3Commas

What it is

A hosted bot platform, and the largest of them by age — trading since 2017. You connect exchange accounts by API key, configure bots in a web interface, and they run on 3Commas' infrastructure whether or not your machine is on.

Four bot types do the work. DCA bots average into a position on a schedule or a trigger. Grid bots work a range. Signal bots fire on an external trigger, including a TradingView alert carrying Pine Script logic. SmartTrades are manual entries with automated exits — take profit ladders, trailing stops — which is the terminal half of the product rather than the bot half.

How it differs from the open-source half of this category. Freqtrade, Hummingbot and OctoBot hand you a framework and a machine to run it on; here the strategy is configured in forms and the machine is theirs. That is the entire trade — you give up the ability to write arbitrary logic and to hold your own keys, and you get something that works in an afternoon and keeps working while you sleep. OctoBot Cloud is the nearest comparison in shape, and it is a hosted build of an engine you could also run yourself. This one has no self-hosted build at all.

Pricing

The pricing page opens on the annual tab, and the large figures are not the monthly rate. Month-to-month it is 20, 50 and 140 dollars for Starter, Pro and Expert; the 15, 38 and 105 on the cards are the annual-equivalent, and the vendor's own saving strings make the discount explicit — an annual subscription is nine months' price. The month-to-month figures are confirmed independently by the help centre's plan table.

The free plan is real but is not a trading plan, and it is not shown on the pricing page at all. A seven-day trial of any paid tier exists and requires a valid payment method up front; skip it and the account lands on Free.

What separates the tiers is counts, not kinds — bots, trades, backtests, connected accounts — with two exceptions that are kinds. Futures trading starts at Pro. A writable developer API starts at Expert; below it the API reads and cannot act.

Billing is in euros including VAT for EU residents and dollars for most others, through Paddle. Paying in crypto is unavailable in the EEA, the UK, the United States, Canada and the UAE.

Data & coverage

Nine exchanges, and the vendor says nine on the pricing page: Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, Coinbase and Hyperliquid. The footer and several older pages still name Bitstamp, Bitfinex, HTX and BitMEX, and the security article's key table still lists Binance TR, Binance US, Bitfinex and Bitstamp — so the historical list is wider than the current one and the site has not finished catching up.

The backtester works on one-minute candles. A triggered condition waits for its candle to close and fills at the close of the next one. Up to ten pairs per run, across what the vendor describes as 10-plus spot and futures venues and more than 10,000 pairs, with PnL, win rate, fees, maximum drawdown, standard deviation, Sharpe and Sortino in the output, and export.

Integrations

Signal bots accept TradingView webhooks, and Pine Script execution is on every paid plan — which is the practical reason many people are here rather than writing Python. The developer API is read-only below Expert. There is a first-party JavaScript SDK for the v2 trading API, MIT-licensed and pushed to in September 2026.

No MCP server, as far as anything published shows. The pricing page's own translation file carries a row label for one, but the row does not render, the help centre's API section does not list it, and unauthenticated probes of six plausible endpoints returned 404, 403, redirects and no resolution — never the 401 a live gated server gives. The only 3Commas MCP server findable in public is third-party. Searched: the pricing page and its embedded data, the plans and API help articles, and those six hosts; developers.3commas.io sits behind a challenge and would settle it.

Limitations

The 2022 key disclosure is the fact to weigh first. 3Commas' own notice, still published, confirms that users' API keys, secrets and passphrases were disclosed by a third party, and that it asked the exchanges to revoke every key connected to the platform. The vendor has since built Sign Center — isolated key storage where its servers request a signature rather than holding the secret in the application — and supports IP whitelisting, but both are per-exchange and neither covers all nine venues. A hosted bot platform is a decision to let somebody else hold keys that can trade; this one has already been on the wrong end of that decision once, and says so.

The free plan cannot trade, which makes it an evaluation mode rather than a tier. Demo trading is paid too, so there is no way to watch a configured bot behave before paying.

Two vendor surfaces disagree about what a plan includes. The help centre says 1, 3 and 15 trading accounts; the pricing page says 1, 5 and 25. Both are current. Whichever is right, one of them is wrong on the page a buyer reads.

Funding is not mentioned anywhere in the backtesting documentation — not in the DCA backtesting guide, not in the bot FAQ, not in the output metric list — while futures bots are sold from the Pro plan up. That is an absence in the documentation rather than a proven absence in the model, and it is the thing to establish before trusting a perpetuals backtest from it.

There is a signal marketplace, and it sells other people's calls. Providers charge monthly for subscriptions to their signals, ranked by Sharpe into "Risky" and "Stable", and the vendor's page for it says in its own voice that a higher price generally means a better signal and that signals are "certainly worth your time and investment". That is advice, it is not what this catalogue lists, and the card is here because it is not what the product leads with — the marketplace is not in the primary navigation and the homepage sells automation. Use the bots; treat the marketplace as a different business sharing a login.

The AI assistant does one thing. It is Gemini-backed, it creates and backtests DCA bot strategies through chat, and the vendor states plainly that it cannot touch SmartTrades, grid bots or signal bots and does not give financial advice. Token budgets run from 500,000 a month on Free to 10 million on Expert.

Alternatives

Against the open-source half of this category the choice is hosting and keys, not features: OctoBot and Freqtrade cost nothing and cost you a server. OctoBot Cloud is the same bargain as this one at a lower price with fewer bot types. Cryptohopper is the direct competitor on shape — hosted bots, forms rather than code, a marketplace attached. Bitsgap is the third of that shape and the one to check against this card on a single axis: it has no public API, no webhooks and no TradingView alerts at all, so anything you want to drive from outside the platform is an argument for this one. If what you actually want is to write the strategy rather than configure it, Jesse and NautilusTrader are the other shelf entirely.