CME Group vs FRED Economic Data
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
CME Group
This app provides access to a diverse derivatives marketplace, offering tools for market insight and strategic planning. Track futures and options, practice with a trading simulator, and receive alerts on market movements and block trades.
- Product watchlists
- Simulated trading environment
- Trading challenges
- Push notifications for trades and price moves
- Delayed market data
- Economic research and analysis
- Block trade viewing
- Interactive charts
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Enhance Your Trading Edge with CME Group Mobile Stay ahead in the fast-paced world of derivatives with the CME Group Mobile app. Whether you're a seasoned trader or just starting, our app connects you to the world's largest and most diverse derivatives marketplace, 24/7. Now featuring product watchlists and a powerful trading simulator, CME Group Mobile is your essential tool for market insight and strategic planning. With CME Group Mobile, you can effortlessly track the futures and options products you care about, right from your mobile device. Hone your strategies and explore market scenarios using our simulated trading environment, designed to help you understand market dynamics without real-world risk. Key Features: • Create and Follow Product Watchlists: Customize and monitor the futures and options products most relevant to your trading interests. • Simulated Trading Environment: Practice and refine your trading strategies with our intuitive trading simulator functionality, perfect for learning market movements and testing hypotheses. • Trading Challenges: Compete against others in a simulated trading environment • Alerts: Receive push notifications for Block Trades and significant moves in price • Market Data: Stay up-to-date with delayed quote data, daily volume, and open interest for a comprehensive market overview. • Economic Research: Get expert insights and analysis of market events, major economic themes and trends driving opportunities. • Block Trades: View real-time block trades and filter by type to focus on the information that matters most to you. • QuikStrike Analytics: Gain deeper market insights with our suite of powerful QuikStrike analytics tools. • Cross-Device Sync: Your personalized watchlists and settings sync seamlessly across your desktop and iOS devices with CME Group Login. • Interactive Charts: Tap on charts to analyze trends and patterns.
FRED Economic Data
Access a vast collection of economic data from numerous sources on the go. Visualize trends with custom graphs and easily share insights. Stay updated with the latest economic news and research.
- Access 149,000+ economic data series
- Browse data by category, source, or popularity
- Create custom data graphs
- Store favorite data series
- Share data series and graphs
- Receive economic news and updates
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Take the economy with you wherever you go. The FRED app gets you the economic data you need— anytime, anywhere. Enjoy full access to nearly 149,000 economic data series from 59 regional, national and international sources. The graphs and supporting data are housed on the St. Louis Fed’s signature database—FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Database). The FRED app is perfect for students, financial market professionals, academics and anyone else interested in economic data. What you can do with this app: •browse for data by category, release, source and popularity or search by keywords or series ID; •view and create custom graphs; •store your favorite data series for quick and easy access; •share your favorite data series or graphs via e-mail or post them directly to your Twitter or Facebook account; •and receive the latest news on new data series , updates, and St. Louis Fed economic research. The app is free to download. If you encounter problems or have suggestions for improving our app, please contact us at webmaster@research.stlouisfed.org.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: CME Group at 4.7 against FRED Economic Data's 3.4. CME Group also leads on update cadence (fortnightly vs every 4 months) and review sentiment (58% vs 37%). FRED Economic Data's advantage is monetization model (free vs free with in-app purchases) and iOS requirement (14.0 vs 16.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
CME Group holds the better App Store score, 4.7 against 3.4. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: CME Group has 4K ratings behind it against 87, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 58% of CME Group's written reviews are positive against 37% of FRED Economic Data's.
