Compare official SEC APIs, document APIs and event feeds

Compare access models by the work they remove

This is a documented-capability comparison, not a scored product test. The official sources and vendor pages were reviewed on 2026-11-14. No commercial account, speed contest or full-archive recall test was run.

A small watchlist may need only the official API

If you check a handful of companies each day, cached submissions responses and original archive documents may solve the problem. There is no need to introduce an event-stream account to retrieve a known company’s filing list.

If the task is a large full-text corpus or structured extraction from many form types, examine providers that explicitly document those outputs. Synoptic’s live-post transport is a different layer. A REST endpoint on a product does not establish full-text EDGAR search or financial-statement parsing.

Ask providers the same reproducible questions

• Can I retrieve this exact accession and its relevant exhibit?
• Does a numeric result preserve unit, period and source document?
• What happens after a disconnect or a missing event?
• Can I backfill the exact date interval needed, and are there retention limits?
• What rights do I have to store and redistribute this specific output?
• Which API operations and entitlements are included in my actual account?

Treat evidence labels literally

The Synoptic stream’s description labels it NO DELAY and public metadata shows API access enabled. These are catalog observations, not an independently measured latency result. One metadata field also conflicts with the description’s package-only wording; confirm the current purchase/access path in the app.

Our real execution evidence is the official SEC submissions request and its parser, plus anonymous Synoptic public metadata calls. Those checks support a narrower claim than production access to every advertised data product.