SledgeKey and Portfolio123, compared honestly
Portfolio123 has been doing point-in-time backtesting for far longer than we have, and if you already use it well, this page will not change your mind. It is written for the person deciding between the two, or wondering whether a cheaper tool can do what they need.
Price. Portfolio123's Screener plan is $25 a month or $300 a year, and its Pro plan is $83 a month. SledgeKey+ is $22 a month or $220 a year, and students with a .edu address pay $12 a month or $119 a year. SledgeKey's Starter plan is free for good, needs no card, and runs backtests of up to two years. New SledgeKey+ subscribers get seven days free with a card on file.
Prices checked October 2026.
What Portfolio123 does that SledgeKey does not. A formula language for custom factors, multi-factor ranking systems, simulated strategies that carry forward as live portfolios, and a much larger metric library. If your process is "rank the market on twelve factors and buy the top decile", Portfolio123 is built for it and we are not.
What SledgeKey does that Portfolio123's entry plan does not. You build a screen from 32 plain filters or start from one of seven preset strategies, and every backtest keeps the companies that later delisted in the universe, applies each fundamental from the date it was filed, and uses the 3-month Treasury rate of its own window for Sharpe and Sortino. SledgeKey+ runs ten years and exports a research PDF and an Excel workbook whose formulas recompute the headline numbers, with a 5,000-path Monte Carlo projection and an optional protective-put hedge priced with Black-Scholes. We also publish our own strategy backtests, including the ones that lost to the index, with every setting printed.
Which one to pick. If you write factor formulas, pick Portfolio123. If you want to test an idea you can state in a sentence and hand someone a report that holds up, start on Starter and see whether our numbers survive your own checks.