Hello Alpaca Is there any benefit to using alpaca over Ally Invest?

I got a completely irrational hunch that alpaca is where I wanna start trading stocks. I got faith, but I’m not convinced just yet.

I would highly recommend using Alpaca if you are at all considering algorithmic trading and accessing the APIs (of course I’m admittedly a bit biased).

Alpaca offers paper trading while Ally Invest doesn’t. While a lot of the community uses paper trading to validate their trading strategy, a much more fundamental purpose is to validate, and debug, one’s code. Without a paper trading platform there isn’t a good way to test an algo without placing actual live trades. This can be scary and potentially costly. First getting code to work in paper trading then moving it to live is a much more robust approach than developing either ‘offline’ or with a live account. Best of all, Alpaca offers paper trading for free!

There are other Alpaca advantages over Ally Invest but, hands down, that’s the biggest one in my mind.