ROIC.ai vs Koyfin vs The Ledger Terminal

If you're a value investor shopping for research tools, three names keep coming up in forums, Twitter threads, and investing communities: ROIC.ai, Koyfin, and The Ledger Terminal. Each takes a different approach to the same fundamental problem — helping you decide whether a business is worth owning.

Here's a direct comparison on the dimensions that actually matter.

Data depth

ROIC.ai pulls financial data from SEC filings and presents it cleanly. The historical coverage is solid — typically ten or more years of data, which is enough to see through a full economic cycle. The focus is narrow by design: return on capital metrics and the financial data that feeds into them.

Koyfin offers broad coverage across US and international markets. Financial data goes back roughly ten years. The platform covers a wide range of data types — fundamentals, estimates, technicals, macro — which makes it versatile but means no single area goes as deep as a specialist tool might.

The Ledger Terminal extracts data directly from SEC EDGAR filings going back fifteen years per stock. Fifteen years matters because it captures at least two full business cycles — the 2008-2009 crisis, the 2020 pandemic, and whatever the current environment throws at you. You see how the business performed not just in good times but in genuinely bad ones. Every data point links back to the original SEC filing, so you can verify anything that looks unusual.

Edge: The Ledger Terminal for depth of US data. Koyfin for international breadth.

ROIC and quality metrics

ROIC.ai — the name says it. This is where ROIC.ai excels. Return on invested capital is the organizing principle of the entire platform. You can quickly see ROIC trends, compare companies on return on capital, and build an understanding of which businesses generate the best returns. It's focused and effective.

Koyfin includes ROIC among its many available metrics, but it doesn't prioritize it. You can find it, chart it, and screen for it, but it sits alongside hundreds of other data points. If ROIC is your primary lens, you'll need to configure your views to surface it — it's not the default.

The Ledger Terminal puts ROIC in the metrics row at the top of every stock page, alongside eight other quality indicators. The screener lets you filter directly by ROIC threshold. The financial table shows ROIC across all fifteen years so you can see the trajectory. The design philosophy is that ROIC is the first thing you should know about any business — not the fifteenth.

Edge: ROIC.ai and The Ledger Terminal are tied on making ROIC central. ROIC.ai is more single-minded; The Ledger Terminal embeds ROIC within a broader analytical framework.

Valuation context

This is where the tools diverge most significantly.

ROIC.ai provides valuation data but doesn't emphasize historical valuation context in the way that value investors need. You can see current multiples, but the visual framework for understanding whether a stock is cheap or expensive relative to its own history isn't the focus.

Koyfin has excellent charting capabilities. You can overlay price with earnings, chart P/E ratios over time, and build custom visualizations. But you're constructing the view yourself — the platform doesn't present a default "price vs. fair value" visualization out of the box. It requires more setup.

The Ledger Terminal puts a logarithmic valuation chart at the top of every stock page. Price plotted against fair value, earnings bars underneath, relative strength versus the S&P 500 — all on a log scale that makes compounding visible. You can switch between four valuation methods (P/E, P/FCF, P/CF, P/Owner Earnings) to see the picture through different lenses. The gap between price and fair value is visible immediately, without any configuration.

Edge: The Ledger Terminal for out-of-the-box valuation context. Koyfin for flexibility if you want to build custom valuation views.

Screening

ROIC.ai offers basic screening focused on return on capital metrics. If you know what you're looking for — "show me all companies with ROIC above 20%" — it delivers. But the screening criteria are limited relative to what a comprehensive fundamental screener provides.

Koyfin has a powerful screener with a wide range of criteria across fundamentals, technicals, and estimates. It's one of the better free screeners available for individual investors. The results are sortable, filterable, and link to detailed company pages.

The Ledger Terminal screener is built specifically for quality-first investing. You can filter by ROIC, gross margin, free cash flow yield, revenue growth, valuation metrics, and a nine-point quality checklist that scores businesses on the fundamentals that matter to compounders. Results link directly to one-page stock tearsheets — one click from screener to full analysis.

Edge: Koyfin for screener breadth. The Ledger Terminal for a screener purpose-built for value investors.

Workflow

This is the dimension most comparisons miss, and it might be the most important one.

ROIC.ai is fast for a specific task: checking return on capital for a company. Open the page, see the ROIC, understand the trend. But the platform is narrow — once you've seen the ROIC data, you'll likely need to go somewhere else for the full picture (valuation, cash flow, balance sheet, capital allocation).

Koyfin is a workbench. It can do nearly anything, but you need to set it up. Create custom dashboards, configure your views, save your layouts. Once configured, it's powerful. But the initial setup time is real, and navigating between different views adds friction to the evaluation process. Analyzing a single stock means visiting multiple sections.

The Ledger Terminal is designed around a specific workflow: screen → scan → study. The screener surfaces candidates. Each stock's one-page tearsheet lets you evaluate in sixty seconds — chart at the top, key metrics in the middle, fifteen years of data below. No tabs, no navigation, just scroll. If a stock passes the sixty-second test, you go deep — read the 10-K, study the competitive dynamics, build conviction. The entire funnel lives in one tool.

Edge: The Ledger Terminal for a focused, friction-free workflow. Koyfin for a customizable workbench that handles many use cases.

Pricing

ROIC.ai — Free.

Koyfin — Free tier available. Pro plans from $25/month.

The Ledger Terminal — Free tier with 10 stock views per day. Pro for unlimited access and fresher data.

The verdict

These three tools aren't interchangeable — they reflect different philosophies about what stock research should look like.

Choose ROIC.ai if you want a quick, focused tool for checking return on capital. It does one thing and does it well. Keep it bookmarked for when you need a fast ROIC check.

Choose Koyfin if you want a broad, flexible platform that covers fundamentals, technicals, estimates, and international markets. It's a strong general-purpose tool, especially at the free tier.

Choose The Ledger Terminal if you're a value investor who thinks in terms of business quality, return on capital, and the relationship between price and value. The one-page format, fifteen years of SEC filing data, and quality-first screener are built for the specific way fundamental investors evaluate businesses. Nothing else combines the depth, the visual approach, and the workflow as tightly.

In practice, many serious investors use more than one tool. But if you had to pick one as your primary research platform — the place you start every investment evaluation — the right choice depends on whether you value breadth or depth. For value investors who care about quality, ROIC, and valuation context, The Ledger Terminal is the most purpose-built option available.