Both vendors sell the same shape of thing: a desktop seat plus a data contract, priced by negotiation. For a single-office RIA running model portfolios, neither one is obviously required, and the honest answer is usually a smaller analytics tool plus a file feed. For a multi-office wealth platform producing client-facing reporting at scale, FactSet's portfolio analytics orientation is the closer fit. For a research or trading desk that needs global cross-asset market data and news in one place, Refinitiv under LSEG is the closer fit. For anyone whose actual daily pull is index and ETF constituents, holdings and identifiers, the terminal is the wrong unit of purchase entirely.
FactSet vs Refinitiv: what the comparison actually decides
FactSet is an integrated financial data and analytics provider whose gravity sits in portfolio analytics and workstation workflows. Refinitiv, now marketed inside London Stock Exchange Group's data and analytics business, has its gravity in market data, news and cross-asset coverage delivered through a desktop product and feeds. For most advisory teams the choice between them is not a data-quality judgement, it is a workflow and seat-count judgement.
That distinction matters because the two decisions have different evidence. Data quality arguments are almost impossible to settle in a trial period, since both vendors will show you their strongest coverage. Seat-count arguments are settleable in an afternoon: count the people who open the terminal daily, count the people who open it monthly, and the contract mostly prices itself.
Neither company publishes an advisor-facing per-seat rate card on its public site. That is the first fact a reader deserves, because every comparison that quotes a confident number is quoting an estimate produced by somebody other than the vendor. Our longer corporate-level treatment sits in FactSet vs Refinitiv: 2026 Comparison; this piece is written from the seat, not from the filings.
| Criterion | FactSet | Refinitiv (LSEG Data & Analytics) |
|---|---|---|
| Centre of gravity | Portfolio analytics, workstation, spreadsheet-side workflows | Market data, news, cross-asset breadth |
| Typical primary buyer | Portfolio and advisory teams, client reporting | Research, trading and markets desks |
| Public per-seat pricing | Not published on the vendor site | Not published on the vendor site |
| How a quote is formed | Negotiated by seats, modules and term | Negotiated by seats, modules and term |
| Unit you are buying | A seat with analytics attached | A seat with data breadth attached |
| Fit for file-based constituent work | Bundled inside a wider contract | Bundled inside a wider contract |
| Fit for a team of two who need one screen | Weak on economics | Weak on economics |
Verdict on the framing: if your team cannot articulate which of the two centres of gravity describes its Tuesday afternoon, it is not ready to sign either contract.
What each platform is built around
FactSet is built around the portfolio: constructing it, attributing its returns, and producing something a client or a committee can read. Refinitiv is built around the market: price, news, reference data and the ability to look at many asset classes from one screen. Both sell feeds alongside the desktop, and both will happily sell you either half.
The practical difference shows up in where the work ends. A FactSet-shaped workflow tends to end in a report, a spreadsheet model or an attribution table that goes to someone else. A Refinitiv-shaped workflow tends to end in a decision made at the screen, with the data never leaving it. Neither is better; they describe different jobs.
What is verifiable from vendor pages is positioning and product naming, and both change often enough that specifics are worth re-checking rather than recalling. We are not asserting what the current desktop product names are on either side, because we have no dated vendor page in front of us, so confirm any product name you read in an older comparison against the vendor's current documentation before it goes into a procurement memo. Our standing notes on each are in Refinitiv Review 2026 and FactSet Review 2026.
Verdict on architecture: pick FactSet if your output is a document, pick Refinitiv if your output is a decision made while looking at a screen.
Who each one actually fits: RIA, wealth platform, or quant desk
The buyer type decides this more cleanly than any feature list. A small RIA running model portfolios usually needs holdings, prices and a reporting layer, not a terminal. A multi-office wealth platform needs reporting at scale and consistency across offices. A quant or index team needs raw history and identifiers, and needs it as files.
