3Commas vs Cryptohopper vs Bitsgap

Three prices that are not in the same units

All three are the same purchase on the face of it: a monthly subscription, exchange keys pasted into somebody else's web app, grid and DCA bots built in forms, and a backtester attached. The entry prices sit within ten dollars of each other. The plans are not comparable anyway, because each vendor is metering a different thing.

• 3Commas meters bot types. The 20-dollar plan gives five DCA bots and two grid bots and no futures; futures and signal bots start at 50; a writable API starts at 140.
• Cryptohopper meters nothing but the bot's effort, because the count is always one. Every tier from 29 to 129 dollars reads 1 in the "Number of bots" row, and running a second type of bot means buying a second subscription. What the money buys is 15 markets scanned rising to 75, 80 open positions rising to 500, and a ten-minute strategy interval falling to two.
• Bitsgap meters counts per type. Three grid bots and ten DCA bots at 29 dollars, ten and fifty at 69, fifty and 250 at 149.

So the question that picks your plan is not which strategies you want. It is: how many positions do you intend to have open at once, and in how many different shapes?

Two people with identical strategies land on different vendors here. Someone running one grid bot on one pair, continuously, pays 29 dollars at Cryptohopper and gets the whole product; at Bitsgap the same person is paying 29 dollars for two allowances they will not use. Someone running a DCA bot and a grid bot together is on one 29-dollar plan at Bitsgap and on two subscriptions at Cryptohopper.

All three pricing pages open on the annual tab. The figures above are the month-to-month rates. The annual rates — 15/38/105 at 3Commas, 24.16/57.50/107.50 at Cryptohopper, 23/55/119 at Bitsgap — are what the large type shows by default on all three sites, which is worth knowing before you compare anybody's headline against anybody else's.

What each one cannot do

This is where the three stop resembling each other, and each gap is decisive for somebody.

Bitsgap has no way in or out. No public API, no webhook listener, no TradingView alert execution, no MCP server — none of it documented, and not one page about any of them across 307 English help-centre URLs. Whatever you build there stays there, and nothing else in your stack can start a bot or learn what one did. If you already run anything that would want to talk to the platform, the comparison ends here.

Cryptohopper is spot only. Not a gap in coverage — a boundary of the product. The vendor states in its own MCP documentation that there are no perpetuals, futures or options and no near-term plan for them, and 284 documentation pages contain no page on futures, leverage or margin. For a category where most of the risk and most of the volume live in perpetuals, that removes it from consideration for a large share of readers, whatever it costs.

3Commas is the one with a disclosed incident. Its own notice of 29 December 2022 states that some users' API keys, secrets and passphrases were disclosed by a third party, and that it asked Binance, KuCoin and other exchanges to revoke every key connected to the platform. That is on the card because it is the single most consequential fact about a service that holds trading keys — and it is also, uncomfortably, the only published evidence any of the three has about how it behaves when something goes wrong.

The backtesters are the weakest part of all three

None of these is a research tool and none of them pretends hard.

3Commas fills at the close of the next one-minute candle and its documentation never mentions perpetual funding, which matters because two of its three paid plans sell futures bots. Cryptohopper's own pages disagree about who even has the backtester — a beta behind a profile flag on one page, marketplace sellers only on another, an Explorer feature with a daily limit on the pricing page — and where it is documented it is capped at one month of test period, one run at a time, with a fee you type in yourself. Bitsgap's lookback is a plan feature: 30 days, then 180, then 365.

If the backtest is the reason you are buying, none of these three is the answer. That work belongs in backtesting libraries, where the engines model funding and fees because that is what they are for.

Which one, and when

Take Cryptohopper if you will run exactly one bot, on spot, and you want the deepest strategy designer of the three for the money. The 29-dollar plan is the whole product, and it is the only one of the three whose limits you will hit in a predictable way.

Take Bitsgap if you run several bots of several kinds at once, want futures, and nothing else in your stack needs to talk to the platform. Its metering is the one that scales with the way most people actually trade, and its closed loop is the price of that.

Take 3Commas if you need the platform to be programmable — webhooks in, a writable API out — or if you want futures and signal bots metered separately. Read its 2022 notice first, and then decide what you are willing to leave a key for.

Take none of them if what you want is a bot you can read and run yourself. OctoBot, Freqtrade and Hummingbot cost a server and nothing else, and Gunbot is the paid, closed-source version of that bargain — a licence you buy once and install, with the keys never leaving your machine.