Open source retail trading platform
Install
Load full exchange on your computer to test it out.
About
Plxtra is a complete trading platform focused on retail security exchanges or local retail brokerage operations. It consists of all the components you would expect in such a platform such as: registry, matching engine, order management, vetting, market data, terminals, session management etc. It is engineered for the highly competitive environment of retail trading.
With its many extensibility points and a comprehensive API, Plxtra is an ideal platform for exchange operators or brokerage who can affordably customise it to develop a great a trading experience for their retail clients/traders, professional advisors and listed companies.
History
Originally created by Paritech/Motif Markets as a closed source product to serve brokers and exchanges in Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia. Was open sourced in 2025
Why open source?
Most trading platform software nowadays is closed source. This has the advantage that vendors can better exploit their intellectual property and have full control over its development to best align it with the market’s and their customers’ needs.
However when customer and/or regulatory expectations increase while margins decrease, then the open source model of software development becomes more attractive. The effort to develop the core platform is shared, but vendors can differentiate and compete by extending and customising the core. In addition, the software skills to develop the core can be quite different to customising. Vendors can better focus their software development skill resourcing on customisation.
The complexity of developing trading platforms is already affecting the ability of startups and small organisations to afford these platforms from closed source vendors. This problem also has a large impact on market development by national security exchanges. They cannot roll out new features and capabilities unless all their brokers, data distributors and other connected organisations update their systems to support the new features. So the exchanges are limited in market development by the capability and profitability of their connected organisations’ vendors.
For the above reasons, the use of open source trading platforms is likely to grow substantially.
Adapting to your environment
In order to use Plxtra, you need to adapt it to your environment. This includes integrating it to your administration systems such as CRM, identity and monitoring. In addition, you may need to configure or develop specific extensions. For example, if used as a brokerage trading platform, you may also need to configure or develop feeds to connected exchanges.