Take the RIA case honestly. If three advisors share one licensed seat and open it twice a week to pull a fact sheet, the contract is buying a screen, not a workflow. The rational structure there is a lighter analytics tool for client reporting plus a constituent and holdings file feed for the underlying data, and the comparison worth running is against the mid-market tools rather than against the other enterprise vendor.
The wealth platform case is different in kind, not in degree. Once reporting has to be consistent across offices, reproducible at quarter end and defensible to a compliance function, the integration work you avoid by buying an analytics platform is real money. That is the case where FactSet's shape earns its price.
The quant or index desk case is the one both vendors serve least efficiently at the advisory price point. What that team needs is constituent history, sector weights, identifiers and holdings counts, delivered as flat files it can diff and load, and terminal seats are an expensive wrapper around that.
| Team type | Sensible primary purchase | Terminal seat genuinely required? |
|---|---|---|
| Single-office RIA, model portfolios | Reporting tool plus constituent file feed | Rarely |
| Multi-office wealth platform | Analytics platform with client reporting | Yes, for the reporting team |
| Bank or broker research desk | Broad market data and news desktop | Yes |
| Quant or index construction team | Raw constituent and holdings files | Usually not |
| Fintech building a product on feeds | Licensed file delivery, FTP or API | No |
Verdict by buyer: only two of those five rows are buying a terminal because the work demands one.
What does FactSet cost, and what does Refinitiv cost?
Neither vendor publishes a public per-seat rate card for advisory buyers. Quotes are negotiated on seat count, module selection and contract term, which is why two firms of similar size routinely pay different amounts for what looks like the same thing. Any specific figure you find online is a third-party estimate unless it appears on the vendor's own page.
Third-party estimates do circulate, usually as an average or median contract value pulled from a competitive-intelligence database. We are not repeating any of them here, because none of them come from a vendor page we can cite and date, and a dollar figure attached to a named company without a source is worth less to a buyer than no figure at all.
Even where such an estimate is honestly labelled, the distance between an aggregate contract value and a per-seat price is the whole problem. An average contract spans firms with one seat and firms with forty, across module bundles that differ, so it tells you about the vendor's book of business rather than about your invoice. We work through the figures that circulate for FactSet, and what each one can and cannot support, in FactSet Pricing 2026: The $12K Figure, Checked.
The variables you can actually move in either negotiation are the same three: how many seats, which modules are inside the bundle, and how long the term runs. Knowing your own numbers on all three before the first call does more for the outcome than any benchmark figure quoted from a third-party page.
For contrast, published pricing exists at the data layer. AmericanETP lists $1,500 per year or $150 per month for an individual and $2,500 per year or $250 per month firm-wide, with no seat negotiation attached to either. The point is not that the numbers are comparable, they cover different scopes, it is that one of them can be checked before a sales call and the others cannot.
Verdict on cost: budget for a negotiated enterprise contract with either vendor, and price any file-deliverable data separately before you let it get absorbed into that negotiation.
The layer neither comparison covers: constituent and holdings data
Index and ETF constituent data sits inside both vendors' broader contracts, which means advisory teams almost never see it priced on its own. That is the gap every FactSet versus Refinitiv article leaves open. Constituent lists, sector weights, identifiers and holdings counts are a file problem, not a screen problem, and the delivery shape changes what you can do with them.
The difference is reproducibility. A terminal shows you the current constituents of an index; a dated file lets you compare yesterday's list against today's and see exactly what entered, what left and what changed weight. Point-in-time reconstruction, drift analysis and turnover work all depend on having the files, not on having looked at the screen at the right moment.
AmericanETP publishes constituent lists twice daily, with a primary update at 6pm EST and a secondary update around noon EST, covering 3,878 US and global indexes and US-traded ETFs. Holdings files carry Bloomberg FIGIs, the fundamentals file carries ETF description, leverage and constituent counts, and archived constituent datafiles run back to July 2009. Delivery includes FTP, which is the first thing most quant and fintech teams ask about, and sample files are on the Downloads page.
