# 3Commas vs Cryptohopper vs Bitsgap

Three hosted bot platforms at 20 to 149 dollars a month — and three different things being metered, so the headline prices do not compare until you convert them.

*https://cryptomarkets.tools/compare/hosted-crypto-trading-bots*

- https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/3commas.md
- https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/cryptohopper.md
- https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/bitsgap.md

## 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](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/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](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/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](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/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](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/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](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/octobot), [Freqtrade](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/freqtrade) and [Hummingbot](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/hummingbot) cost a
server and nothing else, and [Gunbot](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/gunbot) is the paid, closed-source version of that
bargain — a licence you buy once and install, with the keys never leaving your machine.

## FAQ

### Which of these is cheapest?

None of them, until you say how many bots you intend to run. Cryptohopper's 29 dollars buys one bot and so does its 129-dollar plan. 3Commas meters bot types, so five DCA bots and two grid bots is its 20-dollar plan and futures is not. Bitsgap meters counts per type, so three grid bots and ten DCA bots is its 29-dollar plan. Convert your own plan into those three units before comparing any number.

### Do any of them let me trade on the free plan?

Barely. 3Commas cannot trade at all on free — it connects two accounts for tracking and runs backtests. Cryptohopper's unlisted Pioneer plan is manual trading and portfolio tracking with no automation of any kind. Bitsgap's free plan runs bots only in demo, plus three live COMBO bots on one venue, Evedex. In all three cases the product starts at the first paid tier.

### Which one can I drive from my own code?

3Commas has a developer API, writable only on its top plan, plus webhooks and TradingView alerts. Cryptohopper has a REST API on its top plan and a first-party MCP server with four read tools. Bitsgap has none of it — no API, no webhooks, no TradingView execution, nothing across 307 help-centre pages. If your stack has to talk to the platform, that eliminates one of the three before anything else is considered.

### Which one trades futures?

3Commas and Bitsgap. Cryptohopper is spot only and says so in its own documentation, with no plan to add perpetuals in the near term. Its pricing table's "Shorting" row is not shorting — the tooltip describes buying a position back after a price drop.

### Is there a reason to prefer one on security grounds?

All three hold exchange API keys with trade permission on their own servers, so the question is what each has published about it. 3Commas is the only one of the three that has disclosed a key-exposure incident — its own notice of 29 December 2022 — which is a reason to read that card before the others, and also the only public track record any of them has.
