ProjectX Trading in 2026: What It Is and Where It Stands Now

By Marcel Hambálek · Senior Trader, For Traders

ProjectX is a white-label futures trading front-end built by Sims2Funded that prop firms license and rebrand for their evaluations — it routes orders to CME markets but is not a broker, a clearing firm or a prop firm itself. It is not discontinued in 2026: since Topstep's exclusivity deal in November 2025 the same engine ships under the TopstepX badge, and retail traders can only reach it through a prop firm account.

Key takeaways

• ProjectX is a platform layer — the cockpit, not the engine — sitting between your prop firm and CME Group's exchange, with routing handled by brokers and clearing firms behind it.
• It is not dead: the November 2025 Topstep exclusive branding deal turned the public-facing product into TopstepX, same codebase, same order handling, different badge and different distribution control.
• There is no official ProjectX website where a retail trader can sign up — access has always been bundled into a prop firm's evaluation, which is why that query dead-ends.
• The firm pays the platform licence, not you, which is why platform access can vanish overnight when a firm's contract ends or it migrates to another stack.
• Automation traders adopted it early for its REST API, webhook routing and TradersPost integration — and those are the first things that break in a mid-evaluation platform migration.
• The platform barely moves your pass rate; trailing drawdown mechanics, daily loss limits and ES/NQ tick value do — so weight rule clarity and stack stability above brand names.

Watch: related video

ProjectX in 2026 at a glance

Status, owner, access and alternative in four lines

Last verified: August 20, 2026.

Who this page is for

You're here because you searched "what is ProjectX" or "is ProjectX discontinued" and got conflicting answers from Reddit threads and old YouTube reviews. Fair enough — the branding did change, and a lot of the content ranking for projectx trading right now is stale. This page exists to settle it with a timestamp attached, not a vague "still going strong" line that could've been written eighteen months ago.

Short version: ProjectX platform itself didn't die. What happened is a distribution shift. Sims2Funded still writes the code and maintains the order-routing infrastructure to CME futures markets. Topstep became the exclusive commercial distributor in November 2025, and for its own client base, the front-end now wears the TopstepX badge instead of the ProjectX name. If you funded through Topstep after that date, you've likely never seen the old branding — you just know it as TopstepX platform.

That matters for anyone comparing futures prop firms, because the underlying engine — charting, order entry, risk dashboard — hasn't fundamentally changed, only who's allowed to hand you the login. If your prop firm isn't Topstep, you may still see ProjectX under a different label depending on their licensing arrangement, or you may find it's been swapped out entirely for a different white-label option.

The rest of this page breaks down exactly how the licensing structure works, what "white-label" actually means for order execution and fills, which firms still offer ProjectX-based platforms outside the Topstep exclusivity, and what to check before you commit an evaluation fee to a firm built on any rebranded platform.

What is ProjectX and who built it?

ProjectX is a white-label futures order-routing front-end built by Sims2Funded, licensed to prop trading firms that rebrand it under their own name for use in evaluations and funded accounts. That's the 45-word answer if someone asks you cold. It's software, not a company you open an account with directly — you meet it wearing whatever badge your prop firm put on it.

Not a broker, not a prop firm, not an exchange

Here's where most explainers get sloppy, and where the confusion actually starts. ProjectX is a platform layer — nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't hold your funds, it doesn't clear a single contract, and it isn't the firm that issued your challenge. Three separate things get conflated constantly:

• The prop firm (say, Topstep) sets the rules, sells the challenge, pays the performance rewards.
• ProjectX is the front-end — the DOM order ladder, charting, bracket orders — that Sims2Funded built and licensed out.
• CME Group is where the contracts actually trade. ES, NQ, MES, MNQ — all of it settles on CME's order books, regardless of what skin the front-end is wearing.

