Forex Factory is one of the most-searched names in retail trading — a few hundred thousand times a month. Almost every "best alternative" list treats it as a single product you can swap out. It isn't. It's four different tools sharing a domain, and most people only use one or two of them.
So the useful question isn't "what replaces Forex Factory". It's which part are you actually there for.
The four jobs
- The economic calendar — by far the main one. Red folders, release times, forecast vs actual.
- The forum — trade journals, strategy threads, broker arguments.
- The news feed — headlines aggregated from the wires.
- Market data — the trade explorer, sentiment, session times.
Each one has a different best replacement, and one of them has none.
Job 1: the economic calendar
This is why most people have the tab open. It's genuinely good — comprehensive, fast, and it has been the default for fifteen years.
The complaints are consistent, though, and they're all about the same thing: it shows you everything, for everyone. If you trade three pairs, you are reading a wall that is mostly irrelevant to you. Timezone handling trips people up constantly. And the impact colouring is a blunt instrument — a "red folder" NFP and a red-folder speech by a regional Fed president are not the same event, but they look identical.
What to look at instead: Investing.com's calendar is the closest like-for-like and filters more cleanly. Trading Economics is better if you care about the historical series behind a number rather than just the print. FXStreet sits in between. If you want it inside your charts, TradingView's calendar widget is adequate and already where you're looking.
Our own economic calendar takes the narrower approach deliberately: you pick your currencies and see only those, and the schedule is hand-checked against the issuing bodies — the Fed, the BoE, the ECB, the RBA, the ONS, the BLS release calendar — rather than scraped from another aggregator. That is a smaller dataset than Forex Factory's by design. If you want every event in every economy, Forex Factory is still the more complete answer and I'd say so.
Job 2: the forum
Harder to replace, and worth being honest about why: the value isn't the software, it's that fifteen years of archived threads live there. Nothing new can manufacture that.
What people actually go for is usually one of two things — a specific strategy thread, or other people's trade journals. For the first, the archive is irreplaceable and you should just use it. For the second, a public forum journal is a poor version of the thing: you're posting screenshots for strangers, there's no structure, and nothing is measurable six months later.
For live discussion, most of that energy moved to Discord and to prop-firm communities years ago. r/Forex is noisier but more current. Babypips' forum is friendlier for beginners.
Job 3: the news feed
The weakest of the four and the easiest to replace. Forex Factory aggregates; so does everyone. Reuters and Bloomberg are the sources most of it comes from. FXStreet and DailyFX add analysis. If you want speed, the wire services are what the aggregators are reading.
One honest caution, because it affects real money: a headline is not an edge. By the time a release is a readable sentence, the move has usually happened. The traders I know who use news well use it to decide when not to be in a position, not to enter one.
Job 4: market data and sentiment
Forex Factory's trade explorer and sentiment tools are the least-used part of the site. Myfxbook's community outlook is the better-known sentiment gauge; the CFTC's Commitment of Traders report is the serious version, published weekly and free. TradingView covers session times and everything chart-adjacent better.
The summary table
| What you're there for | Best alternative | Honest verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Economic calendar | Investing.com · Trading Economics · a filtered calendar in your journal | Plenty of good options |
| Forum archive | Nothing, really | Fifteen years of threads can't be replaced |
| Live discussion | Discord · r/Forex · prop-firm communities | Moved years ago |
| News | Reuters · FXStreet · DailyFX | Easily replaced |
| Sentiment | Myfxbook · CFTC COT report | Better elsewhere |
| Knowing if news actually hurts your trading | None of them | See below |
The thing none of them do
Here's the gap I kept running into, and it's the reason I stopped using a standalone calendar at all.
A calendar tells you what is scheduled. It cannot tell you whether you are any good at trading around it. Those are completely different questions, and only the second one changes how you trade.
Almost every trader has a belief about this. "I don't trade NFP." "I stay flat over the ECB." "I always get chopped up on CPI day." Ask where the belief came from and it's nearly always one memorable bad day, two or three years ago.
The check takes about ten minutes if your trades are in one place. Tag every trade with whether there was a high-impact release in your pair that session, then compare the two groups. Win rate, average win against average loss, and how big your positions were.
What people find is usually one of three things, and none of them is what they expected:
- News days are fine; the day after isn't. Volatility collapses and they keep sizing for the move that already happened.
- It isn't the news, it's the sitting out. Four hours of waiting, then a marginal trade at 3pm out of boredom.
- The rule is costing them. The avoided setups would have been their best trades of the month — which you only ever see if you log the trades you didn't take.
That last one is the whole reason missed-trade tracking exists in Exhibit A, and it's the part no other journal does. A rule that protects you from losses also costs you the wins on the other side of it, and if you only record what you traded, you never see the bill.
What Forex Factory still does better
It would be easy to end this differently, so: the calendar coverage is more complete than ours, the forum archive is genuinely irreplaceable, and it's free with no account. If you want one page with every event in every economy, keep using it. Nothing here is an argument against that.
What it can't do is join the schedule to your own results. That needs your trades and the calendar in the same place, which is what we built — journal, missed setups, position sizing and the calendar in one interface, with your trades imported from a spreadsheet or CSV in about two minutes. No broker credentials, because we don't ask for them.
Common questions
Is there a free alternative to the Forex Factory calendar?
Several. Investing.com and Trading Economics are both free and filter more cleanly by currency and impact. TradingView's calendar is free inside the chart you're already watching.
Why do calendar times differ between sites?
Timezone handling, almost always — and it gets worse around daylight-saving changes, which the US, UK, EU, Australia and New Zealand all make on different dates. A release published at 10:45am local in Wellington lands the previous day in UTC. If two calendars disagree on the hour, check the issuing agency's own release page rather than a third aggregator.
Is Forex Factory's forum still worth reading?
For the archive, yes. For live discussion, most of it moved to Discord and prop-firm communities some years ago.
Should I avoid trading around high-impact news?
Check your own numbers before you decide. It's a rule most traders adopt from someone else and never test, and it cuts both ways — it removes losses and wins together. Tag your trades by whether a release was scheduled and compare the two groups; ten minutes of arithmetic beats a rule you inherited.