GuruFocus alternative: one flat tier
GuruFocus publishes 30 years of history and screener backtesting, from $549 a year per region. This product is US-only and re-tests your own numbers nightly.
By Javier SanzPublished
Founder of ValueScreener. Built and sold Ninety Nine, a securities services provider, and ran operations and internationalization at Alpaca, the brokerage API.
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GuruFocus is a broad market data service: many markets, thirty years of history, a screener you can backtest, and a large body of filed ownership data. ValueScreener is narrower on purpose. It covers US-listed companies, traces each figure back to the statement it was filed in, and re-tests the numbers you said had to stay true, every night, against the newest filings.
What both do
Both compute ratios from company accounts, both let you screen a market on those ratios, and both put ten years or more of history behind a company page. If all you need is a wide screen and a long history, that overlap is most of the decision, and GuruFocus has more of both.
The difference that decides it
GuruFocus is priced and shaped around breadth. Their pricing page, read 2026-09-18, publishes Premium for the USA region at $549/year and sells eight further regions separately, from $369/year for Canada, UK and Ireland, Oceania, Latin America, Africa and India and Pakistan up to $549/year for Asia and Europe, with "$100 off per year per additional region subscription" printed above them. Three membership levels are offered, Premium, Premium Plus and Professional, and the page prints an annual total only for the level it opens on: selecting either higher level left the order total at $549/year on every read, so no Plus or Professional price is quoted here. Thirty years of financial history is published, and screener backtesting runs over the last five years on Premium and back to 2006 on Plus and Pro. In their detailed plan overview the Guru holdings row reads 144 on Premium and 8,000+ on both tiers above it.
ValueScreener does none of that. It does not backtest a screen, it does not carry thirty years, it does not track anybody's filed holdings, and it has one market. What it does instead is hold a written thesis: the reasons you bought, plus the numbers that must stay true for those reasons to hold. Those numbers are re-checked every night against newly filed data, and one email goes out on the day one of them breaks. Silence otherwise.
The second difference is where a number comes from. Every figure on a company page here opens into its formula, its inputs, the statement it was read from, the fiscal year and the filing date. We looked for a published description of that on the GuruFocus pricing page on 2026-09-18 and did not find one. That is an absence of published evidence and not a statement that the feature does not exist; their product pages may say more than the pricing page does.
What each costs
| GuruFocus, as published | ValueScreener | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid tier | $549/year, Premium, USA region | $228/year, or $29/month |
| Other regions | Eight, sold separately, $369 to $549/year | Not offered |
| Tiers | Premium, Premium Plus, Professional | One, no feature gates |
| Trial | "A 7-day free trial is available once every 24 months" | 14 days, card required, first charge on day 15 |
| Refund | "Once billed, subscriptions are final and non-refundable" | 30 days from your first payment |
Their figures are quoted from the GuruFocus pricing page as read on 2026-09-18, and ours are the list prices on our own pricing page. One thing to know before you click: their pricing used to live at /membership/, and that address now redirects to /pricing. Prices change. Open both before you decide.
Where GuruFocus is better
Thirty years of financial history is three times the fundamental window here, and it reaches through two recessions this product cannot show you at all. Screener backtesting to 2006 answers a question a ten-year dataset cannot even be asked, and no amount of provenance substitutes for it: if you want to know how a rule would have selected in 2008, they can tell you and we cannot.
Regions are sold separately, so an investor who wants Asia or Europe can buy exactly that, and their page lists nine of them. ValueScreener has no answer for anyone outside the United States, and it is not a gap we are closing.
The Guru holdings row reading 8,000+ on their two upper tiers is a large body of filed ownership data, gathered and maintained over a long period. Tracking filed holdings is something this product has decided not to build, which means their answer is the only one of the two.
And they have been doing this since 2004. Their own pricing page carries the line "Founded in Texas in 2004" and the founder's letter on it dates the service to December of that year. Twenty-two years of operating history is itself a reason a cautious buyer picks the older service, and a reader who weighs that heavily should weigh it.
Who should pick which
If the question you are trying to answer is "how would this rule have performed", or "what do these thirty years look like", or "what is this manager holding", GuruFocus answers it and this product does not. If you invest outside the United States, the same.
If the question is "why exactly is this number what it is", or "tell me the day one of my reasons stops being true", then a narrower tool that reads filings, shows its working and watches your own thresholds is the one built for it. Both are research tools. Neither tells you what to own, and this page does not either.
What this leaves out
Every claim about GuruFocus here was read on their own pricing page on 2026-09-18 and nowhere else; /membership/ redirects there. Feature pages and documentation we did not read may describe capabilities this page records as not found. Their prices are per region, so a multi-region subscription costs more than the figure quoted, and on two reads three days apart the Asia and Europe figures differed, so check the region you want rather than trusting a figure on this page. This page compares two software products and says nothing about any security.