MQL5 Signals vs SignalSync vs Cloud Copiers: Fees, Speed, Control

Author: SignalSync editorial · Published: 2026-10-02 · Updated: 2026-10-03 · Comparisons

If you trade on MetaTrader and want to follow someone else's account, you have three realistic routes in 2026: the Signals service built into MT4/MT5 and run by MetaQuotes, a cloud trade copier such as Copygram, Social Trader Tools or Duplikium, or a hosted copy-trading platform like SignalSync. They differ less in headline "speed" than in three things that decide whether the arrangement works for you over a year: what each side pays, where the copying actually executes, and who controls lot sizing. This comparison lays those out side by side, using published vendor terms and SignalSync's own measured numbers, and ends with who each option is for.

MQL5 Signals is MetaQuotes' in-terminal subscription marketplace (20 % fee, same-platform copying only); cloud trade copiers are third-party services that hold your account credentials and copy between any MT4/MT5 accounts for a monthly plan fee; a hosted platform such as SignalSync runs the subscriber's terminal on its own VPS, copies MT4↔MT5 through a server, charges the subscriber only the provider's price, and keeps 10 % of what the provider earns.

Key takeaways

• Fees scale differently: MQL5 takes 20 % from the provider; cloud copiers charge the subscriber $20–80 per month for 2–5 accounts regardless of how many signals arrive; SignalSync charges the subscriber nothing beyond the provider's price (plus a one-time $10 per connected account) and takes 10 % from the provider.
• Only cloud copiers and SignalSync copy MT4↔MT5. MQL5 Signals links MT4 accounts to MT4 signals and MT5 to MT5. Both MQL5 and SignalSync allow one provider per trading account.
• Execution location drives the VPS question: MQL5 needs your terminal online (or its $15/month VPS); cloud copiers need nothing on your side; SignalSync includes the hosted terminal in the $10 connection fee.
• SignalSync's benchmark of 2025-12-10 (one MT4 subscriber EA, 200 signals in 71 minutes) measured 48 ms average server time (P95 88, P99 103 ms), about 553 ms of subscriber-side queue and about 175 ms of EA plus broker execution, roughly 0.78 s end to end as the sum of stage averages. Cloud vendors publish 20–50 ms claims for their copy hop that are not independently verified.
• Track-record verification is strongest where the service reads the account itself: MQL5 and SignalSync both pull live statistics; a cloud copier shows you what you connect, not a public marketplace record.

The three models in one paragraph each

MQL5 Signals

MetaQuotes operates the Signals tab inside every MT4 and MT5 terminal. A provider registers as a seller on MQL5.community, passes a one-month monitoring period, and lists a signal; the service's provider agreement sets an operational fee of 20 % and the published minimum price is about $30 per month (check mql5.com for the current figure). Subscribers pay through the MQL5 payment system and copy inside their own terminal, which "must be always connected to the server using the account which is subscribed for the signals" per the service rules. Demo-account signals are always free, and accounts with leverage above 1:500 cannot be sold.

Cloud trade copiers

Copygram, Social Trader Tools, Duplikium and similar services run both the master and the slave connection on their infrastructure. You give them investor or trading credentials for every account, define a "room" or "copier" from master to slaves, and set lot rules per follower. Pricing is per plan or per account: Copygram lists $29 / $49 / $79 per month for 2 / 3 / 5 accounts (cheaper on yearly billing), Social Trader Tools $20 / $60 / $120 / $220 per month for 2 / 5 / 10 / 20 accounts, Duplikium from €9 per account per month (vendor pricing pages, fetched October 2026). Some of them also host a "signal page" so a master can sell access, but there is no shared public marketplace with uniform statistics.

SignalSync (hosted platform)

SignalSync is a marketplace plus hosting. Providers connect an MT4 or MT5 account, set a monthly price (minimum $35; $35 is also the default if none is set), and the platform's monitoring EA feeds a public profile that shows relative metrics only (gain %, drawdown %, win rate, profit factor, trades, monthly return, risk level, price, subscribers and, when the provider has set one, a recommended deposit); the trade history, without money amounts, opens after login, and balance or equity figures stay with the owner. Registration is free; each connected MT4/MT5 account costs a one-time $10 in USDT (TRC20), which covers a dedicated portable terminal on the platform's Windows VPS. A subscriber pays the provider's monthly price plus the TRC20 network fee (about $2.5) and nothing else; the platform keeps 10 % of the provider's payout. Signals go provider EA → server → subscriber terminal, so MT4 can follow MT5 and vice versa. The provider receives 90 % after a 14-day cooling period, sent automatically to a USDT address.

