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.

The product was replaced in September 2026, and what is sold today is not what most reviews describe. 3Commas' help center says v1 was deactivated on 11 September 2026 and that v1 "is closing and merging into a new v2 trading platform, built in partnership with WunderTrading". Nothing carried over: v2 is a new account, the exchange keys are connected again from scratch, and "your strategies do not transfer to v2 automatically" — each bot is rebuilt by hand. The v1 iOS and Android apps are withdrawn, with v2 apps promised "later".

How much of v2 is WunderTrading's is the vendor's to say, and its phrase is "in partnership". The public surfaces are close to identical. The v2 app and its documentation live at trade.3commas.io; its MCP server, at port 2083 of that host, answered an initialize request on 4 October 2026 as wundertrading-tools, version 1.1.0 — the name and version WunderTrading's own server reports. The v2 REST introduction is WunderTrading's text with the brand swapped, down to the same ten-key cap and three-month key expiry. Read the WunderTrading card alongside this one; the engines behave alike, and the plans, prices and exchange lists do not.

Four surfaces do the work in v2. DCA bots average into a position, started on built-in indicators such as RSI or from presets that replace v1's Strategy Gallery. Signal bots take over everything triggered from outside — a TradingView indicator or strategy alert, your own server posting JSON, or another source — including what v1 filed under DCA bots started by TradingView or the API. Grid bots work a range. Terminal replaces SmartTrade for manual entries with automated exits, and adds orders placed across several API accounts, exchanges and pairs at once.

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 — 60, 144 and 420 dollars a year, "or 3 months free" — make an annual subscription nine months' price. All of this was re-read on 9 October 2026.

What separates the tiers is counts, not kinds — active API keys per exchange, bots, open positions — with two exceptions that are kinds. Futures, including inverse futures, start at Pro. A read-and-write developer API is shown on Expert alone. The page's "All plans include" list names a demo account, webhook execution and "9 exchanges". Above Expert the site's strings carry a quoted Custom plan and a form headed "Need limits above the Expert plan?"; on 9 October 2026 the server-rendered page showed only the three plan cards, so whether the Custom card is shown is unverified.

How many exchanges Starter may trade on, the vendor's pages do not settle. On 9 October 2026 the same pricing page described Starter as "Core bots for spot trading at 1 exchange" on its plan card, and listed "9 exchanges" under "All plans include". The comparison matrix has no exchange row; its nearest, "Active API Keys per exchanges", gives Starter "1 account", which caps keys on one exchange rather than the number of exchanges. The help centre does not resolve it either: on the same date no article in its Subscriptions or Connect Exchanges collections stated Starter's limits, and its Multi-Exchange article illustrates the per-bot caps — up to 10 exchanges in one signal bot or Terminal — with a "Premium" plan the pricing page does not sell. The v2 API documentation answered with a browser challenge and was not read. The two statements disagree; a reader who needs Starter on more than one exchange should establish which holds during the trial, before paying.

The free plan exists — the help centre says an account whose subscription runs out is switched to it — but the pricing page does not show it, and on 4 October 2026 nothing the vendor publishes for v2 says what it includes. The trial is seven days, on any paid plan. Payment is by card, PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay; the pricing FAQ also accepts cryptocurrency, which does not auto-renew.

A downgrade has a sharp edge the help centre states plainly: bots that exceed the new plan's limits are disabled, and positions belonging to a disabled bot are closed.

Data & coverage

Nine exchanges, and the pricing page, the backtesting page and the v2 key-connection guide all name the same nine: Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate, Kraken, KuCoin, Coinbase and Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid is a decentralised perpetuals venue, connected through a Web3 wallet rather than an API key, and it is why dex is in this card's venue list. The site footer still names Bitstamp, Bitfinex, HTX and BitMEX, none of which v2 supports. BitMEX is the starkest case: it ceased trading on 23 September 2026, and the footer still named it on 4 October 2026. WunderTrading's own table lists sixteen venues; the 3Commas build of the engine exposes nine.

The backtester works on one-minute bars, up to ten pairs per run, with export, and the backtesting page claims history back to the day a coin listed. How much of that history each plan gets is not rendered: the pricing table carries a row for DCA backtest depth and shows no values. Output includes PnL, win rate, fees, maximum drawdown, standard deviation, Sharpe and Sortino.

Integrations

Signal bots accept TradingView webhooks and JSON from any other source, and Pine Script execution is listed on every paid plan — which is the practical reason many people are here rather than writing Python.

A REST API, documented at trade.3commas.io/docs. Keys are HMAC, capped at ten per account, and expire after three months unless they are locked to IP addresses. The documented limits are 1,200 weighted tokens a minute per key and 2,400 per IP, with a five-minute ban past 400 requests in ten seconds. A first-party TypeScript SDK for this API, @trade-3commas/trade-3commas-sdk, is MIT-licensed; its last commit was on 14 September 2026.

An MCP server, at trade.3commas.io:2083/mcp. The help article dated 20 August 2026 says it reads strategies and history, exports reports, and opens, adjusts and closes strategies — it can trade. It authenticates with the same API key and secret, passed as plain headers in the client's config file. Which plans can use it is not rendered on the pricing page; it sits behind the same keys as the API, which the page shows as read-and-write only on Expert.

Telegram notifications cover entries, exits, errors and a daily P/L summary.

Limitations

The 2022 key disclosure is the fact to weigh first. 3Commas' own notice 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. That was v1, and v2 is a new platform on new keys. It is still the same brand asking to hold keys that can trade. The v2 help centre's key-connection guide asks for trading permission with withdrawals disabled, and for the platform's IP addresses to be whitelisted wherever the exchange allows it.

The v2 move cost every user their configuration. Bots, settings and keys were rebuilt by hand and v1 deals still open on 11 September stopped being managed. The vendor's own guidance was to note settings down before the date. Nothing stops it from happening again, and it is the clearest argument for keeping a copy of every strategy's parameters outside the platform.

The marketing site has not caught up with the product. The footer still links exchanges v2 does not support; the signal-marketplace page still describes providers selling monthly subscriptions to their calls and says in the vendor's voice that a higher price generally means a better signal. That is advice, and it is not what this catalogue lists. The v2 migration guide maps every v1 feature it carried over — DCA bots, Strategy Gallery, Control Panel, signal bots, SmartTrade — and the marketplace is not among them; WunderTrading closed its own copy-trading marketplace at the end of 2024. Read the v2 help centre, not the landing pages.

An MCP server that can trade, configured with a plaintext secret. Narrow the key's permissions before handing it to an assistant.

The AI assistant page describes a chat tool that builds and backtests DCA bots, and the v2 help centre carries no article about it — its AI article is the MCP one. The vendor's newer AI product, QuantPilot, is a separate site with its own account and credits.

Funding is not mentioned on the backtesting page, and none of the v2 help centre's nine collections has a backtesting article, while futures bots are sold from Pro 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.

Alternatives

WunderTrading is the first comparison now: the engine is shared, and WunderTrading's own plans run on sixteen exchanges with a live-trading free plan. 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. HaasOnline publishes a bot-by-bot guide for moving from 3Commas, dated 1 September 2026 and written for the v1 shutdown. If what you actually want is to write the strategy rather than configure it, Jesse and NautilusTrader are the other shelf entirely.