(by no means exchaustive) things I consider good about one or the other:

1. NinjaTrader:

Pros:
Huge support here on futures.io (formerly BMT) - so plenty of resources. A lot of enthusiasm through its adopters and willingess to help & contribute to the community.
They're very responsive on their forum, and it's an open support forum with very useful past threads.
They have built-in free EOD data for most of the instruments you'd at least want to start with, or you'd ever trade. Kinetick EOD is a good quality feed, a nice perk that anyone else doesn't have.
Theoretically, if you want only EOD data, you could build & backtest everything in NT without spending a dime.
Flexibility to build on top of it with integration in .NET, Visual Studio, etc
They are receptive to feature-requests, and do acknowledge bugs, issues with the product.
Some of the best things I like in NT:
One feature that I appreciate in Walk-Forward, they'll actually give you stats on the OOS samples ... great edge compared to MC, if you're deep in backtesting, and you don't want to "manually" do stats in excel/alternatives.
Each Walk-Forward time-frame gives you the component trades ... you can actually see the trades on a map ... in MC this does not exist, Walk-Forward in MC is as blind as a bat in terms of component trades or OOS-only stats.
Superior market replay - they provide the replay data up to tick level - very nice. This is for the Pros section.
Nonetheless, this is countered by some simple missing features in the replay, which kills half of it's potential. Imagine you have a a cone of icecream in front of you - but you have to eat it with your hands tied at your back ...

Cons:
Very, and I mean, veeeery long release cycle. You might get to know your grandchildren before NT gets through two more big releases. Nonetheless, they have multiple small releases with incremental smaller features/brokers/data-feeds, bug fixing.
Some-what closed road-map. You don't really know what's "cooking" under in their development team (at least, by comparison to Multicharts).
I must say it's somewhat less robust than MC, both in touch & feel and in speed of execution/response time. Example: Backtesting - choosing genetic algoritm testing, rarely produced noticeable differences to the non-genetic, as opposed to MC, where I see noticeable results.
Lack of native (considered now to be standard) features like Volume Profile, Cumulative Delta, etc.


Multicharts:
Pros:
I always liked their open PM platform - one can see the bugs, can log/open FRs, can comment and can really feel they contribute to the development of the platform.
Nice touch & feel, good execution, rarely has stability issues and let's not forget the Multicharts.NET platform which gives the same level of integration with c#/.NET/Visual Studio platform.
Support is very responsive and helpful.
There follow some inovative directions in the platform development that do surprise you. I like the high degree of inovation, and it's nice to see major features being implemented each 2-3 years.

Cons:
Lacks something similar to Kinetick free EOD.
Their Backtesting/Walk-Forward engine is a good start, but does appear like an old car that hasn't been serviced for the last 5 years, that starts to rust and needs some attention. You do feel that development is 100% focused in one (or few) direction(s), and multiple additional areas are not touched, or not properly integrated with the new features.
They may be very inovative, but this does present a risk. In my opinion, they completely messed up the Volume Profile, making it very inflexible compared to other implementations.
Market replay is a pain as well ... you don't have order execution in the market-replay and there is no volume-profile while doing replay.



So, in summary, you kind of have have two opposites in some respect.

I may be off in some of the above, and stand to be corrected. And it's my intention to learn from what I've missed or done wrong, and not to criticise anyone, but that was my experience with the two.

Hi,
In what sense are MC innovative?
Innovation to me means that something wasn't there on the market before.
What features of MC were not on the market before?

I don't look at all possible platforms, options and new features out there, I only compare a handful of them, or even less ... and most importantly, I'm looking at platforms accessible to me, and that I feel comfortable to work with.

But if you have a broader view and more experience, it would be good if you'd share some of it here with us.

I use ninjatrader, I find it can be quite slow, loading charts and changing chart timeframes. Also multicharts includes volume profile, you have to purchase an add-on with ninjatrader (or use one of the futures.io (formerly BMT) ones, but it relies on your tick data). Main reason I use it is because of the Jigsaw add-on, currently unavailable on MC but its getting worked on. NT8 is going to be multi threaded so this should solve performance issues. So if choosing between MC and NT and both have jigsaw, Id go with MC because of faster performance and you get volume profile included.

And most of those 667 are useless

Multicharts interface takes some time to get used to, but the platform is much more robust in my opinion. The charts load really fast and don't lock your system up when you change a range. MC doesn't just lock up in the middle trading for no reason like Ninja either.

There are many features in MC that Ninja doesn't even have. The only feature that MC lacks is a ruler. I use the ruler so many times a day in NT, and the lack of a ruler in MC is really a drag. I have asked them to add it in a future version and I hope they listen.

I think in the past, the need to actually purchase MC instead of the endless trial of NT was a real factor. Now that you can use the MC.NET version for free from AMP, it may make a difference.

Sierra Chart!

Disagree completely with your entusiashm for Multicharts.
In terms of performance in loading charts / multithreading, NT8 will completely close the gap.

I find Multicharts very slow in closing gaps with its competition. Although they have more releases than NT, that doesn't make it a better platform overall. They both have their pluses & minuses.

Disagree completely with your entusiashm for Multicharts.
In terms of performance in loading charts / multithreading, NT8 will completely close the gap.

I find Multicharts very slow in closing gaps with its competition. Although they have more releases than NT, that doesn't make it a better platform overall. They both have their pluses & minuses.

I have no interest in promoting either of the two, but I believe several poorly made decisions, are worth mentioning below for MC:

1 - Useless (for me at least) Volume Profile (unflexible and poor design).
2 - Lack of free EOD good quality futures data (something like Kinetics for NT)
3 - Plain USELESS Walk-Forward-Optimization. You don't get the aggregate Out Of Sample statistics that are of interet to you.
4 - Monte Carlo - missing. MC's PM seems to plainly ignore any hint that this would be a good feature. Their miss.

First & 3rd should be deleted from the product and re-designed from the ground up.
I'm not saying that NT has a definite edge in 1 & 3 above points, but NT has following:

1 - Built-in Volume profile lacking.
2 - Kinetick fills the gap
3 - You do get aggregate OOS stats for Walk-Forward. Great feature.
4 - However, they just missed a great score by NOT making it possible to run Monte-Carlo only on the Out-Of-Sample intervals.

For 4, AmiBroker has the edge - it automatically shows you MonteCarlo on OOS. I would also add AmiBroker does seem to be the fastest of them all. But they're just lacking in so many other aspects (like quality, stability, free good EOD for futures, plain inflexibility - it either does it (what you want) or you're screaming alone to the moon).