Apex vs Topstep Calculator

• Price. Both firms discount constantly, so any figure here would be stale within a week. See current promo codes.
• Payout mechanics. Getting funded and getting paid are different problems; this only covers passing the evaluation.
• Platform and data fees, which differ by broker rather than by firm.

Neither is better in general - they fail different traders. The daily loss limit decides it more often than anything else: Apex has none on its evaluations, while Topstep caps a single day at $1,000 on a $50k account. If your strategy can have a bad day bigger than that, Topstep will end your evaluation on a day Apex would have let you recover from. If your days are small, Topstep's end-of-day trailing drawdown is the more forgiving of the two.

Apex's threshold follows your highest intraday balance, so profit you are up and then give back still moves your floor up against you. Topstep's only moves at the close. A strategy that runs $1,500 up mid-session and closes flat has moved its Apex floor up $1,500 and its Topstep floor not at all. That single difference matters more to most automated strategies than the headline drawdown numbers.

Only on the small account. At $50k Apex allows $2,500 of drawdown against a $3,000 target and Topstep allows $2,000 - so Apex gives 0.83 of the target in room versus 0.67. At $100k both allow $3,000 against a $6,000 target, which is 0.50 each. The advantage disappears entirely at the bigger size.

Both firms allow automation on evaluations. The deciding factor is usually whether your strategy can meet Topstep's requirement of five winning days of at least $200 each - a bot that wins big on a few days and scratches the rest can hit the profit target without ever satisfying that. Apex has no equivalent requirement during the evaluation.

The article is a full side-by-side of every rule, written to be read. This page asks how you actually trade and tells you which of those rules will decide it for you, so you do not have to work it out from the table yourself.