The 5 best stock alert apps in 2026

August 10, 2026·Updated August 27, 2026·11 min read

Five apps you can install and one web tool that outguns most of them, judged on one job: telling you a threshold you chose has been crossed, while your phone is in your pocket. Stock Alarm has the widest triggers, Yahoo Finance is the free pick that covers everything, and only two of the six support a percent-change trigger the vendor will actually put in writing. Checked August 27, 2026.

The short answer

If your alert is a plain number on a well-known ticker, install Yahoo Finance and stop reading: it is free, it covers everything, and it pushes. If your alert is a rule rather than a number, an RSI limit or a moving-average cross, Stock Alarm is the only app here that can express it, and it will phone you if you want. If you want both trigger types with the day’s context attached and you would rather pay $3.99 than $19.99, that is us, and we are third for reasons stated below.

The most interesting product in this category is not an app at all. StockAlert.pro has 23 trigger types including sentiment and valuation rules that nothing on the ranked list can match, and a genuinely free tier. It has no phone app, its own answer to whether one is coming is “not yet”, and browser push only fires while a browser is running. That trade is the whole shape of this category.

What actually separates alert apps

Alerts are the most-claimed and least-differentiated feature in finance apps. Nearly every product here has them, so the criteria come before the list rather than being implied by it.

• It has to be an app. Everything in the ranked list has an App Store or Play listing we opened on the date shown, and the table records the title the store displayed rather than the brand name. One well-known alerting product failed that test and is in its own section below, because a browser notification is not a phone notification.
• What it can trigger on. Absolute price alerts are universal and tell you almost nothing about an app. Percent change is the first real dividing line, and technical triggers such as an RSI limit or a moving-average cross are the second. Percent change has its own column because vendors describe it loosely and it is the one people assume is there.
• Whether the check runs on a server. An alert evaluated on a server and delivered as push works whether or not the app is open. An alert evaluated on your device depends on background execution the operating system is free to suspend, which is the usual reason an alert arrives hours late or not at all.
• What the free tier actually allows. Alerting is usually free; the limit is how many you can keep live at once. That number, not the feature list, is what you will run into. Where a vendor claims a free tier but publishes no limits, the table says that instead of implying generosity.
• Whether the price is checkable, and consistent. Every figure carries the date we read it and a link to the page we read it from. This page adds a column the others do not: the store price against the vendor's own price. Two of the five differ, one of them by more than Apple's commission, and nobody comparing these apps mentions it.
• What we did not weigh. Whether the alert was a good idea. An alert reports that a threshold you chose was crossed. It carries no view on whether to buy or sell, and nothing here is investment advice.

The five apps compared

Figures checked August 27, 2026. Dimmed cells record a failure to check rather than a bad answer, and each entry below says exactly what happened when we tried, including the HTTP status where a vendor blocked us.

The five, in detail

1. 1. Dedicated alerting app

   Stock Alarm

   An app whose entire product is the alert: dozens of trigger types across 65,000 assets, delivered by push, phone call, text or email.

   App Store: Stock Alarm - Alerts, TrackerGoogle Play: Stock Alarm - Alerts, Tracker

   Best at

   Trigger breadth, by a distance. Nothing else here fires on an RSI limit, a MACD cross, a moving-average cross or a golden cross, and nothing else here will phone you. If your alert is a rule rather than a number, this is the only app on the list that can express it.

   Bad at

   Telling you what it costs. Three of its own surfaces publish three different price lists, and none of them matches the other two. It is also the most expensive way here to set a plain price alert, if a plain price alert is all you want.

   Percent-change trigger

   Yes, stated by the vendor

   Price

   Vendor pages disagree. stockalarm.io/membership: Gold $19.99/mo, Pro $44/mo or $440/yr. app.stockalarm.io/pricing: Pro $168.00/year. App Store: Bronze $4.99/mo, Silver $9.99/mo, Gold $19.99/mo or $164.99/yr

   Verified August 27, 2026

   All three price lists were read on 27 August 2026 and all three are quoted above rather than reconciled, because reconciling them would mean picking one and presenting a guess as a fact. stockalarm.io/membership (HTTP 200) lists Gold at $19.99/mo with “Annual available in the app · free week to start”, and Pro at $44/mo or $440/yr described as two months free. app.stockalarm.io/pricing (HTTP 200) renders “PRO PLAN $168.00/year” with a “30% off” flag and a monthly toggle that does not change the figure, and adds “Existing Bronze and Silver members stay supported. New public pricing now centers on Pro.” The App Store listing at id1465535138 (Stock Alarm, LLC) discloses Bronze $4.99 and $53.99, Silver $9.99 and $95.99, Gold $19.99 and $164.99, and three Premium purchases. pro.stockalarm.io returned HTTP 429 to every attempt. Trigger types and delivery channels are quoted from the vendor's own descriptions.

   Check it yourself

2. 2. Free market data portal with an app

   Yahoo Finance

   The default free finance app: quotes, news and watchlists for practically every listed company, with custom price triggers and news notifications on top.

