Sign up with almost any futures prop firm and one word appears immediately: Rithmic. You get "Rithmic credentials," you're told to sign "Rithmic agreements," your platform asks for a "Rithmic connection" — and nobody explains what Rithmic actually is. This article does.

(Quick note: nothing here is financial advice. Firm line-ups and fees in this article are current as of mid-2026 and change often — always confirm with your firm's help center.)

What Rithmic actually is

Rithmic is the plumbing between your trading platform and the exchange: a market data feed and an order-routing network for futures. When you trade ES or NQ through a platform connected to Rithmic, Rithmic is what carries the live prices to your screen and your orders to the CME. It has been doing this for roughly two decades and is an official technology vendor of CME Group.

Two things Rithmic is not:

Why traders care about the feed

Rithmic's reputation rests on two things: speed (order routing measured in microseconds) and unfiltered tick data — every trade and every order book update, not a smoothed summary that skips ticks when the market gets busy. For order flow trading that second part is the one that matters: a footprint chart or delta reading is only as good as the tape it's built from. It's why order-flow platforms plug into Rithmic in the first place.

Why prop firms use it

Beyond speed, Rithmic gives prop firms something they need to exist: server-side risk control. Daily loss limits and position caps get enforced on Rithmic's servers, not in your platform — close the laptop and the limits still hold. That, plus the ability to run thousands of evaluation accounts, is why so much of the funded-trading world runs on Rithmic rails.

As of mid-2026, firms offering Rithmic connections include Apex Trader Funding (which supports ATAS directly), Tradeify, Take Profit Trader, Lucid, and a growing list — several firms moved toward Rithmic in 2026 after the ProjectX platform became exclusive to Topstep. Topstep itself is the notable exception: new accounts there run on its own TopstepX platform, not Rithmic. Line-ups genuinely change every few months — treat any list, including this one, as a snapshot, and double-check before buying an evaluation.

Your credentials and the two agreements

When a firm sets you up, it creates a Rithmic login for you — user ID and password arrive in your welcome email or dashboard. On first login you'll be asked to sign two CME agreements. The first is a standard market data agreement. The second asks you to classify yourself — and this is the one to slow down for: choose non-professional. It's the correct answer for virtually every individual trader, and picking "professional" by mistake triggers exchange fees of roughly $140 per exchange per month.

Also useful to know: a Rithmic login supports one connection at a time. Log into ATAS and R Trader Pro at once with the same account and one will kick the other. (There's a sanctioned plugin mode for running both — most traders never need it.)

One login, one connection — but ATAS itself can run several Rithmic connections at the same time. Each needs its own login, and they can all be live in ATAS side by side — which is how traders run accounts at more than one firm from a single platform. One thing to watch: only one connection should be toggled on as the quotes provider — ATAS will warn you if more than one is on.

Connecting ATAS to Rithmic

The short version: in ATAS, add a Rithmic connection, enter the credentials from your firm, then pick your firm's system (for example "Apex") and a nearby gateway (for example Chicago). The firm's name in the system list — not the generic paper trading option — is the one you want, unless your firm says otherwise. Evaluation and funded accounts sometimes live on different systems, so a "wrong password" after passing an eval is often just the wrong system selected. There's a full walkthrough in the ATAS with prop firms article, and connection problems are usually a question for ATAS support rather than the firm.

What it costs

Rithmic itself reaches you bundled through a broker or prop firm, and the real recurring cost is exchange market data — CME charges for the live feed, and those fees pass through to whoever uses it. Most firms include data in the evaluation fee; some bill it separately per month. The amounts are modest for non-professionals (a full CME bundle with depth runs in the tens of dollars per month), but the split differs per firm — one more thing worth checking before comparing evaluation prices.

Rithmic vs the alternatives

You'll usually meet these names next to Rithmic on a signup page. CQG is the other institutional-grade futures rail — comparable quality, longer history, less common at prop firms. Tradovate is a cloud-first broker with its own connection — convenient and browser-friendly, and the usual second option at firms that offer a choice. TopstepX is Topstep's in-house platform, exclusive to Topstep. dxFeed is data only — you can chart from it, but orders don't route through it. For ATAS order flow work with a prop firm, the practical choice is usually simply: whichever of Rithmic or the firm's alternative supports the platform you actually want to trade on.

The bottom line

Rithmic is infrastructure: the data-and-orders rail between your platform and the exchange, trusted for unfiltered tick data and used by prop firms for its server-side risk control. It isn't a broker, isn't a platform, and isn't something you trade on — it's what your platform trades through. Get the credentials from your firm, sign the agreements as non-professional, connect your platform to the right system, and the rail does its job quietly from then on. If you're setting up ATAS from zero first, start with how to set up ATAS for futures and come back to the connection step.