The company has been doing this longer than most of the names it gets compared with: it was founded in the 1990s as MasterDATA and renamed to AmericanETP to avoid confusion with IBM's use of the MasterDATA term. Side-by-side treatments sit in AmericanETP vs FactSet: 2026 Comparison and AmericanETP vs Refinitiv (LSEG) 2026, and the change-tracking output is described on the Constituent Change Report page.
Verdict on this layer: if your team diffs files, buy files; if your team reads screens, buy a screen. Paying terminal rates to do the first job is the most common avoidable line in an advisory data budget.
Where each one genuinely wins
Each platform has a real advantage that the other does not match, and pretending otherwise makes the whole comparison useless. FactSet wins on the integrated path from portfolio to client-facing output. Refinitiv wins on breadth across asset classes and geographies from a single desktop.
FactSet: analytics and reporting in one chain
The strength is that portfolio construction, attribution and reporting live in the same environment, so the numbers on a client report and the numbers in the analyst's model come from the same place. For an advisory team that produces recurring client documents, that removes a reconciliation step that otherwise consumes real hours each quarter.
What it costs you is money spent on analytics depth that a team of four running three model portfolios will not exhaust. The same integration that saves a large reporting team its quarter-end also prices the product out of reach for the firm that would use a tenth of it.
Refinitiv: breadth and cross-asset coverage
The strength is range. A desk that touches equities, fixed income, FX and commodities in the same week benefits from not switching tools, and news sitting next to price on the same screen is a genuine workflow advantage for anyone making intraday decisions.
What it costs you is that breadth is not depth in any single workflow. A team whose entire job is equity model portfolios pays for asset classes it never opens, and the reporting chain that FactSet-shaped buyers value is not the product's centre.
Verdict on strengths: buy the one whose advantage describes work you actually do weekly, and treat the other's advantage as a line item you are declining on purpose.
Who is FactSet's biggest competitor, and does the answer matter to an advisor?
The honest answer is that it depends on the layer. At the terminal layer the rival is Bloomberg. At the data and cross-asset breadth layer it is LSEG's Refinitiv business. At the fundamentals and research layer it is S&P Global Market Intelligence, and in the advisory and fund-research layer it is Morningstar.
None of that is a single answer, and the single-answer version is what most competitor articles sell. A vendor selling into four layers at once has four competitor sets, and which of them is the biggest depends entirely on which layer the buyer is standing in.
Whether it matters to an advisor depends on which layer the advisor is actually buying. If you need a screen, the competitor set is terminals. If you need constituent files, the competitor set is data vendors, and comparing those to a terminal is a category error. We split the landscape that way in FactSet Competitors: 2026 Breakdown and FactSet Alternatives: Split by the 4 Layers You Pay For, with the fund-research angle covered in FactSet vs Morningstar: 2026 Compared.
Verdict: the competitor question only becomes useful after you name the layer, and most advisory teams are shopping in two layers simultaneously without realising it.
How to run the decision without a nine-month procurement cycle
Run it as an inventory, not as a bake-off. Most teams can settle this in three weeks by listing what they actually pull, how often, and in what form, then pricing each group separately. The mistake is letting a single enterprise negotiation absorb requirements that were never terminal requirements.
Work through it in this order:
- Inventory the pulls by frequency. List every recurring data request for a month, with who made it and how often. Anything pulled daily is a workflow; anything pulled twice a quarter is a report someone could schedule.
- Separate terminal-only from file-deliverable. Intraday price, news and ad hoc screening need a screen. Constituent lists, holdings, sector weights and identifiers do not.
- Count real daily seats, not licensed seats. Pull login frequency if your admin console exposes it. The gap between licensed and active is where the negotiating room is.
- Test history depth and identifier coverage before pricing. Ask for a dated file from a specific past quarter and check that the identifiers resolve against what you already hold. Archived constituent files back to July 2009 and FIGIs carried in holdings files are the kind of thing to verify on a sample, not to take on a slide.