   App Store: Yahoo Finance: Stocks, MarketsGoogle Play: Yahoo Finance: Stocks & News

   Best at

   Costing nothing and covering everything. Coverage is effectively total, alerts are included without subscribing, and for most people that combination ends the search. If you want one alert on one ticker, install this and stop reading.

   Bad at

   Precision, in two senses. The alert arrives inside an endless news feed, so nothing is summarised for you, and Yahoo's own description promises only “custom price triggers” with no mention of a percent-change trigger anywhere.

   Percent-change trigger

   Not stated on any page we could read

   Price

   Bronze $7.95/mo billed $95.40 yearly, Silver $19.95/mo billed $239.40 yearly, Gold $39.95/mo billed $479.40 yearly

   Verified August 27, 2026

   Read from finance.yahoo.com/about/plans/select-plan/ on 27 August 2026 (HTTP 200), reached after three plausible Yahoo pricing URLs returned 404: /subscriptions/, /about/promos/gold/ and /subscriptions/plans/. The tiers are Bronze, Silver and Gold, with a “Start 7 day free trial” and a footer reading “No contracts, cancel anytime. No hidden fees.” There is no “Yahoo Finance Plus” tier on the current page, so any comparison still using that name is out of date. Both store listings resolved. Alert wording is quoted from Yahoo: “Set custom price triggers and news notifications so you are immediately informed of pivots in the market or news affecting your watchlists.” Percent change is not mentioned, which is why the column says not stated rather than no.

   Check it yourself

3. 3. Daily market-monitoring app

   Our app

   Stockplus

   Our app: server-side price and percent-change alerts delivered by push, next to a watchlist, a morning AI briefing and congressional and insider filing feeds.

   App Store: StockPlus: AI Market TrackerGoogle Play: StockPlus: AI Market Tracker

   Best at

   Both trigger types on a free tier, and context arriving with the alert. The check runs on our server every minute rather than on your phone, so nothing depends on the app being open or on the OS letting it wake up. Pro is $3.99 a month, the cheapest paid tier on this page by a wide margin.

   Bad at

   Breadth, in triggers and in coverage. There is nothing technical here: no RSI limit, no moving-average cross, no phone call, no SMS. Three live alerts on the free plan is a real ceiling, and Stock Alarm can express rules we simply cannot.

   Percent-change trigger

   Yes, stated by the vendor

   Price

   Free; Pro $3.99/mo

   Verified August 27, 2026

   This is our own product, so treat the row as a description rather than an independent check. The figures are the ones the server actually enforces rather than the ones our marketing would prefer: the free tier is 3 price alerts and 1 keyword alert, there is a hard ceiling of 200 alerts per account on any plan, and the checker runs on a one-minute schedule against a cached price with a staleness bound, so a very fast move can be reported a minute late. SEC filing alerts are Pro only. We are placed third of five because two apps above genuinely beat us: one on trigger breadth, one on being free and covering everything.

   See what Stockplus does

4. 4. Portfolio-risk monitor

   Guardfolio

   An app that alerts on the shape of your portfolio rather than on the price of a stock: concentration, drift, drawdown and volatility crossing limits you set.

   App Store: GuardfolioGoogle Play: Guardfolio: Portfolio Tracker

   Best at

   A question no price alert can answer. “Tell me when one position quietly becomes a third of my portfolio” is a genuinely useful alert and nothing else on this page will send it.

   Bad at

   Being a stock alert app, which it is not quite. The vendor says its alerts are sync-based rather than real-time price ticks, delivery is email and Telegram rather than push, and at $24.99 a month it is the most expensive entry here.

   Percent-change trigger

   No, and the vendor says so

   Price

   Guardian Pro $24.99/mo or $187.49/yr. Guardian Elite $49/mo or $399/yr. Promotional rates of $19.99 and $39.20 a month were showing on the day

   Verified August 27, 2026

   Read from guardfolio.ai on 27 August 2026, which 301s to www.guardfolio.ai (HTTP 200). Note that /pricing returns HTTP 404; the plan table is on the homepage. Both store listings resolved, seller Quantum Leap Alpha, LLC. The trigger description is the vendor's own: alerts fire when “concentration or drift crosses your limits”, and the site states explicitly that these are sync-based alerts when monitored thresholds change rather than real-time price ticks. That sentence is the reason this is fourth rather than first: it is an excellent product answering a different question. The percent column reads no rather than not stated because the vendor does describe percentage thresholds, but only for allocation drift, never for price.

   Check it yourself

5. 5. Retail social sentiment network

   Stocktwits

   A social network for traders, where each ticker has a live message stream and a crowd-sourced bullish or bearish sentiment reading.

   App Store: Stocktwits: Trading CommunityGoogle Play: Stocktwits: Trading Community

   Best at

   Understanding a move after it happens. When a ticker gaps and you want to know what retail thinks right now, nothing else here replaces a live ticker stream.

