I'm still a complete novice and have been looking into stocks as well as futures. I recently found out about footprint charts, these seem extremely useful but everything I've found and read online has been using them with futures and I cant find any examples of people using them with stocks? Is there a reason for this?

Thanks

Because with a particular futures contract, all orders flow through the exchange that's handling that contract. With stocks, there's less transparency--a particular stock can be bought and sold in many different ways on different exchanges as well as traded privately. Stocks have actual certificates indicating ownership which can be registered and transferred through any broker without going through any central exchange. Futures contracts are virtual--they exist only as electronic data.

jneedle 

Because with a particular futures contract, all orders flow through the exchange that's handling that contract. With stocks, there's less transparency--a particular stock can be bought and sold in many different ways on different exchanges as well as traded privately. Stocks have actual certificates indicating ownership which can be registered and transferred through any broker without going through any central exchange. Futures contracts are virtual--they exist only as electronic data.

But as far as I understand it private trades have to be reported within 10 seconds meaning they'll show up on time and sales and therefor the footprint?

There are reporting requirements as you say for market makers for exchanges. But there's a lot of stock transactions, such as many block trades, that are regarded as distributions that don't have to be reported at all.
https://media2.mofo.com/documents/faqs-block-trade-reporting-requirements.pdf

I do not see any reason that you could not use them

b4tty 

I'm still a complete novice and have been looking into stocks as well as futures. I recently found out about footprint charts, these seem extremely useful but everything I've found and read online has been using them with futures and I cant find any examples of people using them with stocks? Is there a reason for this? Thanks

I think you have this conclusion is a kind of survivorship bias.

The issue is in categorizing orders as buy orders or sell orders. In order to do this properly you need to have historical best bid/ask prices. You use the current best bid/offer and compare against the price the order was executed at to determine if the order was a buy or a sell. Now this is very possible to do yourself using live data, but I'm not aware of any retail package that gives such data historically for equities.