CME Group ships an update fortnightly, FRED Economic Data every 4 months. The most recent releases landed on September 24, 2026 and September 19, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | CME Group | FRED Economic Data |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.7 (4K ratings) — better | 3.4 (87 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 57.9% of reviews — better | 37.1% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 4K — better | 87 |
| Update frequency | Fortnightly — better | Every 4 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better |
| Requires iOS | 16.0 | 14.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 33 MB | 26 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | CME Group, Inc. | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis |
Customer experience
CME Group
FRED Economic Data
User reviews
CME Group
From 4K App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 🚀 Fast and responsive
- 👍 User-friendly interface
- 💡 Valuable data and insights
- 🔒 Secure platform
Room to improve
- 🐛 Bugs and crashes
- 📉 Declining user experience after updates
- 🔍 Difficult to navigate
- 💤 Slow data updates
FRED Economic Data
From 87 App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 👍 Access to economic data
- 👍 Useful for fact-checking
- 👍 Comprehensive data source
- 👍 Handy for quick conversations
- 👍 Great content
Room to improve
- 🐛 App is non-functional
- 🐛 Broken experience
- 🐛 Web slop or React Native
- 🐛 Cropped graph images
- 🐛 Unreadable charts
Bugs and requests
CME Group
Reported bugs
4 issues- App crashes on launch
- Quotes and watchlists disappearing
- Forced portrait mode on iPad
- Errors when signing up
Requested features
4 requests- Add multi-language support
- Improve widget functionality
- Enhance charting capabilities
- Introduce customization options
FRED Economic Data
Reported bugs
78 issues- App is non-functional
- Graph images are cropped
- Graph images are cropped, only top half visible
- Saving photo only saves top half of graph
- Cannot login with Apple account
Show 73 moreShow fewer
- Cannot remove favorites
- Charts are miniscule and unreadable
- Expanding graph axes go off page
- Graphs are off the screen
- Cannot be viewed properly
- Issues with logging in
- Issues with saving data or comparisons
- Chart is cut off at the bottom
- Doesn’t let you scroll through the graph
- Only see half the charts
- Cannot change settings or parameters in horizontal view
- Select years automatically gives projections instead of actual
- Expanded horizontal view bugged out, did not show half of data
- X axis often isn’t visible
- Bad Request: Account Verification Failed
- Full screen view of saved graphs often glitches and does not show full screen
- Cannot view saved dashboards
- Poor search functionality
- Search bar doesn’t narrow down list
- Doesn’t update
- Doesn’t work
- Search is a disaster
- App runs like it's 2005
- App is buggy
- App is buggy again
- Buggy search
- Charts on iPhone in portrait mode is idiotic
- When rotating phone, chart goes from five-year to max chart
- iPhone keyboard screen covers login page
- Thumbnail charts too small to read
- Cannot be used in landscape mode
- Formatted in a huge image that puts axes off the page
- Still inappropriately formatted in landscape
- Text is almost microscopic in landscape
- Stays in portrait mode on iPad
- iPad Pro charts are clipped
- Cannot zoom on graphs
- Graph scale incorrect to the point of obfuscation
- Cannot share blog posts
- Won’t display in landscape
- No value add over the website
- Crashes when attempting to add new series to a graph
- App crashes sometimes when comparing two graphs
- Navigation path to current page is unknown
- App is very buggy
- App crashed when attempting to add a graph
- New version needs months of testing
- Older version was more stable and reliable
- Can’t navigate because of screen layout
- App is broken
- Cannot launch app on iOS
- Issa broken
- Unusable as of this date
- Won’t launch on iOS 11
- App is broken, but can get past splash screen with workaround
- App is currently totally broken and unusable
- Death upon arrival
- Cannot pass the “New Features” page
- “Get Started” button aligned with home touch button
- App cant load
- Cannot get past the “New Features” screen
- “Get Started” link is outside the usable space
- App freezes
- Fails to load on current iOS and iPhone 8
- Can’t make it past preferences screen
- Screen has a “get started” window over the app that doesn’t allow interaction
- App was useful prior to iPhone X, now broken and useless
- Cannot get past the new features page
- Wouldn’t even start
- App takes forever to load
- App showed splash screen and exited
- Crashed a few times
- App gets crash sometimes
Requested features
12 requests- Include widgets for favorites
- Include all web version edit graph features
- Allow saving and sharing in multiple formats (PDF, Excel)
- View saved dashboards
- Use graphing editor tool
Show 7 moreShow fewer
- Add help section with common definitions
- Allow indexing two datasets for comparison
- Add a button for zero-based Y-axis
- Add URL for series on info page
- Ability to add different series to the same graph
- View data in list form as % change
- More detail in descriptions for each data set
In-app purchases
CME Group
No in-app purchases
FRED Economic Data
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is CME Group free?
Is FRED Economic Data free?
Which has better reviews, CME Group or FRED Economic Data?
Do CME Group or FRED Economic Data have ads?
Which is updated more often, CME Group or FRED Economic Data?
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