Free paper trading tools in India, and what each one actually simulates

Search for a paper trading app in India and you will get twenty listicles, most of them ranking whichever platform pays the best affiliate commission. They all answer the same question — is it free? — and almost none of them answer the one that decides whether the practice is worth anything: what is this thing actually simulating?

A simulator is a claim about the market. If the claim is wrong, the habits you build in it are wrong, and you will pay to unlearn them later with real money. So before the list, four checks. Apply them to everything below, including ours.

Four things to check before you trust a simulator

1. Does it charge you?

A round trip on an NSE index option carries six lines: brokerage, STT, exchange transaction charges, SEBI turnover fees, stamp duty and GST. Brokerage is flat per order — commonly ₹20 — so the floor on any F&O round trip is ₹40 before anything else happens. STT is charged on the sell side only. Stamp duty on the buy side only. GST is 18% of brokerage plus exchange plus SEBI fees, and of nothing else.

A simulator with no charges will show you a green trade where your broker would have shown you a red one. It is not a small correction: on a trade that captured ₹0.50 of premium on 300 units, the charges are larger than the entire gross profit. If you want that arithmetic in full, it is here.

2. Is the price live, or delayed?

Practising on delayed prices teaches you to read a chart. It cannot teach you to trade one, because the thing you are learning to handle — a premium moving while you decide — is exactly what a delay removes.

3. Who picks your fill price?

This is the one nobody checks. If the platform lets you type your own entry price, then every number downstream of it — your P&L, your win rate, your expectancy — is a number you chose rather than a number you earned. A simulator that lets you buy an ₹800 share at ₹0.01 is not a lenient simulator. It is not a simulator.

4. Are the statistics gross or net?

A win rate that counts a ₹15 gross win which cost ₹40 in charges is not measuring anything you could have spent. Profit factor, expectancy, average win, drawdown — all of them have to be computed after charges or they describe a version of your trading that does not exist.

The tools

Tool	Cost	Data	F&O	Charges modelled	Ranking
Neostox	Free tier, paid plans above it	Delayed (their own note)	Yes	Not stated	No
Moneybhai	Free	Live	No	Partial	Public board, by return
TradingView	Free tier	Live on NSE	Charts yes, simulated F&O no	No	No
Sensibull	Free via several brokers	Live	Yes	Partly	No
Streak	Free for Zerodha users	Live	Yes	In backtests	No
DhanX	Free tier, ₹99 / ₹149 a month above it	Live NSE	Yes, selling on paid tier	Not stated	No
thepapertrade.com	Free	Live NSE and BSE	Yes	Full contract note	Scored leaderboard

Checked August 2026. Every platform here changes its plans; check the current page before you rely on a row.

Neostox

The largest dedicated Indian simulator, and the one most people find first. Equities, futures and options, a proper order pad, basket orders, an option chain, day-wise P&L reports. If you want a platform built for practice rather than a practice mode bolted onto something else, this is the obvious candidate.

Two things to know. The free access is a trial tier, and the paid plans differ in ways that matter to practice — trades per day, how much virtual capital you start with, how much trade history you keep. And the site's own footer says market prices are delayed. For learning where the buttons are, fine. For learning how a premium behaves in the last hour of an expiry day, less fine.

Moneybhai

Moneycontrol's simulator, free, ₹1 crore of virtual capital, and the most established leaderboard culture in Indian retail — a public national board plus private leagues you can run against friends.

It covers NSE and BSE equities, mutual funds, fixed deposits and bonds. It does not cover F&O, which is most of what Indian retail actually trades. If your question is "how do I run a stock portfolio", it is a reasonable answer. If your question is about a weekly option, it cannot answer it at all.

Its leaderboard ranks on portfolio return, which is worth holding onto — we come back to it below.

TradingView

Nothing else charts as well, and the paper trading is right there on the chart: place a market, limit or stop order from the price axis, drag your stop, watch the position marker move. About ₹1,00,000 of virtual funds, live NSE data on a free account.

What it is not is an Indian F&O simulator. Fills are idealised, and Indian charges — flat brokerage per order, STT on one side, stamp duty on the other — are not part of the model. Use it to practise reading and to rehearse the mechanics of order placement. Do not use its P&L as an estimate of what a strategy pays.

Sensibull

The best options analysis on the Indian market, and free through several brokers. Option chain, strategy wizard, payoff graphs, IV and greeks — the tools for deciding what to put on. Virtual trading exists inside that.

Which is the honest framing: it is an analysis platform with a practice mode, not a practice platform with analysis. If your gap is "I do not know what a calendar spread does to my P&L at 2:30pm", this is where to go.

Streak

Free for Zerodha users. Backtesting, live scanning, and virtual deployment of a strategy — you write the rules, Streak runs them, and you watch what they would have done without money on the line.

That makes it the best tool on this list for testing a rule and the worst for practising discretion. Nothing here teaches you what you do when the premium is ₹8 below your stop and you have to decide. It teaches you whether your rule had an edge, which is a different and also useful question.

DhanX

The closest thing on this list to what we build, so it gets the longest entry.

Live NSE data, a clean option chain with open interest, basket mode, market, limit and after-market orders, and — a genuinely good idea nobody else here has — ₹10,00,000 of virtual money you drag down with a slider to match what you would really trade, so the lessons transfer.

