Screener.in and Beyond: Tools for Professional-Grade Indian Equity Research

Screener.in is one of the most loved fundamental research tools in India, and for most investors it is more than enough: 10 to 15 years of financials, clean ratios, screening, concall notes, and Excel export at a very low price. A professional-grade alternative like Altys Labs is not about replacing that, it is about the extra depth a person running concentrated or institutional books tends to want, such as point-in-time history, source-linked figures, deeper concall and guidance tracking, and backtesting.

This is not a takedown. If you use Screener.in every day and it does the job, that is exactly what a good tool should do. The point here is narrower: to be honest about where a free-to-cheap tool naturally stops, and what a professional tier adds on top.

What Screener.in is, and why people rely on it

Screener.in is a fundamentals and screening site for Indian listed companies. It has a free Hobby Investor plan and a premium Active Investor plan priced at 4,999 rupees per year as of 2026. That pricing alone tells you a lot about who it serves: it is built to put serious financial data in the hands of individual investors without a heavy cost.

On the free tier you get a company page with a decade or more of profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow, an automatic pros-and-cons snapshot, quarterly results, shareholding, and a genuinely powerful screen builder with custom ratios. Premium adds unlimited company follows, higher alert limits, detailed peer comparison, segment results, Excel automation that even remembers your own template, concall notes, industry filters, multiple watchlists, and Screener AI credits for pulling insights from documents.

For a huge share of Indian investors, that is the whole job. You can find companies, read their long-term trends, compare peers, set alerts, and export to a spreadsheet. Screener.in earned its following by doing the fundamentals well and keeping them accessible, and nothing below is meant to take that away.

Where a professional running concentrated books wants more

The gap is not about quality, it is about a different job. When you manage other people’s money in a concentrated book, or you sit at a PMS, AIF, or family office, your questions change. You care less about “what are the numbers” and more about “what did I know, when did I know it, and can I prove where each figure came from.” A few needs tend to show up that a low-cost fundamentals tool is simply not built to answer.

Point-in-time history. Most databases show you today’s version of a company’s past. When a firm restates prior years for a demerger, an accounting change, or discontinued operations, the old number is quietly overwritten. That is fine for reading trends, but it matters a lot the moment you test an idea against history, because you can end up acting on figures that did not exist on the decision date. This is the core of why point-in-time data matters and closely tied to the problem of lookahead bias.

Source-linking you can audit. In an institutional setting, a number in your model needs a paper trail. Which filing, which line, which date. When a colleague or an investor asks “where did this come from,” you want to click through to the exact document rather than trust a scraped cell.

Concall and guidance depth over time. Reading a single concall is one thing. Tracking what management guided across many quarters, and whether they hit it, is another. That kind of longitudinal view is central to reading a concall like an analyst and to tracking historical guidance accuracy.

Forensics and revenue detail. Serious diligence often means splitting revenue by segment or driver and looking for the quiet signals a screen will not surface. That is the work behind revenue mapping and finding problems before the market does.

Backtesting a strategy. If your process has rules, you eventually want to test them against the past on honest, as-it-stood data, not on restated history that flatters the result.

None of these are criticisms of Screener.in. They are the natural boundary between a broad, affordable tool for everyone and a narrower tool built for the professional workflow described in the institutional equity research workflow.

How Altys approaches the professional tier

Altys Labs is an equity research and fundamental analysis platform for Indian stocks on the NSE and BSE, plus Indian mutual funds. It is built for professional users: PMS firms, AIFs, family offices, and MFDs. It is currently invite-only and in private preview, so this is a description of focus, not a claim that it is open to everyone today.

Altys brings India’s market data into one place: company filings, earnings-call transcripts, management guidance, shareholding patterns, more than 80 global and domestic macro series, FII and DII flows, factor scores, and mutual-fund data. On top of that data sit tools to screen, build financial models, forecast, and backtest a strategy.

The design choices line up with the professional needs above. Altys keeps data point-in-time, so research and backtests reflect what was actually knowable on each past date rather than restated history. Every figure links back to its source document, line, and date, so the work is auditable. Numbers are calculated from the company’s own filings, and forecasts come from explicit statistical methods rather than a language model guessing a growth rate. And because it is India-first, the depth is on Indian equities and funds rather than being a light India layer on a global product.

To be clear about what Altys is not: it is not a broker, not a tip service, and not a SEBI-registered research analyst or adviser. It does not tell you what to buy or sell. It is software that helps you do the research yourself.

Which fits whom

	Screener.in	Altys Labs
Best for	Retail and serious individual investors	Professional users: PMS, AIF, family office, MFD
India coverage	Deep Indian fundamentals and screening	India-first equities and mutual funds
Strength	Long-term financials, screening, low cost	Point-in-time data, source-linked figures, backtesting
Data timing	Current and restated view	Point-in-time as it stood on each date
Access	Free plan plus premium at 4,999 rupees/year	Invite-only, private preview

If you are an individual investor who wants strong fundamentals, screening, and long-term history at a low price, Screener.in is an excellent choice and may be all you ever need. If you run a concentrated or institutional book and your questions have moved to point-in-time accuracy, source-linked auditability, guidance tracking, and backtesting, that is the professional tier Altys is built for. The two are not really rivals so much as different rungs on the same ladder, and many professionals will keep using both.

Altys is in private preview for professional users. If that describes your work, the honest summary is simple: start where Screener.in serves you well, and look at a professional-grade tool when your process outgrows what a broad, affordable one is meant to do.