   Bad at

   The thing this page is about. We could not find alerting documented on any Stocktwits page we could read, and its own store descriptions list watchlists, sentiment, rooms, earnings and brokerage connect with no alert feature named at all. Listed because it is widely recommended for alerts, and the widely-recommended part is the bit we could not confirm.

   Percent-change trigger

   Not stated on any page we could read

   Price

   Ad Free $8.00/mo or $85.00/yr. Edge $22.95/mo or $229.50/yr. Enterprise is contact-only

   Not fully verified August 27, 2026

   The prices are solid; the alerting is not, and the two need separating. stocktwits.com/subscriptions returns HTTP 403 to automated requests and was read in a normal browser on 27 August 2026, showing Ad Free at $8.00/month or $85.00/year (from $96) and Edge at $22.95/month or $229.50/year (from $274.50), with “Save up to 16%”. Both store listings resolved. What we could not verify is the reason it is on this page: no page we read describes a price alert, a trigger, or a notification setting. Other comparisons, including our own /compare pages, record Stocktwits as having price alerts. It may well have them in the app. We are not going to assert a feature we could not find documented, and the honest answer is that this entry is the one to check yourself before installing on the strength of it.

   Check it yourself

The one with the best triggers, which is not an app

Worth its own section because on trigger breadth it beats everything above it, and because installing it is not an option.

1. 6. Web alerting service

   Not an app

   StockAlert.pro

   A web service built entirely around alerting, with 23 alert types including sentiment, valuation and insider-activity triggers, and no phone app at all.

   No App Store or Play listing exists. It is a browser tool with email, SMS and browser push.

   Best at

   Trigger types you cannot get anywhere else on this page. P/E and forward P/E thresholds, Reddit and X sentiment shifts, insider activity, dividend ex-dates and volume shifts, on top of the usual price and percentage rules. The free tier is real: 5 active alerts and unlimited email at $0.

   Bad at

   Reaching your pocket. There is no iOS or Android app, the vendor's own answer to whether one exists is “not yet”, and browser push only works while a browser is running. SMS is capped at 50 a month and sits on the paid plan.

   Percent-change trigger

   Yes, stated by the vendor

   Price

   Basic $0/mo, Premium $19.99/mo, with yearly billing stated to save 17%

   Verified August 27, 2026

   Read from stockalert.pro on 27 August 2026 (HTTP 200). Note that /pricing returns HTTP 404; the plan table is on the homepage, listing Basic at $0/month with “Up to 5 active Price & Time alerts” and “Unlimited Email notifications”, and Premium at $19.99/month with 50 SMS alerts a month. The “23 alert types” figure and the list above are the vendor's own. There is no app: an iTunes search for the brand returns only unrelated products, the nearest being “Stock Alert - Realtime Alarms” from a different vendor called Stock Alert ApS, which is worth knowing if you go looking in the App Store for this one and install the wrong thing.

   Check it yourself

Two things nobody comparing these apps mentions

The store price is often not the vendor’s price

Subscribing inside the app and subscribing on the website are different prices at two of the five. Yahoo Finance Gold is $39.95 a month on Yahoo’s own plans page and $49.95 as an in-app purchase. Stocktwits Edge is $22.95 a month on the site and $29.99 in the App Store, and the store also sells a $399.99 lifetime purchase with no equivalent on the web. Neither gap is a scandal, both are ordinary commission arithmetic, and both are money you keep by opening a browser before you tap subscribe.

A free tier with no published limits is not a free tier yet

Two entries here claim a free tier and publish no ceiling for it. Stock Alarm’s FAQ says it has a free tier for basic usage and no page states how many alarms that allows. Yahoo names a free plan in its help pages and prints no $0 tier on the plans page at all. Compare that with StockAlert.pro, which prints “$0/month, up to 5 active alerts” on the page, and with our own three. The number is the thing you will actually hit, and a vendor that will not print it has told you something.

How to choose in one minute

• You want free, comprehensive and on both platforms: Yahoo Finance.
• Your alert is a technical rule, not a price: Stock Alarm, and read all three of its price lists before you pick a plan.
• You want both trigger types with the day’s context attached: Stockplus, ours, at $3.99 a month with three alerts free.
• You want to be told your portfolio has drifted, not that a stock moved: Guardfolio.
• You live at a desk and want the richest rules available: StockAlert.pro, accepting that nothing reaches your phone.
• You want alerts on filings rather than on price: see the best congress stock tracker apps, where the trigger is a disclosure rather than a number.

Research subscriptions are a separate purchase and a poor way to buy alerting. If you already read the analysis, the alerts are a fine bonus; if you do not, see Stockplus vs Seeking Alpha and Stockplus vs Simply Wall St for what you would be paying for instead. If your holdings span brokers and crypto, Delta alternatives covers the portfolio-first end of the same question.

Whichever you pick, the setup matters more than the app. How to set stock price alerts you will actually act on covers choosing the trigger type and the threshold, and why alerts fail when your app is closed explains why the server-side column above is the one that decides whether an alert arrives at all.