MT4 vs MT5: Which MetaTrader Should You Use?

Open an account with almost any forex broker and you will meet the same question: MetaTrader 4 or MetaTrader 5? The two look nearly identical, share a name and come from the same company, so it is hard to tell whether the choice matters or is just a version number.

Quick answer: In the MT4 vs MT5 choice, MetaTrader 5 is the newer platform, with more timeframes, more order types, a built-in economic calendar, an optional netting mode and a faster strategy tester. MetaTrader 4 is simpler and has a larger library of older tools. For manual trading either works; automated traders must match their code to the platform.

MT4 vs MT5: what they are and how they differ

MetaTrader is a family of trading platforms made by MetaQuotes, a software company, not a broker. MetaTrader 4 (MT4) was released in 2005 and became the standard retail forex platform over the following decade. MetaTrader 5 (MT5) followed in 2010. Brokers buy a licence from MetaQuotes, connect the platform to their own prices and accounts, and give it to you free of charge. You download it, log in with the details your broker sends you, and use it to read charts and place orders.

MetaTrader 5 is a separate platform from MetaTrader 4, with a different internal design and its own programming language. Your trading account lives on one or the other: an MT4 account cannot be opened in MT5, and tools written for one do not run on the other. That is why the choice is made when you open the account, not later inside the software.

Day to day, they feel very similar. Both have a Market Watch list of prices, a Navigator panel, chart windows and a panel along the bottom showing your trades and history. Both run on desktop, in a web browser and on iOS and Android phones. Both let you place market and pending orders with a stop loss and take profit attached. If you learned on one, you can find your way round the other in an afternoon.

A home office desk with a laptop and a desktop monitor, both with blank screens, beside a desk lamp, keyboard and mouse. — Both platforms run on a desktop computer or laptop, with mobile apps alongside. The screens look much the same; the differences sit in how each one handles orders and code.

The differences sit underneath. The graphic below sums up the ones that come up most often.

MT4 vs MT5 side by side: MT5 has more timeframes, pending order types and built-in indicators, plus an economic calendar, depth of market, an optional netting mode and a multi-threaded strategy tester.

MT5 has more of almost everything: 21 timeframes against nine, six pending order types against four, 38 built-in indicators against 30, plus tools MT4 never had, such as an economic calendar, depth of market and a choice of how positions are counted. What MT4 has instead is history. Two decades of traders have written indicators, scripts and automated strategies for it, and many tutorials still show MT4 screens.

For a wider view that includes cTrader, the other trading platform you will often be offered, tap through the matrix below.


Since 2005; still the most widely offered	Since 2010; the successor, now standard	Since 2011; popular with ECN brokers
9	21	26 plus custom
Market, limit, stop	Adds stop-limit	Adds stop-limit and advanced protection
No	Yes (where the broker provides it)	Yes, built in
Expert Advisors (MQL4)	Expert Advisors (MQL5)	cBots (C#)
Single pair, basic	Multi-pair, faster	Multi-pair, visual
Functional, dated	Improved	Modern, detachable charts
Yes	Depends on account mode	Yes

Tap a feature name to see why it matters, or a platform name to highlight its column.

MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5 and cTrader compared. Tap a column to highlight a platform and a row to see why the feature matters. Brokers configure each platform differently.

Brokers configure each platform differently. Two MT5 accounts at different firms can show different instruments, trading hours and features, so treat any comparison, including ours, as general characteristics rather than a description of what your account will have.

MT5 features for charting: timeframes, indicators and the calendar

A timeframe is how much time each candle on a chart represents. MT4 offers nine fixed timeframes: M1, M5, M15, M30, H1, H4, D1, W1 and MN (one minute up to one month). MT5 offers 21. It keeps all nine and adds in-between steps such as M2, M3, M10, M20, H2, H3, H6, H8 and H12.

Whatever the number of buttons, the principle is the same: each higher timeframe is built from the candles below it. Tap between the views below to see one day of prices regrouped.

The same 24 hours as 24 one-hour candles. Each one contains four M15 candles.

The same 24 hours of illustrative prices shown as M15, H1 and H4 candles. Both MT4 and MT5 offer these three; MT5 adds in-between steps such as H2 and H6.

Do the extra timeframes matter? For most people, not much. The common working charts (M15, H1, H4 and daily) are on both platforms, and the methods in our timeframes lesson need nothing else. The in-between steps help if you want, say, a six-hour chart that splits the day into four even blocks, or a two-hour chart between H1 and H4. Our guide to forex timeframes explains how to choose a set that fits your schedule.

