How does Reamer Research compare with DolphinDB?

DolphinDB is a time-series database with its own scripting language, stream processing and a backtest plugin that simulates order matching down to tick-by-tick and Level-2 data. Reamer Research is a backtesting engine only, for strategies on OHLCV bars. DolphinDB is a data platform that can also backtest. Reamer Research does one job and leaves data storage to you.

What DolphinDB is

• A database first. Distributed storage and computing for time series, queried with a SQL-compatible scripting language that has over 2,000 built-in functions.
• Streaming. Historical data can be replayed through stream tables, so the same script can serve backtesting and real-time use.
• A backtest plugin. Event-driven callbacks on bars, snapshots and trades, with a matching-engine simulator that follows price-time priority. It works on daily, minute, snapshot and tick-by-tick data, across stocks, futures, options and crypto.
• Editions. A free community edition, limited to 2 nodes with 2 CPU cores and 8 GB of memory each, and commercial editions for larger deployments. Cloud, on-premises or hybrid.

How Reamer Research differs

• An engine, not a database. Reamer Research is a library with a stable C interface. Your program hands it bars from CSV files, settings and a strategy, and gets back the full result. Where you store data is up to you. See Does it include market data?
• Your own language. Strategies are written in Python or C++, or any language that can call C, not in a database's scripting language. See Which languages can I write strategies in?
• Bars, not order books. It models what happens inside a bar on a deterministic tick path, but it does not replay Level-2 data or simulate a queue. Order-book and high-frequency strategies are out of scope.
• Fill rules in writing. An execution specification ships with the kit and covers bid and ask, spread, slippage, commission, overnight swap, margin, gaps, order lifetimes and what fills first inside a bar.
• Byte-identical runs. With a fixed rng_seed, output is identical to the byte, including randomised spread and slippage.
• One machine. It runs on one Linux x86-64 or Apple Silicon Mac, offline after activation. No cluster to run.

Which to choose

• DolphinDB if you need to store and compute on large tick or Level-2 data sets, want research, factor computation and backtesting in one database, or trade at frequencies where order-book matching matters.
• Reamer Research if your strategies run on bars, held from minutes to days, you already keep your data somewhere, and you want a backtest whose fill rules you can read and rerun to the byte, from the language you already use. See Who are Reamer Research and Reamer Server for?

Price

Reamer Research costs $1,800 per seat per year, with a $225 30-day trial. See pricing.