What "for prop traders" actually changes
A general trading journal and a prop firm journal are judged on different things, and most rankings ignore the difference.
A retail trader with their own capital wants to find an edge. Depth of analytics is the product. A funded trader has a second, harder constraint sitting on top: a daily loss limit and a maximum drawdown, at least one of which is usually trailing, and breaching either ends the account regardless of how good the edge was.
So the questions that matter here are narrower. Does the tool model your firm's drawdown type correctly? Does it know where you stand against it during the session, rather than after? And when you are about to break it, does anything happen?
The last question is the one that separates this list, so here is the whole field at a glance before the rankings.
← scroll →
Five tools are strong in four columns and empty in the first. That column is the whole reason this page exists — and it is also why the ranking below does not start with us.
The ranking
Ranked as journals for a funded trader. Enforcement is scored separately further down, because mixing the two produces the kind of list where the author's own product mysteriously comes first.
TradesViz
Best overallNothing else on this list takes prop firm rules as seriously. 36+ pre-built firm profiles, 60+ account configurations, and all four drawdown types — trailing end-of-day, trailing intraday, static, and trailing-to-static lock — applied automatically from the profile you choose.
The feature I would actually pay for is retroactive evaluation: run your real trade history through any firm's rules "to find out, before paying for an evaluation." That answers the question every prospective funded trader has, using their own trades, for less than an evaluation fee.
Genuine free tier at 3,000 executions a month
Challenge Mode rehearses an evaluation with rules enforced on every tick
600+ statistics, and MT4/MT5 auto-sync alongside the futures platforms
Enforcement is simulator-only; a live breach produces a dashboard alert naming the date it happened
Forex needs the Pro plan — the free tier is stocks only
Cruveno vs TradesViz →Cruveno
Best for enforcementThis is our product. Read the next paragraph as a disclosure rather than a recommendation.
Second on journal depth, and honestly a distant second — there is no trade replay, no backtester, nothing like 600 statistics. What it does that nothing else here does is close the position. Session and equity drawdown limits are enforced server-side through MetaAPI, sub-second, whether or not your computer is on.
The only journal on this list that acts on a live account
Behavioural score that moves during the session, not a report afterwards
Unmetered AI — no credit allowance, no daily message cap
MT4/MT5 only; futures accounts on Tradovate or Rithmic cannot connect at all
Needs a master password, not an investor password, in order to act
No free tier, no simulator, no backtesting, and it is a new product
TradeZella
Best review environmentThe strongest post-session product in the category. Trade Replay re-watches the chart exactly as it printed, without the hindsight of the completed move, which is the fastest way to find out whether a setup was really there. Backtesting runs against years of tick data.
Their Risk Management Agent is also more than most journals attempt — it tracks daily drawdown, position size and R-multiple, and warns before the break rather than after.
Trade Replay and tick-data backtesting have no equivalent here
Real-time sync from 500+ brokers, MT4 and MT5 included
AI is metered: 500 to 3,000 credits a month, which cannot be topped up
Essential covers one trading account — a challenge plus a funded account means Pro at $59
Cruveno vs TradeZella →TraderSync
Best broker coverageBroad and mature. Autosync across stocks, forex, crypto, futures and options, trade replay, market replay down to millisecond precision on the top tier, and an automated backtester.
Worth knowing before you buy: the Cypher AI assistant is capped by day, not by month — 5 messages a day on Pro, 15 on Premium, 60 on Elite. On a bad session that is a low ceiling.
Very wide asset and broker coverage, with a 7-day trial
Market replay with 1-minute to millisecond tick precision by tier
No prop-firm-specific rule modelling worth the name
Cypher AI limited to 5 messages a day on the entry plan
Edgewonk
Best for psychologyThe one tool here built around the trader rather than the trades. Its emotional and discipline tracking goes deeper in retrospect than anything else on this list, and there is no tier ladder — every customer gets the full feature set.
On a per-month basis it is also the cheapest paid option here, roughly $12.30 over the 16-month term before VAT. If your problem is psychological and you want to study it properly after the fact, this is the specialist.
Deepest retrospective psychology tooling in the category
Flat pricing, no tiers, and automatic import from 200+ brokers including MetaTrader
No prop firm rule modelling and nothing that acts during a session
Billed as a 16-month term rather than monthly, and VAT lands on top in the EU and UK
Tradervue
Best simple optionThe long-standing, unfussy option. Journalling, charts, reports and mentoring, with broker sync and a free plan to start on. If you find the newer tools cluttered, this is the calm one.
Free plan, and a mentoring feature the others do not have
Mature and stable, with a straightforward workflow
No prop firm features at all — no rule profiles, no drawdown modelling
Priced like the tools that do have them
MQL5 risk manager EAs
Not a journalOn the list because they solve the problem the journals do not. A drawdown EA runs inside your MetaTrader terminal, evaluates on every tick and closes every position when your limit is hit — in milliseconds, faster than any cloud service including ours.
