Overview

A high-level guide to Benzinga’s real-time WebSocket data streams.

Benzinga’s WebSocket API delivers low-latency, push-based financial data directly to your application. Instead of repeatedly polling a REST endpoint, you open a single persistent connection and receive events the moment they’re available — analyst ratings, earnings results, news, transcripts, and more.

All streams share the same base endpoint, authentication model, and message envelope, so the patterns you learn on one stream apply everywhere.

How it works

1. Authenticate

   Obtain a Benzinga API token from the Benzinga Console and append it as a token query parameter when opening the connection.

2. Connect

   Open a WebSocket connection to the stream URL for the data you need — for example wss://api.benzinga.com/api/v1/analyst/insights/stream?token=YOUR_TOKEN.

3. Receive events

   Messages arrive as JSON objects with a consistent envelope: an id, api_version, kind, and a data block that carries the action (created, updated, or deleted) and the payload.

4. Keep the connection alive

   Send a ping plain-text frame periodically (every 30–60 s). The server responds with pong. The server also sends its own ping every 10 s — most WebSocket libraries handle this automatically.

One connection per API key

Each API key may hold one active connection per stream at a time. The limit is per stream and enforced across all of Benzinga’s servers. You can run connections to several different streams at once with the same key — but only one connection to any given stream. This keeps delivery ordering consistent for your key on each stream and prevents a single token from fanning out into unbounded concurrent connections to the same stream.

If a connection to a stream is already active for your token, another connection to that same stream is rejected with HTTP 429 Too Many Requests. The existing connection is not dropped — the new attempt is refused. Open one connection per stream per key and fan messages out inside your own application.

What this means in practice

• Don’t open more than one connection to the same stream with a single key (per browser tab, worker, or server instance) — consolidate to one connection per stream and distribute messages internally.
• Connecting to different streams with the same key is fine — each stream permits its own single connection.
• If you need multiple concurrent consumers of the same stream, request additional API keys.
• Treat a 429 on connect as “another session is already active for this key on this stream,” not as a rate limit on message volume.

Reconnecting

When a connection drops (network blip, deploy, or a missed keepalive ping), reconnect — but expect a brief hand-off window before the previous session’s slot frees:

1. Reconnect with backoff

   Retry with exponential backoff (e.g. start at ~2 s, cap around 15 s). A 429 means your previous session for that stream is still considered active; keep backing off and retry until it succeeds.

2. Deduplicate

   Use the message id to drop any events you may see again around the reconnect boundary.

If your process exits without closing the socket cleanly, the slot is released automatically after a short server-side timeout — no manual cleanup is required. Just reconnect with backoff; a freshly dropped connection can take a few seconds to free.

Available streams

Analyst Insights

Real-time analyst ratings, price targets, and detailed recommendations as they’re published.

Ratings

Analyst rating changes and price target updates from major firms.

Consensus Ratings

Aggregated consensus ratings and price targets across all tracked analysts.

Earnings

Earnings announcements with EPS, revenue, estimates, and surprise metrics.

Bulls/Bears Say

Bull and bear case scenarios for securities, published in real time.

News

Breaking news articles and market updates from Benzinga’s editorial team.

Earnings Call Transcripts

Live earnings call transcripts delivered sentence-by-sentence as they’re spoken.

Message envelope

Every stream message follows the same top-level structure:

{
  "id": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
  "api_version": "websocket/v1",
  "kind": "<stream-type>",
  "data": {
    "action": "created",
    "id": "<record-id>",
    "timestamp": "2024-10-08T10:00:00Z",
    "content": { ... }
  }
}

Field	Description
id	Unique message ID — use this to deduplicate on reconnect
api_version	Protocol version of the message
kind	Identifies which stream the message came from
data.action	One of created, updated, or deleted
data.content	Stream-specific payload

Reference pages

Authentication

How to obtain and use your API token.

Supported Actions

ping and replay commands you can send on any stream.

Errors

Error codes and how to handle connection failures.