Broker API Comparison: Order Update Notifications

When an order fills, you want to know immediately — not on the next check. This matters most for copy trading, where a delay on the master account delays every child account behind it.

Broker APIs offer up to three ways to find out:

Method	How it works	Speed
Postback (webhook)	The broker calls a web address you registered, the moment something happens	Fastest
Order-update stream	You hold a live connection open and the broker pushes events down it	Fastest
Polling	You ask for the order book again and compare	Slowest

Polling always works — every broker lets you read your order book. The question is whether you are limited to it.

✅ provided · ⚠️ provided with a limitation · ❌ not provided · — not stated in the documentation

How each broker API pushes order updates

Broker	Postback	Order stream	Stream connection	Also streams positions
AliceBlue	✅	✅	Separate	❌
Upstox	✅	✅	Separate	✅
Fyers	✅	✅	Separate	✅
Dhan	✅	✅	Separate	❌
Zerodha	✅	✅	Shared with prices	❌
Motilal	✅	✅	Shared with prices	❌
Angel One	✅	✅	Separate	❌
Shared platform — Kambala	⚠️	✅	Shared with prices	✅
Shared platform — Symphony XTS	❌	✅	Separate	✅
Kotak	❌	✅	—	❌
Nuvama	❌	✅	Shared with prices	❌
Groww	❌	✅	Shared with prices	✅
5paisa	❌	⚠️	Shared with prices	❌
IIFL	❌	✅	Separate	❌
Sharekhan	✅	❌	—	—
SAS Online (Stocko)	❌	❌	—	—
Mastertrust	❌	❌	—	—
Choice	❌	❌	—	—

The brokers with the best coverage

AliceBlue, Upstox, Fyers and Dhan offer both methods. You can register a web address and hold a stream open, which gives you a fallback if one path fails. AliceBlue allows up to five different addresses for one account.

Upstox goes furthest of all. Its stream can carry not just order events but position and holding updates too, so your whole portfolio view stays current without asking for it. Only Fyers, Groww, the Kambala platform and Symphony XTS offer anything similar.

Shared or separate connection

This sounds like a technical detail but has a real consequence.

Where the order stream is shared with the price feed — Zerodha, Motilal, Nuvama, Groww, 5paisa and Kambala — one connection carries both. That is simpler, but a problem with the connection takes out prices and order updates together.

Where it is separate — Upstox, Fyers, Dhan, Angel One, AliceBlue and Symphony XTS — the two are independent, so a price feed problem does not blind you to your own fills. Separate connections often need their own login step and their own keep-alive, and on Symphony XTS the two even need different credentials.

On the Kambala platform the order stream needs no subscription at all — order updates begin arriving the moment you connect, unlike prices, which you must ask for.

The brokers that make you wait

Three brokers offer no push method at all — SAS Online, Mastertrust and Choice. No webhook, no order stream. Asking for the order book again is the only way to learn of a fill, which makes these the slowest of the group. If you plan to run a master account for copy trading, these are the three to avoid for that role.

Sharekhan is the reverse of most. It offers a postback but no order stream — its streaming connection carries prices only.

Kotak offers a stream but publishes almost nothing about it — no field list, and no statement of whether it shares the price connection.

Two traps worth knowing

5paisa order updates only arrive on the correct server. Its service runs across several servers, and which one you must connect to is carried inside your login token. Connect to the wrong one and order updates silently never arrive — no error, just nothing. Its price feed has no such restriction, so a working price feed is no proof the order feed is working.

Postback reliability varies more than the table suggests. Only Zerodha publishes a way to verify that a postback genuinely came from the broker rather than someone else. Fyers blacklists your address for thirty minutes if it fails to respond properly, so a brief outage on your side stops updates well beyond the outage. Most brokers document no retry policy at all, which means a missed postback is simply missed.

On the Kambala platform, postback support depends on your broker. Only one broker on that platform offers it, even though the underlying platform is otherwise identical across all of them.

What this means for you

You do not have to build any of this. AutoTrader Web uses the fastest channel each broker offers and falls back to checking the order book where a broker offers nothing faster. Your orders and positions stay current either way — the difference is how quickly.

Where it shows up most is copy trading, because the child orders cannot go out until the master’s fill is known. A broker with a push channel will replicate noticeably faster than one that has to be asked. If speed of replication matters to you, this page is the one to read before choosing a master account’s broker.

Not every broker’s push channel is switched on for every account — some are used only where they add value, and a broker can refuse the connection on certain account types. When that happens the system falls back to checking the order book, and everything continues to work.

Related help

• Order placement comparison
• Market data comparison
• All six areas — the comparison hub
• Copy trading