The four-layer stack: trader → prop firm → ProjectX → CME Group

Think of it as four layers stacked on top of each other, and it's worth knowing which layer does what before you fund an evaluation:

1. You (the trader) — clicking buy/sell on the front-end.
2. The prop firm — your counterparty for the challenge, the one enforcing daily loss limits and trailing drawdown.
3. ProjectX / the rebranded platform layer — the software rendering your DOM, executing bracket orders, tracking your drawdown in real time against the firm's specific rule set.
4. Routing and clearing (Rithmic, clearing brokers) into CME Group — where the order actually gets filled and where price discovery happens.

What the front-end actually gives you day to day: a proper DOM order ladder for scalping in and out of the book, one-click bracket orders so your stop and target are live the second you're filled, integrated charting, and — the piece traders actually care about mid-evaluation — real-time drawdown tracking synced to whatever rule set the firm layered on top. None of that means the platform is holding your money or clearing your trades. It isn't. That's the routing broker's job, and ultimately CME Group's book.

The confusion exists for one simple reason: white-label platform licensing means Sims2Funded builds it once and five different firms slap five different names on it. You could evaluate under one badge, get funded, switch firms next year, and find yourself staring at the identical order ladder with a different logo in the corner. Same engine, same fills, same CME plumbing underneath — different paint.

Is ProjectX discontinued in 2026?

Direct answer: no — rebranded, not retired

ProjectX is not discontinued in 2026. The engine that powers it is still processing orders every trading day — it just lives under a different badge now. Since Topstep's exclusivity deal in November 2025, the platform you'd have called "ProjectX" in 2024 ships as TopstepX. Same order routing to CME markets, same underlying build from Sims2Funded, different name on the login screen. If you're searching "is projectx discontinued" because your dashboard stopped showing that logo, the answer is: the badge moved, the engine didn't stop.

Timeline: 2024 launch to the 2026 shakeout

Every claim below is date-attached so you can verify it against firm announcements rather than take our word for it.

Why traders think it disappeared

The confusion is mechanical, not mysterious. When a firm loses its ProjectX license, it doesn't send you a eulogy — it just pulls the platform tile off your dashboard and swaps in whatever replacement it negotiated. You log in one Monday, the icon you're used to is gone, and if you go searching for "project x topstep" or the old brand name to figure out what happened, you find scattered forum threads and outdated reviews instead of a clear answer. That reads as "discontinued" even though the platform is doing more daily volume than ever — just funneled through one firm's badge instead of five.

What actually shrank is the searchable footprint, not the installed base. Before the Topstep deal, you could Google the ProjectX name and land on half a dozen firms all using it. Now that surface area is consolidated into TopstepX, so the old name returns fewer hits — which feels like decline but is really consolidation. Any projectx trading review 2026 that calls it dead is measuring brand visibility, not order flow. The traders who actually got affected aren't the ones asking if it's discontinued — they're the ones who got migrated to a different engine mid-evaluation and had to relearn a new order ladder from scratch.

ProjectX vs TopstepX: same platform, different badge

ProjectX and TopstepX are the same front-end running the same order-routing engine — the November 2025 deal changed who controls distribution and roadmap, not what happens when you click buy. If you're searching "projectx vs topstepx" trying to figure out which one to trade, stop: there's no "which one." There's one platform, one owner of the exclusive license, and a name that follows the contract.

What actually changed in November 2025

Topstep signed an exclusivity agreement with Sims2Funded, the developer behind ProjectX, making Topstep the sole distributor of the platform under its own badge — TopstepX. That's a distribution and branding change. It's the kind of deal that happens constantly in white-label software: the underlying product doesn't get rebuilt, the go-to-market does. Firms that previously offered ProjectX under their own labels lost access to new builds; existing users on other brands didn't have their charts deleted overnight, but they stopped getting the roadmap Topstep users now get first.

What stayed identical under the hood

Order handling, DOM behavior, the drawdown/trailing engine, chart rendering, position panel logic — all of it carried over untouched. A trader who ran evaluations on ProjectX in early 2025 and opens TopstepX today will recognize the layout inside thirty seconds: same hotkeys, same order ladder, same fill behavior on CME futures. This is the part reviewers keep missing when they write a projectx trading review 2026 — they compare screenshots of two logos and call it a fork. It's not a fork. It's the same codebase behind a different skin.