Indicators and drawing tools. MT4 ships with 30 built-in technical indicators and MT5 with 38. The core set is the same on both: moving averages, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, the stochastic oscillator, ATR and so on. MT5 also has more graphical objects (lines, channels, Fibonacci tools and shapes) for marking up a chart. A trader using two moving averages and a few horizontal levels will not notice the difference, and both platforms accept thousands of custom indicators written by other users.

Economic calendar. MT5 has an economic calendar built in, listing upcoming releases such as inflation, jobs data and central bank decisions. On MT4 you need a separate website or an add-on. It is a convenience rather than an edge: knowing when a release is due matters more than where you read about it, as the economic calendar lesson explains.

Depth of market. MT5 can show depth of market: the volume available at prices above and below the current one. It is most meaningful on exchange-traded instruments. In forex each broker builds its own price feed, so what you see depends entirely on the broker, and many retail accounts show little there. MT4 has no built-in depth of market.

More than forex. MT5 was designed from the start to handle exchange-traded markets such as shares and futures, as well as forex and CFDs. MT4 was built around forex. If you only trade currency pairs, this makes no practical difference; if you also want other markets, it is a point in MT5’s favour, though what you can trade depends on the broker.

Order types: what MetaTrader 5 adds

Both platforms offer the orders every trader needs. A market order fills now at the current price. A limit order waits to buy below the current price or sell above it. A stop order waits to buy above the current price or sell below it, usually to catch a breakout. Tap through them below.

Fills immediately at the current ask (buying) or bid (selling). You get speed; you accept whatever the price is right now.

Market, limit and stop orders, plus stop loss and take profit, on an illustrative EUR/USD chart. All of these work the same way in MT4 and MT5.

That gives four pending orders on both platforms: buy limit, sell limit, buy stop and sell stop. MT5 adds two more, the buy stop limit and the sell stop limit, which combine the two ideas. You set a trigger price and a limit price. When the market reaches the trigger, the platform places a limit order at your limit price, which then waits to be filled.

Both platforms offer four pending orders. MT5 adds the stop limit: once price breaks the trigger, a limit order is placed at a better price and fills only if the market pulls back to it.

On MT5, the limit price of a buy stop limit sits below the trigger. The order says: if price breaks above this level, I want to buy, but only on a pullback to that lower level. The sell stop limit is the mirror image: if price breaks below a level, place a sell limit above it to sell the retest. It is a way to let a breakout prove itself and then enter at a better price than chasing it.

The trade-off is the usual one between price and certainty. A plain buy stop fills on the breakout, often with some slippage in a fast market. A buy stop limit never fills worse than your limit, but if price breaks out and never pulls back, you miss the move entirely. Neither is better in general. The order types lesson walks through the four basic orders with examples.

Example: a breakout entry with a buy stop limit

You have a $5,000 account and risk 1% per trade, which is $50. GBP/USD is at 1.2700, below resistance at 1.2740.
Your plan: if price breaks above 1.2750, buy a retest of the old resistance at 1.2740, with a stop loss at 1.2710. On MT5 you place a buy stop limit with the trigger at 1.2750 and the limit at 1.2740.
The distance from limit to stop is 30 pips. On GBP/USD a pip is worth $10 per standard lot, so $50 ÷ 30 pips is about $1.67 per pip. You round down to 0.16 lots, which is $1.60 per pip. If the stop is hit, you lose 30 × $1.60 = $48, plus the spread.
Compare a plain buy stop at 1.2750 with the same stop loss. That is 40 pips of risk, so 0.16 lots would risk $64, about 1.3% of the account. To stay within $50 you would need 0.12 lots ($1.20 per pip, $48 at risk), and 5 pips of slippage on the breakout would push the loss to 45 × $1.20 = $54.
The cost of the stop limit: if GBP/USD breaks out and keeps rising without returning to 1.2740, the order never fills and you have no trade. On MT4 you could get the same entry only by watching for the breakout and placing a buy limit by hand.

Hedging vs netting: how MT5 handles positions

MT4 treats every order as its own position. If you buy 0.10 lots of EUR/USD and then sell 0.10 lots, you hold two positions at once, a buy and a sell. In platform terms this is called hedging: holding opposite positions in the same pair. Your net exposure is zero, but both trades stay open until you close each one.

