--- title: "sec-api.io vs EvidInvest — SEC EDGAR data APIs compared (checked September 2026)" description: "sec-api.io is a hosted API over the whole SEC EDGAR archive since 1993 — filing search, XBRL-to-JSON, streaming, insider trades and 13F — on a $49+/month subscription. EvidInvest is a pay-as-you-go API over cross-company standardized statements back to fiscal 1985, with filing citations, transcripts and valuation. Every claim here is read off sec-api.io’s own pages and dated." canonical: https://evidinvest.com/alternatives/sec-api last_updated: "2026-09-11" --- # sec-api.io vs EvidInvest: every EDGAR filing as raw data, or standardized statements with citations > sec-api.io is a hosted API over the SEC EDGAR archive, operated by Data2Value GmbH — its home page calls it “your gateway to search the latest SEC filings and access all corporate documents from the SEC EDGAR archive filed since 1993”, and its catalogue spans filing search, full-text search, a WebSocket stream, XBRL-to-JSON conversion, section extraction, insider trades, 13F holdings and executive compensation. EvidInvest is a narrower product built on the opposite premise: statements normalized into one schema comparable across companies and forty years, with each US row from fiscal 2009 carrying the accession number of the filing it came from, plus transcript search and valuation on top. > Every claim about sec-api.io below was read off its own pages on 2026-09-11; > the source URL and that date are printed on each comparison row. > Canonical page: https://evidinvest.com/alternatives/sec-api. ## Who sec-api.io suits sec-api.io suits an engineer whose raw material is EDGAR itself. If the job is “give me every filing, every form type, every exhibit, as data, the moment it is published”, that is precisely what they sell: 500+ form types on the homepage’s count, structured datasets most providers never touch (Form 3/4/5 insider transactions, 13D/G, N-PORT, Form ADV, audit fees, 8-K items as structured events), a push stream over WebSocket, and filings-to-PDF and bulk download tooling. It is infrastructure for building your own filings product, from a vendor that describes itself as “building petabyte-scale systems” over SEC data. ## What sec-api.io does better - EDGAR breadth EvidInvest does not attempt: their docs index sells structured APIs for insider Forms 3/4/5 — the insider docs page puts the dataset at all Form 3, 4 and 5 filings and their amendments filed since 2003, holding 11.4 million insider transactions, 8.27 million non-derivative and 3.15 million derivative — plus Form 13F institutional holdings, 13D/G, N-PORT, Form D, Form C, Form ADV, executive compensation from DEF 14A “filed since 2005 to present” (sec-api.io/docs/executive-compensation-api), audit reports and fees, subsidiaries, and 8-K items 4.01/4.02/5.02 as structured events. - Real-time delivery. The Filing Stream API is “push-based WebSocket technology”, and the pricing page states new-filing availability under 300 milliseconds. EvidInvest has no streaming feed of any kind. - Full-text search across “all EDGAR filings and exhibits published since 2001” — the entire archive, not a curated subset, with a Query API over “18+ million filings” and 20+ search parameters. - A 13F API. Institutional holdings are a first-class, queryable product there; on EvidInvest, 13F lives on the website only and is not reachable from the API or MCP at all. - Operational scale tooling: bulk datasets refreshed daily, a filings-to-PDF generator, a Download API, and official Python and Node SDKs on PyPI and npm. ## What EvidInvest does differently - Standardization means different things on the two sides. Their XBRL docs state it plainly: “Please note that GAAP items are not renamed to its parent name… There are many items representing different types of revenue but none of them are renamed to Revenue - the original GAAP item name is always maintained.” EvidInvest maps every filer into one schema, so “revenue” is one field across every company and year. - The statement series runs back to fiscal 1985. Their archive is “filed since 1993”, because EDGAR itself starts there, and their XBRL conversion works on what filers tagged — they state no XBRL start year at all. - Pay-as-you-go against subscription: credit packs at $10, $20 and $59 that never expire, against $49/month billed annually ($55 monthly) for their entry tier — with their Full-Text Search API excluded from that tier by their own pricing matrix. - Earnings-call transcripts are a product on EvidInvest (cited transcript