Side-by-side: branding, distribution, roadmap, automation access

The honest downside: exclusivity means one firm now decides what gets built next — new order types, automation hooks, chart tools all get prioritized around Topstep's user base first. That's good if you're a Topstep evaluation trader. It's not great if you're on another firm still running an older ProjectX build waiting for parity updates that may never come. Know which side of that line your firm sits on before you build a strategy around a feature that might not survive the next release cycle.

Is there an official ProjectX website, and can you sign up directly?

Direct answer: no retail sign-up, ever

No. There is no projectx official website where you create an account, deposit anything, or start an evaluation. ProjectX was built by Sims2Funded as a B2B trading platform — licensed to prop firms, not sold to individual traders. If you've been searching "project x prop firm" hoping to find a direct sign-up page, you're chasing something that doesn't exist. The platform only becomes accessible once a firm licenses it, rebrands the front-end, and wraps it inside their own evaluation funnel. TopstepX is the clearest example: same engine, Topstep's branding, Topstep's sign-up flow.

Is ProjectX a prop firm?

No — and this is where most searches for "projectx prop firm" go nowhere useful. ProjectX never ran an evaluation, never issued a funded account, never set a drawdown rule or a daily loss limit. It's the order-routing and charting layer sitting on top of CME futures markets. The firm licensing it — Topstep, or whoever else runs a build — decides your futures prop firm evaluation structure: account sizes, profit targets, trailing drawdown rules, scaling plans. ProjectX just executes the fills. Confusing the platform for the firm is the single biggest misunderstanding traders bring into this space, and it's exactly why generic searches for the term dead-end.

What ProjectX costs and who actually pays

The licence itself is a firm-level cost — Sims2Funded charges the prop firm for the right to run ProjectX's engine, not the individual trader. What happens next varies:

• Absorbed by the firm — folded into the evaluation fee you already pay, no separate line item.
• Passed through as a monthly platform or data fee — shown separately on your account, often framed as a "platform" or "software" charge.
• CME market data fees — almost always the trader's responsibility regardless of which model the firm uses. These are exchange-level fees for real-time futures data, set by CME Group, and they sit outside whatever the firm charges for the evaluation itself.

Because the licensing is B2B and invisible to the retail sign-up flow, any site advertising a direct "ProjectX account," a "ProjectX challenge," or a stand-alone ProjectX sign-up should be treated as a red flag — either a scam, a misrepresentation, or, at best, an unlicensed reseller with no relationship to Sims2Funded at all. If you can't trace the platform back to a named, licensed prop firm, don't fund it.

Which prop firms run ProjectX-based platforms in 2026?

As of August 2026, Topstep is the only firm shipping the ProjectX engine at scale, running it exclusively under its own TopstepX badge after the November 2025 exclusivity deal with Sims2Funded. Firms that white-labeled ProjectX before that deal have either migrated to other platform stacks or folded their offering into a different tech partner. If you're evaluating a futures prop firm evaluation right now, you need to know who's running what today — not what a 2024 blog post said.

Status by firm, last checked August 2026

Who migrated away and what they moved to

A handful of smaller futures prop firms ran ProjectX white-labels through 2025 while Sims2Funded was still licensing broadly. Once Topstep locked in exclusivity, those firms had two choices: negotiate a continued license (rare, and not publicly disclosed by any firm we've tracked) or move to a different execution layer — typically Rithmic or Tradovate-based infrastructure, which is what most of the surviving futures challenge providers run today. If a firm's marketing still references "ProjectX" or "ProjectX-powered" without mentioning TopstepX, that copy is stale — check the platform page directly, because the underlying tech has likely changed even if the site hasn't.

Verify before you buy a challenge

Platform lineups shift on contract cycles, not on a quarterly schedule, so treat any list — including this table — as a starting point, not a final answer. Before you pay for an evaluation, confirm three things directly on the firm's own platform page:

• Platform name — does the firm state the exact engine (TopstepX, Tradovate, Rithmic, NinjaTrader) rather than a vague "our proprietary platform"?
• Data fees — is CME market data included in your evaluation fee, or billed separately as a monthly add-on?
• API access by tier — if you plan to automate or backtest, confirm API access is actually enabled on the account tier you're buying, not just advertised at the top of the funnel.