- Ask about delivery shape early. FTP and scheduled file drops are what most fintech and quant teams want first, because they are what a pipeline can consume without a human present. The Bloomberg Extensions page describes the identifier side of that.
- Price the residual separately. Once the file-deliverable work is carved out, re-quote the terminal for the seats that genuinely need it. The residual is usually smaller than the original ask.
If the residual turns out to be one or two seats, widen the comparison rather than narrowing it: Refinitiv Alternatives: 2026 Options and Refinitiv vs Morningstar: 2026 cover the mid-market end of that decision.
Verdict on process: the inventory does more to set your price than the negotiation does.
Verdict by scenario
Single-office RIA. Do not buy either as your primary system. Buy a reporting tool you will use daily and a constituent file feed with published pricing, and revisit in two years.
National wealth platform. FactSet, for the analytics-to-reporting chain across offices, with constituent and holdings data licensed separately so it does not disappear into the bundle.
Bank or broker research desk. Refinitiv under LSEG, for cross-asset breadth and news at the screen. This is the clearest case for a terminal seat in the list.
Fintech building on feeds. Neither. You need licensed files, defined schemas and FTP or API delivery, and a terminal seat contributes nothing to a production pipeline.
Index or exchange team. Files, with deep archives and identifier coverage, plus whatever terminal seats your research function separately justifies. Teams weighing ETF-specialist vendors as part of that should read ETF Global vs FactSet: 2026 Compared.
FAQ
Who is FactSet's biggest competitor?
There is no single answer, because FactSet sells across several layers. Bloomberg competes at the terminal layer, LSEG's Refinitiv business at the market data and cross-asset layer, S&P Global Market Intelligence at the fundamentals and research layer, and Morningstar in fund research and advisory tools. Asking which one is biggest without first naming the layer you are buying in produces an answer that cannot guide a purchase.
Does J.P. Morgan use FactSet?
We cannot verify which platforms any individual bank uses, and no source in front of us states it. Enterprise agreements between data vendors and financial institutions are sometimes announced by one party or the other, so the check is straightforward: look for a published statement from the institution or from the vendor. Treat client-usage claims about other firms as unverified unless one of those two parties has put it in writing.
Why is FactSet's share price falling?
Share price direction should come from a market data source and from the company's own disclosures, not from an article, and we will not characterise it from memory or from undated secondary summaries. FactSet reports on a quarterly cycle, and its investor relations materials carry management's own account of results, guidance and capital allocation. That is the primary source; anything else is somebody's reading of it.
Is FactSet or Bloomberg better for a financial advisor?
For an advisor whose output is client reporting and portfolio analytics, the FactSet-shaped workflow is generally the closer fit, since the chain from portfolio to document is the product's centre. Bloomberg's advantage is the trading and markets desktop, which most advisory work does not require daily. Neither publishes an advisor-specific public rate card, so both require a quote.
How does FactSet compare to YCharts for an RIA?
They are not the same category. FactSet is an enterprise platform with a negotiated contract and deep analytics; the mid-market advisor tools sit at a lower price point with a narrower scope aimed at client-facing charts and reporting. A small RIA that uses a fraction of an enterprise platform is usually better served by a mid-market tool plus a separately licensed data feed, which is the structure we recommend in the RIA scenario above.
Can you replace a FactSet or Refinitiv seat with a data feed?
Partly, and the split is predictable. Workflows that require looking at live prices, news and ad hoc screening at a screen cannot be replaced by files. Workflows that consist of pulling constituent lists, holdings, sector weights, identifiers and counts on a schedule are file work, and running them through a terminal seat is the most common source of avoidable cost in an advisory data budget.
If the residual after that inventory is constituent and holdings data on a schedule, that layer is priced and published: twice-daily updates, 3,878 US and global indexes and US-traded ETFs, Bloomberg FIGIs in holdings files, archives back to July 2009, and FTP delivery. See sample files and current pricing at americanetp.com, or ask a specific coverage question through Contact.