Three things to state plainly. The site says it is independent and not affiliated with any broker, despite the name, so do not assume it comes with a Dhan account. The free tier carries ads, and option selling, larger wallet restores and 5x intraday leverage sit behind Pro at ₹99 a month and Pro Plus at ₹149. And nothing on the site claims brokerage or statutory charges are simulated — apply check 1 yourself before you trust a P&L from it.

There is no leaderboard and no ranking.

NSE Paathshala

Listed by half the articles you will read. It is discontinued. Mentioning it only so you stop looking for it.

thepapertrade.com

Disclosure: this is ours. Judge it on the same four checks.

It is free. No subscription tier, no trades-per-day cap, nothing behind a plan — option selling included.

Live NSE and BSE prices. SENSEX and BANKEX contracts trade here, not only the NSE indices.

A contract note, not a P&L. Brokerage is flat ₹20 per order — and an order larger than the exchange's freeze quantity for that underlying reaches the market as two orders and two ₹20 lines, which is the most commonly under-counted cost in retail F&O. STT on the sell leg, stamp duty on the buy leg, exchange and SEBI charges on both, GST on brokerage plus exchange plus SEBI and nothing else. BSE option rates differ from NSE and are charged as such.

Margin the way the exchange asks for it. Buying an option costs the premium. Selling the same contract blocks a percentage of the underlying's notional value, not of the premium — so a short that "collected ₹3,000" ties up what it really ties up, and the size you get comfortable with is a size you could actually carry.

₹1,00,000 to trade, not ₹1 crore, and no way to top yourself up at will. Capital you can refill on demand is capital you need not respect. A top-up can only bring a fallen balance back up to ₹1,00,000, never past it, and never while a position is open — so a losing trade can never be rescued and a winning account can never buy more ammunition. There is no leverage slider. Practising position sizing on a crore of imaginary money teaches nothing you can carry to an account with a lakh in it.

The rest of a desk. Stops and trailing stops watched on every tick, targets, baskets for multi-leg entries, and an option chain for NIFTY, BANKNIFTY and SENSEX where a strike goes on in one tap. Everything squares off at 15:10 like an intraday desk, so nothing carries overnight.

Every statistic is net. Win rate, expectancy, average win, drawdown — all after charges. A trade that finished green by less than its own round-trip cost is counted as a scratch, not a win, because calling it a win teaches exactly the wrong lesson.

No ads on the trading screen.

The leaderboard, and why it is not a return leaderboard

Every simulator that ranks anything ranks percentage return. It is the obvious choice and it is the wrong one, for a reason that shows up the first month you run one.

A raw return board is won, every single time, by whoever bet the whole account on one out-of-the-money weekly option and got lucky. Not usually. Structurally. The largest return in any given month belongs to the largest survivable gamble, and with a hundred participants somebody's gamble always survives. So the top of the board becomes a public advertisement for the single worst habit in Indian retail options, and everybody below it learns that the way to climb is to size up.

The board here ranks on a score in points instead, and the whole design is about making that gamble score badly even when it wins. Three components, each with a fixed budget it cannot exceed:

• Result — up to ±600 points. Not return: expectancy in R, which is what you make per unit of risk you took. R is the only unit in which a small account and a large one say the same thing, and the only one in which size cannot be mistaken for skill. It is bounded, so one freak month cannot own the board.
• Habits — 0 to +300 points, never negative. Five of them, each earning its own budget: consistency across your green days, cost efficiency (what fraction of your gross the charges ate), not sizing up after a loss, keeping your scratches down, and restraint against overtrading. Good habits recognise a disciplined losing month. They never rescue one.
• Risk taken — 0 to −300 points, never positive. Four readings: your largest single trade's risk, your largest margin commitment, your peak-to-trough drawdown, and your worst single day. The worst of the four counts, not the average — they are four ways of asking one question, and averaging lets three calm answers bury the true one.

That third component is the part a return board cannot have. A winning all-in bet leaves a rising equity curve, no red day and no drawdown; nothing in a performance figure can see the risk it took. Concentration and exposure see it, and they charge for it whether the bet came off or not.

The result budget is four times the habits budget on purpose, so a board about trading cannot quietly become a board about paperwork.

Qualification is 10 closed trades across at least 5 separate days, a confirmed email and a public profile — enough that one lucky afternoon does not rank. The monthly board resets to zero for everyone, so joining in month three is not joining a race that was over in month one, and the all-time board is a trimmed average across your months that drops your best one, which makes a single spectacular month worth nothing on its own.

One thing the board will never carry: a rupee column. Expectancy in R and a percentage are claims about skill. A rupee figure is a claim about wealth. Publishing money takes its own separate, deliberate yes on your profile, and a leaderboard with a rupee column would be a back door around that consent — read by everyone, chosen by nobody.

You can see the board at /leaderboard, and every profile on it is public because its owner switched it on.

Which one

If you want a stock portfolio and a friendly competition: Moneybhai. If you want to learn what a spread does before you put it on: Sensibull. If you want to test a mechanical rule: Streak. If you want charts to rehearse on: TradingView. If you want a dedicated Indian practice platform with a paid path: Neostox or DhanX.

If you want to find out whether your trading survives the contract note — and whether it looks like anything once risk is priced — start here. It costs nothing.

Whatever you pick, keep the four checks. A simulator that charges you properly, prices you off a live tick, refuses to let you choose your own fill and reports everything net is teaching you the market. One that does not is teaching you a game, and the game does not pay.