A five-minute check on the firm's platform documentation saves you from discovering, mid-challenge, that your tier doesn't support the tool you built your edge around.

Automation on ProjectX: API, webhooks and copy trading

ProjectX shipped with a documented REST API and webhook endpoints from early on, which is why systematic traders adopted it faster than most white-label front-ends — you could fire a TradingView alert straight into an order without running a desktop bridge or paying for a VPS to keep a terminal open 24/5. That single design choice pulled in a chunk of the algo and semi-automated crowd who'd otherwise have stuck with a native NinjaTrader or Rithmic connection.

REST API and webhook routing

The projectx api exposes order placement, position management and account state over standard REST calls, with webhook listeners that accept inbound signals. Practically, that means a TradingView webhook futures setup — alert fires, payload hits the endpoint, order routes to CME — can run without you touching a bridge app. For a strategy trader running set-and-forget entries off an indicator cross, that's a real reduction in moving parts compared to the MetaTrader-plus-EA stack most retail traders grew up on.

TradersPost and third-party integrations

Not everyone wants to write their own client against a REST spec, and that's where TradersPost slotted in as the routing layer. You build the alert logic in TradingView, TradersPost handles the translation and delivery to the ProjectX endpoint, and you skip the authentication and payload-formatting work entirely. It's become close to the default path for retail systematic traders who want webhook automation without becoming part-time developers — the trade-off is you're now dependent on a third party's uptime sitting between your signal and your fill.

Copy trading across multiple evaluation accounts

Copy trading futures across several evaluation accounts is the standard play for traders running two, three or more challenges in parallel — one signal source, mirrored position sizing across accounts, so you're not manually clicking the same trade five times before NFP moves the tape. It's efficient, but it's also exactly where firms tend to draw hard lines. Many prop firms explicitly restrict or prohibit copy trading between accounts registered to the same person, precisely because it defeats the purpose of independent evaluations. Read the firm's rulebook before you wire accounts together — a violation here can void a payout even if every individual trade was clean.

Be direct with yourself about the limits too. API access is granted per firm and per account tier — a key issued under one firm's ProjectX deployment does not travel to another firm's instance, even though the underlying engine is identical. Rate limits, supported order types and webhook reliability differ from what you'd get on a native NinjaTrader or Rithmic feed, and they can differ between two firms both running ProjectX. Automation is, without question, the single most fragile thing in any platform migration — a strategy that fires clean on one firm's API can silently drop orders on another's until you've stress-tested it.

ProjectX/TopstepX vs NinjaTrader, Tradovate and Rithmic front-ends

Four names get lumped together in every "which futures platform" thread, but they're not competing for the same job. NinjaTrader owns the power-user desktop, Tradovate owns browser-first retail, Rithmic is the plumbing half the industry routes through, and ProjectX/TopstepX owns the white-label prop niche — a lane that narrowed hard once Topstep's November 2025 exclusivity deal took it off the open market.

How the four stacks differ on access and cost bearer

NinjaTrader and Tradovate you can open directly as a retail trader and pay for yourself — monthly platform fee, data feed, done. Rithmic isn't a front-end at all; it's the execution and market-data layer that NinjaTrader, Tradovate and a long list of smaller platforms sit on top of, so you're often paying a Rithmic data fee without ever seeing the Rithmic name. ProjectX flips the model: it's B2B-only. Sims2Funded licenses the engine to prop firms, the firm pays for the license and rebrands the UI, and you only reach it by buying a challenge — TopstepX being the visible example since the exclusivity deal. There's no "sign up for ProjectX" page for a retail trader in 2026, and that's by design.