Comparison table: fees, platforms, control

Two things the table hides. First, the cloud vendors' latency figures describe the hop between their servers; the broker's fill time is added on top for everyone, and in SignalSync's benchmark EA processing plus broker fill averaged about 175 ms. Second, MQL5's "no VPS needed" depends on whether you consider leaving a PC on all week acceptable; most subscribers end up paying the $15.

Fees over a year: three worked examples

Assume you want to follow one trader who charges $40 per month, for twelve months, with one trading account. All figures are list prices from the sources above; your broker's spread is not included because it is the same in every scenario.

Notice that MQL5 is cheapest for the subscriber when the provider already lives on the same platform and the subscriber already has a VPS or an always-on machine. The moment you need MT4↔MT5, MQL5 drops out of the list and the comparison becomes cloud copier versus hosted platform, where the difference is a plan fee of $20–30 a month against a one-time $10 and network fees.

Ready to see what the marketplace actually lists? Browse the provider statistics before paying anyone, or create a free account to open providers' trade histories (prices, times, lots and pips; no money amounts).

Where the copying runs, and why it matters

This is the question most comparison posts skip, and it determines reliability more than any fee.

MQL5: in your terminal

The subscribed terminal receives trade events from MetaQuotes' signal servers and sends orders to your broker from your machine. Advantages: nothing leaves MetaTrader, no third party holds your password, and symbol handling is done by the terminal itself. Disadvantages: if the terminal is closed, nothing copies; Windows updates, a sleeping laptop or a broker reconnect all cost you trades; and copying is bound to the terminal type, which is why MT4→MT5 is impossible.

Cloud copiers: on the vendor's servers

The vendor logs into every account through its own connectors and relays orders. You get 24/7 operation with nothing installed, and a single dashboard for many accounts. You also hand over trading passwords (not investor passwords) for the slave accounts, you depend on the vendor's uptime and on their connector keeping up with broker server changes, and you cannot inspect a terminal when something looks wrong. For an EA-driven master with hundreds of modify events per hour, the vendor's rate limits matter; ask before you commit.

SignalSync: hosted terminal, local execution

SignalSync deploys a real MetaTrader terminal for your subscriber account on its Windows VPS, in portable mode. On MT4 a subscriber EA receives signals over WebSocket and executes them at your broker exactly as a local copier would; on MT5 the default is a Python copier attached to the hosted terminal. The trade-off is that the platform holds your trading password (encrypted, per the documentation), and your account lives inside the platform's deployment pipeline rather than on hardware you own.

Control: lot sizing, SL/TP, slippage

All three let the subscriber scale volume, but the controls differ enough to change outcomes.

• MQL5 uses a percentage of equity to allocate ("deposit load") and derives volume from the provider's relative position size and the two accounts' balances and leverage. It is conservative by design; check the service rules on mql5.com for how volumes are derived.
• Cloud copiers typically expose fixed lot, multiplier and balance-percent modes per follower, plus symbol-specific exceptions (Copygram lists these on its product page). This is the most flexible model and also the easiest to misconfigure, since one dashboard setting applies to every room it touches.
• SignalSync stores per-subscription settings: lot multiplier, a maximum lot cap (enforced by the MT4 subscriber EA only; the MT5 Python copier does not apply it, so on MT5 limit risk with the multiplier), whether to copy SL/TP, and a slippage limit counted in MT4 points, not pips (20 points is about 2 pips on a 5-digit EURUSD quote, or $0.20 on XAUUSD). Note the default slippage behaviour on the MT4 EA: when price has moved beyond the limit it waits up to 60 seconds for a better price rather than skipping the trade. Copying can be paused with the Copy Trading toggle in the account settings. The MT4 subscriber EA also handles broker suffixes and server-side aliases such as GOLD→XAUUSD (the aliasing applies to MT4 subscribers). The provider's balance is never shown. The card's "recommended deposit" is the minimum the provider suggests for a 1.0 multiplier, not his balance, and it is omitted when blank. Size from risk instead: after login open the provider's trade history, take the typical lot and typical stop (or typical loss in pips), compute the dollar risk per trade at multiplier 1.0 (lot × pip value × stop) and set the multiplier so that risk per trade is 1–2 % of your deposit. If the history shows no stops, use the card's max drawdown: multiplier ≈ your acceptable drawdown % ÷ (historical drawdown % × 1.5). The worked arithmetic is in how to calculate position size for copy trading; the MT4-to-MT5 guide covers the cross-platform details.

Whichever route you pick, the rule in our provider-selection checklist applies: set the multiplier from the provider's maximum drawdown, not from their average month.

Track records: what each service can actually prove

MQL5 reads the provider's account from inside MetaTrader, which makes the equity curve hard to fake. What it cannot show you is how the signal behaves on a different broker's spreads.