MT5 was launched with a different model called netting, the one exchanges use: one position per instrument. A new order in the same direction adds to it, with an averaged entry price. An order in the opposite direction reduces it, closes it or reverses it. MetaQuotes later added a hedging mode to MT5, so a broker can now offer MT5 accounts either way. The mode is set on the account by the broker, not chosen by you inside the platform.

Hedging vs netting: the same buy and sell leave two open positions on a hedging account, but on a netting account the sell simply closes the buy, leaving no position.

On a netting account, a sell you meant as a new short trade will reduce or close your existing buy instead. Some automated strategies assume one model and misbehave on the other. Before you trade an MT5 account, check which mode it uses; the account details from your broker, or the account information in the platform, will tell you.

Is hedging in this sense useful? Rarely, for a manual trader. A buy and a sell of the same size in the same pair freeze your current result, while you keep paying spreads and can be charged overnight swap on both sides. Closing the trade does the same job more cheaply. Some regulators also restrict it. In the United States, rules from the National Futures Association do not allow retail forex customers to hold opposite positions in the same pair, and positions must be closed on a first-in, first-out basis.

MT4 expert advisors, MQL4 vs MQL5 and backtesting

For many traders this is the part that settles the MT4 vs MT5 question. An expert advisor (EA) is a program that runs inside MetaTrader and can analyse charts and open and close trades by itself. Custom indicators and scripts work in a similar way. On MT4 they are written in a programming language called MQL4; on MT5, in MQL5.

The two languages look related, but they are not interchangeable. MQL5 was built around MT5’s different order and position model, and a compiled MT4 program will not load in MT5, any more than a compiled MT5 program will load in MT4. Moving a tool across means rewriting it, which is often a substantial job, and then testing it again from scratch.

MQL4 vs MQL5: an expert advisor or indicator runs only on the platform whose language it was written in. Moving it to the other platform means rewriting and retesting it.

That is the main reason MT4 is still so widely used. MT4 expert advisors and indicators built over twenty years, some free, some sold and some written privately, exist only in MQL4. If a tool you depend on has no MQL5 version, the choice is made for you.

An expert advisor does exactly what its code says, which only helps if the method inside it has an edge. Many EAs sold online advertise smooth backtests and large returns, but a backtest can be tuned to the past until it looks perfect and then fail on live prices. No platform turns an untested method into a working one, and buying a robot is not a substitute for a trading plan you understand.

Two computer monitors on a grey desk showing lines of program code, with a keyboard and mouse in front. — An expert advisor is a program written in MQL4 or MQL5. Code written for one platform has to be rewritten and tested again before it runs on the other.

The strategy tester. Both platforms include a strategy tester for running an EA on historical prices. Here MT5 is clearly ahead. The MT4 tester runs on a single processor core and tests one pair at a time. The MT5 tester is multi-threaded: it spreads optimisation runs across all your processor cores, can test one strategy on several pairs at once, and can use recorded tick data where the broker provides it.

Strategy tester compared: MT4 works through optimisation runs one after another on a single core, while MT5 spreads them across every core and finishes far sooner. Illustrative timings.

If you plan to test ideas seriously, that is a strong reason to start on MT5. If you trade by hand, you may never open the tester at all.

Which MetaTrader should you use?

Start with what does not depend on the platform. Your results come from your method, your risk per trade and your discipline, not from the software. The same trade on the same pair at the same broker produces the same result on MT4 and MT5. MT5 will not make you a better trader, and MT4 will not hold you back. What does vary is the broker: its regulation, costs and execution matter far more than the window you look through. That is why our broker checklist puts the platform near the end, after the licence and the costs of trading.

With the broker chosen, the flowchart below handles the platform.

Which MetaTrader should you use? Choose a regulated broker first, let any tool you depend on decide the version, pick MT5 for netting, market depth or serious testing, and otherwise use either.

If you are a beginner trading by hand, use whichever platform your broker offers. If it offers both, MT5 is the sensible default: it is the actively developed platform, it is what newer brokers launch with, and it does everything MT4 does for manual trading. Our guide for beginners covers what to learn first, and the platform is not high on that list.

If you use an EA or custom indicator, the code decides. Check which language it was written in before you open an account. If it exists for both, prefer MT5 for the better tester.

If you want to automate and test your own ideas, MT5’s tester and MQL5 make it the stronger of the two. cTrader, with automation in C#, is the main alternative.