search over MCP and REST); their catalogue has no transcripts product, and the nearest their MCP page gets to earnings is the filed 8-K: “Material events. Form 8-K, split by item, from earnings under Item 2.02 to cybersecurity incidents under Item 1.05.” - Valuation is part of the product — DCF, reverse DCF, earnings power, Graham, EV/EBITDA, EV/FCF and P/E versus sector, each solved for what today’s price implies. Their docs describe the platform as APIs to “search, stream, parse, convert and download” SEC data; no valuation product appears in the catalogue. - Coverage extends past EDGAR: 40,000+ listings on 60+ exchanges, standardized with end-of-day prices — with no filing behind those rows, and the tools say so. ## Side by side | Capability | sec-api.io | EvidInvest | Source (read on) | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | What you are actually getting | A hosted API suite over the EDGAR archive: “SEC Filings API is a platform that makes EDGAR filings and SEC data accessible and analyzable to everyone”, with endpoints on api.sec-api.io and official Python/Node SDKs wrapping them. | A hosted service over standardized statements: one normalized schema across companies and years, reachable as a website, a REST API and an MCP server, with valuation models on top. | https://sec-api.io/docs (2026-09-11) | | Data source and how far back it goes | SEC EDGAR only: “access all corporate documents from the SEC EDGAR archive filed since 1993”, “30+ years data coverage since 1993”. Full-text search starts later — “filings submitted since 2001”. No start year is stated for XBRL conversion. | Standardized annual statements from fiscal 1985 — 30+ annual periods on file for 5,000+ US-listed companies — sourced from the company’s own XBRL filings from fiscal 2009 on. | https://sec-api.io (2026-09-11) | | Standardized statements across companies | Their “standardized” is statement-name and prefix cleanup on as-filed XBRL, and their docs disclaim concept mapping outright: “GAAP items are not renamed to its parent name… There are many items representing different types of revenue but none of them are renamed to Revenue - the original GAAP item name is always maintained.” | Yes — one normalized schema for income statement, balance sheet and cash flow, annual and quarterly, comparable across companies and across forty years. | https://sec-api.io/docs/xbrl-to-json-converter-api (2026-09-11) | | Citations back to the source document | Yes — filings are the product, so results resolve to EDGAR documents; the XBRL converter takes an accession number or filing URL as its input. | Yes, at row level: every US statement row from fiscal 2009 carries the form, period, filing date, accession number and sec.gov URL of the filing where that fiscal year first appeared. | https://sec-api.io/docs/xbrl-to-json-converter-api (2026-09-11) | | Non-US and foreign issuers | Through the SEC only. Their pricing FAQ: “We cover all filings filed with the SEC”, and names, in their own words, the “Form 20-K filings of foreign companies”. No non-SEC regulator source is stated anywhere in the catalogue. | Over 40,000 listings on 60+ exchanges, standardized by EvidInvest with end-of-day prices — and no SEC filing behind them, so no filing link and no 1985-deep history on those rows. | https://sec-api.io/pricing (2026-09-11) | | Earnings-call transcripts | Not stated — no transcripts product exists in their docs catalogue, and the word does not occur on the homepage, docs index or pricing page. The closest their MCP page comes to earnings is the filed document: “Material events. Form 8-K, split by item, from earnings under Item 2.02 to cybersecurity incidents under Item 1.05.” — the 8-K, not the spoken call. | Yes — cited transcript search is one of the tools, over both MCP and REST, alongside filing-section search. | https://sec-api.io/docs/mcp-server (2026-09-11) | | Valuation models | Not stated — the docs index groups every product they sell and none of the groups contains a valuation, estimates or fair-value product; the platform is described as APIs to “search, stream, parse, convert and download data and filings published by the SEC”. | DCF, reverse DCF, earnings power, Graham, EV/EBITDA, EV/FCF and P/E versus sector — each solved for what today’s price implies, with the inputs shown and adjustable. | https://sec-api.io/docs (2026-09-11) | | Insider trades, 13F and ownership data | A genuine strength: a structured Form 3/4/5 API whose docs page gives the dataset as every Form 3, 4 and 5 filing and amendment filed since 