They also stop the moment the terminal does. MQL5 sell virtual hosting precisely so robots keep running "around the clock", which tells you what the failure mode is.
Fastest possible reaction, and no password shared with anyone
A one-time $32–40 if your machine is genuinely always on
No journal, no analytics, no behavioural data whatsoever
Stops with your terminal; one instance and one manual config per account
Cruveno vs risk manager EAs →The capability almost none of them have
Look back at the matrix. Five of the seven tools are strong journals and empty in the first column. That is not an oversight on their part — a journal connects read-only, and read-only cannot act. Building enforcement means asking for trading rights, which is a different product with different risks.
But it does mean that if your specific failure is a drawdown rule you keep breaking, five of these seven cannot help with it, however good their analytics are. The two that can are a local EA, which depends on your machine staying up, and a cloud service, which does not.
The honest framing: most funded traders who blow an account did not lack information. They could have recited the rule that ended them. What was missing was something between the decision and the order, and no amount of retrospective depth supplies that.
What each one costs per year
Annual cost for a forex prop trader who needs a plan that actually covers forex — which rules out TradesViz's free tier. All figures were read from the vendors' own pages on 1 August 2026 and are shown in the currency each company bills in, without conversion.
| Tool | Cheapest usable plan | Per year | Acts on a live account |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cruveno | Founding | €149 | Yes |
| Risk manager EA | One-time purchase | ~$40 first year, $0 after | Yes — while the terminal runs |
| TradesViz | Pro (forex) | ~$180 annually billed | No — simulator only |
| Edgewonk | Single tier | $197 / 16 months | No |
| TraderSync | Pro | $269.52 | No |
| TradeZella | Essential | $315 | No — warns |
| Tradervue | Silver | $29.95/mo | No |
Every tool on this list costs less than a third of one failed evaluation. Picking the wrong one is cheap; picking none is not.
By trader type
Futures on Apex or Topstep. TradesViz, and it is not a close call. It syncs from Tradovate, Rithmic, NinjaTrader, Sierra Chart and CQG and models the trailing drawdown types those firms use. Cruveno cannot connect to your account at all.
Forex on MT4 or MT5, first evaluation. TradesViz Pro. Use Challenge Mode to rehearse, and run your existing history through the retroactive evaluation before paying a fee. Learn the rules before you pay to be tested on them.
Forex on MT4 or MT5, already failed one or more. This is the case the enforcement column is about. If your post-mortem keeps telling you something you already knew, another analytics surface will not change the outcome.
Strategy still in development. TradeZella for the replay and tick-data backtesting, or TraderSync for the market replay. Neither of these is a prop firm question yet.
Discipline is the whole problem, and you want to study it. Edgewonk. Cheapest per month, deepest psychological tooling, and no tier ladder.
Budget is zero. TradesViz's free tier if you trade stocks, Tradervue's free plan otherwise, or a spreadsheet. A disciplined trader with a spreadsheet beats an undisciplined one with a subscription.
Two of the three branches end at a competitor. If they did not, this page would not be worth the time it takes to read.
How we compared these tools
- Every price and feature claim was read from the vendor's own pages on 1 August 2026, and each is recorded in this page's HTML source with its URL and that date. Two of the pricing pages render through JavaScript and were read in a browser rather than fetched.
- TraderSync's monthly-billing price is deliberately absent. Their pricing page kept showing annual figures and we could not confirm the monthly number from the page itself, so we quote only the annual prices we actually saw. Third-party review sites list a monthly figure; we are not repeating it as fact.
- Prices are shown in the currency each vendor bills in. We do not convert, because an exchange rate picked today would be wrong by the time you read this.
- We make Cruveno. It is ranked second, and the enforcement section is written to be checkable rather than persuasive — every claim about a competitor's enforcement behaviour is quoted from their documentation on the linked comparison pages.
- No star ratings, no scores out of ten, and no Review schema. We are one of the seven tools; any number we invented would be worthless.
- We have not run paid subscriptions to all seven end to end. This ranks what each product is documented to do, not how well it does it.
Common questions
What is the best trading journal for prop firm traders?
Which trading journal enforces prop firm rules on a live account?
Is there a free trading journal for prop traders?
Do I need a journal or a risk tool?
Which journals work with MT4 and MT5?
Which tools cap their AI features?
Is Cruveno a trading journal?
Cruveno holds your session and equity drawdown limits on a live MT4 or MT5 account, from the cloud, in under a second. Prop firm templates already configured, journal and behavioural score included.
Get started — €19/month →The detailed comparisons
Cruveno vs TradesViz
Compliance tracking against rule enforcement, in their own words.
Cruveno vs TradeZella
A metered AI journal that warns, against one that closes the position.
Cruveno vs MT5 risk manager EAs
Millisecond latency against a limit that survives a disconnect.
All comparisons
Every tool we have looked at, and who each one is for.