $29.95 a month Premier is also cheap for what it is, and if you trade anything other than US equity options it is doing work that nothing on this site touches. The unusual-activity and end-of-day tooling has no counterpart here either.

What OptionsKing does differently

Barchart hands you a ranked table and trusts you to apply judgment to it. That is the correct design for a data product serving every kind of trader. It is also the exact point where a lot of premium sellers lose money, because the top of a yield-ranked covered call table is reliably the name with a problem: the thin chain, the earnings print inside the window, the stock that just fell 20 percent for a reason.

OptionsKing scores every candidate 0 to 100 and drops everything under 60 before you see it, with 75 recommended. You cannot set it lower. On a quiet week that leaves an empty screen, and the app says so.

The other half is the ledger. The app records what you actually collected on the trades you told it you took, including the ones that went badly, and reports the real number against what you would have made just holding the shares. Most tools in this category stop at the idea. Whether the idea worked is the only question that pays you.

Where OptionsKing is weak

It is new. Neither app is in the App Store or on Google Play yet, so today it runs in a browser and that is the whole distribution story. It covers 60 tickers on the public data pages, not five thousand. It does one strategy family, premium selling, and it has nothing to say about spreads, calendars, or anything you would put on in a directional bet.

And the gate cuts both ways. On the first public snapshot, taken in a dead-flat low-volatility tape, not one strike across all 60 names cleared the 75 bar. Zero. A screener with a looser bar would have handed you a full page of ideas that week, and some of them would have worked out fine.

And Barchart is not going anywhere. It has scale, history and a data business underneath it. If you want one subscription that answers most market questions, it is a much better answer than a single-strategy app.

Pick this way

• You trade more than US equity options. Barchart.
• You want to screen thousands of names yourself. Barchart.
• You sell premium on a short watchlist and want a bar under it. OptionsKing.
• You want to know whether your covered calls beat just holding the shares. OptionsKing tracks exactly that.

Questions people actually ask

Related calculators

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• Wheel strategy calculator a full cycle, put entry through covered call exit.
• Assignment probability calculator delta to keep-odds, with the caveat that matters.

Barchart pricing on this page came from Barchart on August 4, 2026. Nothing here is investment advice. See the disclaimer.