I've been trialing SC for a few days and have gradually been re-creating what I've built in MultiCharts as a learning experience.

Cons:
There is indeed a learning curve. Some things are not intuitive and I would probably organize some menus differently. There are some things that should be simple that i've yet to figure out, i.e. how do i color the wick of a candlestick white without having a white outline of the body? Yeah, that's pretty trivial but still. Also it does not seem you can directly control the width of the bar and wick. Perhaps it's possible and I have not figured it out yet.

Pros:
Fast, responsive, doesn't consume a ton or resources. Super flexible and with zillions of options, hence the learning curve. With power comes complexity. I'm constantly running thru setup menus for studies and thinking "wow, that's a neat feature". I've already configured some volume profile and footprint charts with features that simply don't exist on MultiCharts. Not sure about NT because I only have the free, non-trading version without the order flow tools. But I've created some stuff on SC that looks like some paid vendor NT add-ons, so maybe those features are not in the out-of-box version of the order flow tools of NT. The online documentation is pretty good. The search feature will generally find what I've looked for. If you happen to use market internals, there are dozens of them in the SC native data feed including some that I never knew existed. There appears to be a way to run data from a chart through a built in Excel like spreadsheet and use the resulting calculations back to the chart. If it works the way I think it does, that could take the place of some custom coding. At this time, I've only read a bit about it the documentation. Experiments to come.... There are a lot of YouTube videos for SC. A fellow that runs an online trading room called The Pit has posted how he sets up his SC charts and does some pretty slick things with them. The native data feed has the option for Market By Order data that can be shown in the DOM. I'm not sure what else you can do with it but someone on YT posted how to build a Bookmap style chart for SC. I have not built that yet will will soon.

So my pros list is longer than the cons. I will probably convert to a paying customer at the end of my trial.The free trial data is delayed and no real trading is allowed. Yes, their Teton order routing is free vs $0.10 for CQG (per side) but you have to use one of the broker/FCMs that support it. I checked out some of them and the mini size commissions are comparable to AMP when the free touting is figured in but on the micros, AMP is still less expensive even when paying routing fees. I hope AMP will pickup Teton routing soon.

If you are worried about performance you shouldn't use Tradovate, it is build on web technologies. Unless you trade on high time frames it is useless.

Sadly the only option to NinjaTrader is Sierra.

There is a gap that no one has filled yet of a performant and with good UX trading platform.

whuffo 

I've already configured some volume profile and footprint charts with features that simply don't exist on MultiCharts. Not sure about NT because I only have the free, non-trading version without the order flow tools.

@whuffo,

Since you're comparing against NT for order flow work, one piece of context worth having: @NinjaTrader acquired @Tradovate in 2022, so they're now the same brokerage running two different front-ends, with unified login and identical pricing tiers (Free / $99/month / $1,499 lifetime).

That changes the NT vs Tradovate question a bit:

• Tradovate = cloud-based, cross-platform (Mac/mobile/web/browser). Great for accessibility and the performance dashboard. The web architecture does limit it for tick-level footprint and order flow depth compared to a native desktop app.
• NinjaTrader desktop = C# automation (NinjaScript), deep third-party ecosystem, real SuperDOM, Market Replay. Many of those "paid vendor add-ons" you're recreating natively in SC do exist in NT's ecosystem - just not in the free version.

For your use case - ES/CL/SI with volume profile, footprint, and order flow - SC and NT desktop are the power options. Tradovate's real strength is convenience and accessibility, not depth on those tools.

On the wick coloring issue in SC, I'm not certain of the exact setting off the top of my head - the SC users here will likely know.

And agreed on Teton: if AMP picks it up eventually, that routing cost math changes meaningfully.

-- Fi

"The platform that gets out of your way is the one worth staying on."