If you trade other markets as well, MT5’s multi-asset design is a reason to prefer it, though the instruments available still depend on the broker.

There is also the question of MT4’s future. MetaQuotes now puts its development into MT5, and many newer brokers launch with MT5 only. Existing brokers can keep running MT4, and many still do, but some no longer open new MT4 accounts. If you start on MT4 today, be prepared to move one day. If you start on MT5, the question does not arise. The platforms lesson puts MT4, MT5 and cTrader side by side with three example traders.

How to download and log in safely

Because the platforms are free and familiar, they are a favourite disguise for fraud. Fake MetaTrader apps and installers have been used to steal logins, and dishonest firms can run a genuine-looking MetaTrader platform connected to a server they control. A familiar interface proves nothing about the firm behind it.

Three habits protect you:

Download only from your broker or the official MetaQuotes site. Your broker’s website or client area will link to the right installer, and MetaQuotes publishes the official versions at metatrader5.com. Do not install a trading platform from a link in a message, an advert or a stranger offering to mentor you.
Check the server name. When you log in, you choose a trading server. It should carry your broker’s name and match the details your broker sent you. A server you do not recognise is a reason to stop.
Keep both passwords private. Each MetaTrader account has a master password, which can trade, and an investor password, which can only view. Never share either. The investor password cannot place trades, but it reveals your balance, open positions and full history, which is exactly what someone planning to pressure or defraud you wants to see.

Your two MetaTrader passwords: the master password can trade, the investor password can only view, and neither should be shared. Install the platform only from your broker or the official site.

Finally, remember that the platform is not a regulator. A genuine MetaTrader installation says nothing about whether the firm holding your money is licensed. Check that separately on the regulator’s own register, as the regulation lesson shows, and learn the warning signs in our guide to forex broker scams.

Common mistakes when choosing a trading platform

Choosing a broker because of its platform

Every regulated and unregulated broker alike can offer MetaTrader. A polished platform at a weakly supervised firm is a good window onto money you may struggle to get back. Settle the licence, costs and execution first; the platform is the last filter.

Assuming MT5 is more profitable

More timeframes, more indicators and more order types do not add an edge. The same entry, stop and position size give the same result on both platforms. If your trading is not working on MT4, moving to MT5 will not fix it.

Buying an EA for the wrong version, or on the strength of a backtest

An MQL4 robot will not run on an MT5 account, and a beautiful backtest says little about live results. If you use an EA at all, know what its rules are, test it yourself on a demo, and size it with the same risk limits as any manual trade.

Ignoring the account mode

On a netting account, a sell can close your buy rather than open a new trade. Find out whether your MT5 account uses hedging or netting before you place your first order, especially if a method or EA expects one of them.

Skipping the demo

Use a demo account to place every order type you plan to use, including a stop limit on MT5, before you risk money. The lesson on your first demo trade walks through one from start to finish.

Frequently asked questions

Is MT5 better than MT4?

MT5 has more features: more timeframes and order types, a built-in economic calendar, an optional netting mode and a faster multi-threaded strategy tester. MT4 is simpler and has a larger library of older tools. For manual trading, neither produces better results; your method and risk management matter far more than the platform.

Can I use MT4 expert advisors on MT5?

No. MT4 expert advisors are written in MQL4 and MT5 uses MQL5, and the compiled files are not compatible. To move an EA from MT4 to MT5 it has to be rewritten in MQL5 and tested again. Check which version an EA or indicator was built for before you choose an account.

Is MT4 being discontinued?

MT4 has not been switched off, and many brokers still offer it. MetaQuotes now puts its development into MT5, many newer brokers launch with MT5 only, and some brokers no longer open new MT4 accounts. MT5 is where development continues.

Is MT4 or MT5 better for beginners?

Either is fine, because both handle charts, pending orders, stop losses and take profits well. If your broker offers both, MT5 is the sensible default as the actively developed platform. What matters far more is choosing a regulated broker and practising on a demo account first.

Can you hedge on MT5?

It depends on the account. MT5 supports two modes: netting, which allows one position per instrument, and hedging, which allows several, including opposite ones. Your broker sets the mode when the account is opened. Some regulators, including those in the United States, do not allow retail hedging in the same pair.

Are MT4 and MT5 free?

Yes. Brokers pay MetaQuotes for the licence and give the platform to clients free of charge. You pay the broker's normal trading costs, such as the spread, commission and overnight swap, not a fee for the software. Be wary of anyone who charges you to download MetaTrader.