SignalSync's monitoring EA reports a heartbeat and a statistics block at short, regular intervals, so profiles are live rather than uploaded. The public provider card shows relative metrics only: gain %, drawdown %, win rate, profit factor, number of trades, monthly return, risk level, price, subscriber count and, when set, a recommended deposit. After login a user can open the provider's trade history without money amounts (symbol, direction, lots, prices, times, pips). Balance, equity and profit in currency are visible to the account owner only; the recommended deposit is the minimum the provider suggests for a 1.0 multiplier, not his balance, and is omitted when blank. The public catalogue applies a filter: only accounts with positive net profit, at least 10 trades and a maximum drawdown under 80 % are shown. Two honest caveats. The card does not flag whether the account is demo or live, so read the profile or ask through the contact form. And the accounts currently listed are the platform's own test and demo accounts running catalogue Expert Advisors, not third-party traders; their statistics are real account statistics, but they are not a sample of independent providers, and there are no paid-subscriber results to cite.

Cloud copiers do not verify anything for you. They are tools; the master's track record is whatever Myfxbook or a broker statement says. For a trader copying their own second account that is irrelevant; for someone paying a stranger it is the whole game. See the scam-protection guide for what to ask.

Who each option is for

Latency: the honest version

Marketing numbers for copiers describe different segments of the path. Here is what SignalSync measured in its benchmark of 2025-12-10, one MT4 subscriber EA, 200 signals in 71 minutes (method and caveats in Copy Trading Latency Explained):

• Server (receive, store, push over WebSocket): 48 ms average, P95 88 ms, P99 103 ms.
• Queue wait on the subscriber side during modify bursts: about 553 ms average.
• EA processing plus broker fill: about 175 ms average.
• End to end: about 0.78 s as the sum of stage averages; the platform documentation states 200–800 ms. The benchmark is about ten months old and MT4-based.

Copygram's "under 20 ms" and Social Trader Tools' "50 ms average" refer to their copy hop and, if accurate, are faster than SignalSync's server-plus-queue segment. Neither includes broker execution, and neither is published with a method. MQL5 publishes nothing. If latency is your decisive criterion, measure it yourself on a demo for a week; the latency article explains how. Our wider trade-copier software roundup covers the local-EA copiers that this three-way comparison leaves out.

Want the hosted model with a cross-platform marketplace? Register for free, connect a demo account and compare the trades in your own terminal against the provider's trade history (visible after login) before you fund anything. The features page lists what is included in the $10 connection fee; questions go to the contact form; the Telegram channel @signalsync_official carries platform news only (it does not take messages).

FAQ

Is MQL5 Signals free for subscribers?

The service itself charges the subscriber nothing; you pay the provider's price (minimum around $30 per month, free for demo-account signals). The provider gives up 20 % to MetaQuotes. You may also need the $15/month MQL5 VPS if your terminal cannot stay online.

Can I use MQL5 Signals to copy from MT4 to MT5?

No. The service rules state that an MT4 terminal account can only subscribe to signals in the MetaTrader 4 section and an MT5 account only to the MetaTrader 5 section. Cross-platform copying requires a cloud copier or a hosted platform.

What is the cheapest MQL5 Signals alternative for one subscription?

For one provider on one account, SignalSync charges the subscriber nothing beyond the provider's price, the TRC20 network fee and a one-time $10 to connect the account, which is below the entry plans of the cloud copiers ($20–29/month). For five or more accounts under your own control, a cloud copier's per-plan pricing wins.

Do cloud trade copiers need my trading password?

Yes, for every account that must place orders (the slaves); the master can often use an investor password. SignalSync also needs the trading password for the hosted subscriber terminal. MQL5 Signals is the only model where nothing leaves your terminal.

How much slower is a hosted platform than a local copier?

In SignalSync's 2025-12-10 benchmark the server added 48 ms on average and the subscriber-side queue about 553 ms during modify bursts; EA processing plus broker fill was about 175 ms. A local copier on the same VPS skips the server and queue, so the realistic difference is a few hundred milliseconds, which matters for scalpers and little for swing strategies.

Who gets paid if the provider stops trading?

On MQL5, cancelled paid subscriptions are not refunded, but if the provider terminates the signal the reserved funds are not transferred to the provider. On SignalSync, subscriber payments are held for 14 days before the provider receives 90 %; there are no refunds for partial months either. Check the vendor's terms before paying for a long period.

Which option shows verified statistics?

MQL5 and SignalSync both read the provider's account directly (MQL5 inside the terminal, SignalSync via a monitoring EA on the hosted terminal, with a catalogue filter of positive net profit, 10+ trades and drawdown under 80 %). Cloud copiers do not verify masters; use Myfxbook or a broker statement.

Can I pay SignalSync by card?

Not at the moment: subscriptions, the $10 connection fee and provider payouts are all in USDT on the TRON network (TRC20). If that is a blocker, MQL5 and the cloud copiers accept cards and PayPal.

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