2003, containing 11.4 million insider transactions — 8.27 million non-derivative and 3.15 million derivative — with Form 13F institutional holdings, Form 144 and Schedule 13D/G sold as separate APIs in the same catalogue. | Institutional ownership from Form 13F is published on the website at /holders/{SYMBOL} and is not an API or MCP tool. Insider Forms 3/4/5 are not carried at all. | https://sec-api.io/docs/insider-ownership-trading-api (2026-09-11) | | Real-time and streaming delivery | Yes — the Filing Stream API is “push-based WebSocket technology” at wss://stream.sec-api.io, and the pricing page states “New Filings Availability < 300 milliseconds”. | None. EvidInvest is pull-only — request/response over REST and MCP — and prices are Cboe data delayed at least fifteen minutes. If sub-second filing alerts are the job, EvidInvest is not the tool. | https://sec-api.io/pricing (2026-09-11) | | MCP server | Yes — hosted and remote at api.sec-api.io/mcp, “nothing to install”, reaching “all 20 million filings published on EDGAR from 1993 to today”. Auth is the API key as a query parameter in the URL; their Claude instructions say to leave OAuth fields empty. Included on every paid tier. | Yes — a hosted MCP server with 59 tools over statements, cited filing and transcript passages, supply-chain facts and valuation. Auth is OAuth 2.1 in the browser, so no key is pasted into the client, or an API key as a bearer header. | https://sec-api.io/docs/mcp-server (2026-09-11) | | Pricing model and free tier | Subscription: Personal & Startups at “$49 / mo (billed annually)” or $55 monthly — with Full-Text Search excluded from that tier — and Business at $199/$239. The free tier is one-off: “The free trial API key is valid for 100 calls total.” Data volume beyond 50 GB/month is $0.30 per GB. | Pay-as-you-go: a free key to start, then credit packs — Starter $10, Plus $20, Pro $59 — that never expire. No subscription, no monthly fee, no data-volume meter. | https://sec-api.io/pricing (2026-09-11) | | Who operates it, licence and self-hosting | Data2Value GmbH — the sitewide footer reads “© 2026 sec-api.io by Data2Value GmbH”, with the disclaimer that “sec-api.io and Data2Value GmbH are independent of, and not affiliated with… the SEC”. A hosted proprietary API: the pricing page says “All files are hosted on our own infrastructure”, the PyPI and npm packages are SDKs for it, and no self-hosted option is stated. Redistribution is not in the listed plans — “If you’re looking for a redistribution license… please contact us”. | Proprietary hosted service, with no on-premise option at any price. The npm package @evidinvest/mcp-server is a client for the hosted server, not a copy of the data. | https://sec-api.io/pricing (2026-09-11) | ## Pick sec-api.io if… your raw material is EDGAR itself. If you are building on filings as documents and events — every form type, insider transactions, 13F positions, structured 8-K items, sub-second alerts over a WebSocket, bulk downloads — sec-api.io sells exactly that, mature and well-documented, and EvidInvest carries almost none of it. It is also the only choice of the two if you need 13F or insider data over an API rather than on a web page. ## Pick EvidInvest if… you need the numbers rather than the filings: one standardized schema where “revenue” means the same field for every company, back to fiscal 1985, with each US row from fiscal 2009 citing its accession number — plus transcript search and valuation models over the same key. Also if you want pay-as-you-go instead of a subscription: credit packs from $10 that never expire, against a $49-a-month entry tier that excludes full-text search. ## Where EvidInvest is the weaker choice - Filing links start at fiscal 2009. That is where the SEC’s structured XBRL data begins, so US statement rows from fiscal 2009 onward carry the form, period, filing date, accession number and sec.gov URL — and rows older than that carry the standardized figures with a null citation rather than a fabricated link. The series still runs back to fiscal 1985; the link does not. - Institutional ownership from Form 13F is published on the website, at evidinvest.com/holders/{SYMBOL}, and is not one of the MCP tools. If you need 13F positions inside an agent or a script today, EvidInvest is not the way to get them. - Coverage outside the US is standardized statements, not filing links. The 40,000+ non-US listings on 60+ exchanges are normalized by EvidInvest with end-of-day prices; there is no SEC filing behind them, no source document to open, and nothing like