DOM depth, order types and execution feel

On the ladder, NinjaTrader's DOM is still the reference point — full depth-of-market columns, custom order types, and an indicator/strategy ecosystem built over close to two decades. Tradovate's DOM is capable but leaner, tuned for speed in a browser tab rather than maximum configurability. ProjectX/TopstepX ships a competent order ladder and charting layer good enough to trade ES E-mini S&P 500 or NQ E-mini Nasdaq-100 cleanly, but it's a narrower feature set than NinjaTrader's — fewer order types, thinner charting toolset, and automation support that varies by which prop firm's build you're on.

Which one fits which trader

If you scalp and live on the ladder, NinjaTrader's DOM depth is hard to beat — that's the honest call, even inside a futures trading platform comparison written by a prop firm. If you're a discretionary swing trader who lives on charts more than the book, Tradovate's browser-first charting is fast enough and you skip the desktop install entirely. If you're systematic and building against an API, test Rithmic's R|API directly if your firm allows it — fewer layers between your code and the fill. And if you're inside a Two-Step Challenge or Instant Funding account on TopstepX specifically, work within it rather than fighting it: it's built for evaluation trading, not for replacing NinjaTrader as your daily desktop.

Your firm switched platforms mid-evaluation: the migration checklist

Run through this before you touch the order ticket: confirm how trailing drawdown is displayed, re-check your daily loss limit reset time, and fire a single micro contract to test fills before you size back up. A platform migration checklist isn't optional here — it's how you avoid failing an evaluation on a technicality rather than on your trading.

What to re-verify before your first order

1. Confirm whether trailing drawdown tracks your closed balance or your open equity — this single detail changes how much room you actually have intraday, and firms differ on it even when the front-end looks identical.
2. Re-read your daily loss limit reset time in your own local time zone, not the platform's default UTC or CT display. A reset you assume is midnight your time might actually be 5pm the day before.
3. Rebuild your hotkeys and chart templates from scratch rather than trusting an import — spacing, tick increments, and default order size can shift silently between platform versions.
4. Confirm tick value and contract specs render correctly for MNQ and MES micro futures versus their full-size ES and NQ counterparts. A DOM that quietly defaults to the wrong contract is the single most common migration error we see.

What breaks silently for automated traders

If you're running anything systematic, re-issue your API keys the moment your firm confirms a platform switch — old credentials sometimes stay "live" against a sandbox environment while your real evaluation account sits on the new engine, meaning your bot is trading nothing. Re-link any copy-trade masters manually too; auto-migration of copy relationships is inconsistent across providers, and a broken link fails silently — you won't get an error, you'll just get no fills. Test bracket and OCO order behaviour on one micro contract before committing size. Some platforms cancel the opposite leg on partial fill, others don't, and that distinction only shows up when you watch it happen live.

Reset your position sizing on day one

A familiar-looking DOM with a different default quantity is how traders blow a daily loss limit in the first hour of a migration. You click size out of muscle memory, the ticket defaults to 3 contracts instead of 1, and you're staring at a locked account before your coffee's cold. Trade one contract for a full session purely to validate fills and slippage — not to make money, just to confirm the plumbing works the way you think it does. Once you've watched a handful of fills come back clean with no surprise slippage, step back into your normal size. It costs you a session of upside. It saves you the account.

ProjectX/TopstepX: honest pros and cons for futures traders

Pros

• Browser-native — no desktop install, works from any machine you sit down at
• Documented REST API and webhook support, so TradingView-to-execution routing works without a bridge app
• Drawdown and daily loss limits displayed live against the firm's actual rule set, not calculated by you on a napkin
• Clean, fast DOM and bracket handling that suits ladder scalpers on ES, NQ and the micros
• Platform licence is a firm cost, so traders often avoid a separate desktop platform fee

Cons / risks

• No direct retail access — you can only reach it through a prop firm that licenses it
• Exclusive distribution since November 2025 means most non-Topstep traders can no longer get it at all
• Charting and indicator depth trail NinjaTrader for traders who live in custom studies
• API keys and copy-trade links are firm-scoped and die when your firm changes stacks
• Your access depends on a B2B contract you never see and cannot influence

Frequently Asked Questions