Spread comparison sites answer "which broker is cheaper than which?" using community-sampled data across many brokers. Useful for choosing a broker. OrderVolume answers what happens after you've chosen: how is YOUR broker's feed behaving, against reference truth, right now?
✓ Broad coverage — dozens of brokers side by side, sampled from thousands of user accounts.
✓ Free to use, quick sanity check when broker shopping.
✓ Long-running, familiar tools in the trading community.
— No reference market. Comparing brokers to each other can't show when the whole group — or yours specifically — has drifted from exchange-derived truth. No basis, no feed-latency measurement, no order-flow context.
— Community-sampled data versus a dedicated capture running against real broker terminals every two seconds.
— No per-user product: no alerts on your criteria, no view built around your broker, your hours, your thresholds.
— Different funding model: those services are free to traders. OrderVolume is funded by subscribers — you are the customer, and the product answers only to you.
Use comparison sites when you're shopping for a broker and want a broad free survey of typical spreads.
Use OrderVolume once you have a broker and real money moving through it. The question stops being "who's cheapest on average" and becomes "what is my counterparty's feed doing at the moment I act" — which needs a reference market and dedicated measurement, not a survey.
"They compare brokers to each other. We compare your broker to the truth."