the 1985-deep history the US series has. - Prices are Cboe data delayed at least fifteen minutes and labelled as such on every response. There is no real-time feed, no tick data, no full options chain archive and no crypto at any price. Options positioning is previous-session only. - Quarterly statements do not reach as far back as the annual series, so a decades-long quarterly panel is not available. - EvidInvest is a hosted service. There is no open-source distribution and nothing to run inside your own network — if that is a requirement, stop reading here. ## FAQ ### Is sec-api.io free? No — it is a subscription product with a one-off trial. Their pricing page says “Your first 100 API calls are on us” and the FAQ clarifies “The free trial API key is valid for 100 calls total”; after that, requests return a 429 until you subscribe at $49/month billed annually ($55 monthly) for Personal & Startups or $199/$239 for Business. Note their own tier matrix excludes the Full-Text Search API from the Personal tier entirely. ### Does sec-api.io provide standardized financial statements? In their sense of the word, yes; in the cross-company sense, no — and their docs are commendably explicit about it: statement names are canonicalized and the us-gaap_ prefix is stripped, but “GAAP items are not renamed to its parent name… There are many items representing different types of revenue but none of them are renamed to Revenue - the original GAAP item name is always maintained.” You get each company’s own tags, cleanly converted to JSON. EvidInvest is the other design: every filer mapped into one schema so the same field is comparable across companies and years. ### Does sec-api.io have earnings-call transcripts? No transcripts product appears anywhere in their docs catalogue, and the only earnings line on their MCP page is a filing one: “Material events. Form 8-K, split by item, from earnings under Item 2.02 to cybersecurity incidents under Item 1.05.” — the 8-K a company files, not the spoken call with Q&A. EvidInvest ships cited transcript search as a first-class tool over both MCP and REST. If transcripts matter to your workflow, this is the clearest single difference between the two products. ### Which one should I connect to Claude or ChatGPT? Both run hosted MCP servers, so try both against your actual prompts. Theirs reaches the entire EDGAR archive — filings, insider trades, 13F holdings, executive compensation — with the API key passed as a query parameter in the server URL. EvidInvest’s exposes 59 tools over standardized statements, cited filing and transcript passages, supply-chain facts and valuation, with OAuth 2.1 sign-in so no credential is pasted into the client. Filing-shaped questions favour theirs; number-shaped and valuation questions favour ours. ### Who is behind sec-api.io? Data2Value GmbH. The footer on every page reads “© 2026 sec-api.io by Data2Value GmbH”, next to the disclaimer that “sec-api.io and Data2Value GmbH are independent of, and not affiliated with… the SEC”. Beyond the company name their public pages say little about the operator — their terms-of-service page renders no body text — but the pricing page is explicit about the shape of the business: “All files are hosted on our own infrastructure”, and redistribution is a separate conversation, “If you’re looking for a redistribution license… please contact us”. ## Sources Every sec-api.io cell above was read from these pages on 2026-09-11: - https://sec-api.io - https://sec-api.io/pricing - https://sec-api.io/docs - https://sec-api.io/docs/xbrl-to-json-converter-api - https://sec-api.io/docs/mcp-server - https://sec-api.io/docs/financial-statements - https://sec-api.io/docs/insider-ownership-trading-api - https://sec-api.io/docs/executive-compensation-api - https://sec-api.io/list-of-sec-filing-types Product home page: https://sec-api.io ## Related pages - All comparisons: https://evidinvest.com/alternatives (Markdown: https://evidinvest.com/alternatives.md) - Nine financial data APIs in one dated table: https://evidinvest.com/compare/financial-data-apis - The EvidInvest MCP server and every tool name: https://evidinvest.com/mcp - What EvidInvest costs: https://evidinvest.com/pricing (Markdown: https://evidinvest.com/pricing.md) Research and data software, not investment advice. ## Sitemap See the full [sitemap](https://evidinvest.com/sitemap.md) for every page on this site, the [index for language models](https://evidinvest.com/llms.txt), and the [glossary](https://evidinvest.com/learn/glossary) for the terms used above.