Disclosure: Deploy Finance publishes this page and offers a competing product that appears in it.
Not financial advice. Crypto, DeFi and perpetual-futures strategies can lose money, including your whole deposit. Yields are variable, and past or backtested results do not predict future returns. Read the risk disclosure.
Freqtrade and Hummingbot are free, open-source trading frameworks. You write or configure the strategy, run the software on your own machine or server, and connect it to exchanges with your own API keys. Deploy Finance is the opposite end of the scale: two agents with defined strategies that run for you from a wallet you own.
All three can trade on Hyperliquid. The asymmetry is the work. With Freqtrade or Hummingbot you own the strategy, the code, the server, and the uptime. With Deploy you choose an agent and an allocation, and the operation is handled for you.
Compare Freqtrade, Hummingbot, and Deploy Finance
| Freqtrade | Hummingbot | Deploy Finance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Open-source Python trading bot | Open-source framework for market making and custom strategies (Apache 2.0) | Curated autonomous agents |
| Who writes the strategy | You, in Python with pandas | You, from templates or custom code | Deploy |
| Built for | Strategy research: backtesting, hyperopt, FreqAI machine learning | Market making and arbitrage across CEXs and DEXs | Funding carry and directional perps without configuration |
| Venues | Major CEXs plus Hyperliquid, spot and futures | 300+ connectors, including Hyperliquid and Solana DEXs | Hyperliquid |
| Who runs it | You, on your own hardware or VPS (Docker recommended) | You, via CLI, API server, or its Condor AI harness | Deploy |
| Custody | Your exchange accounts or wallet, through keys you configure | Your exchange accounts or wallet, through keys you configure | Your self-custodial wallet; session key that can trade but not withdraw |
| Cost | Free software; you pay for hosting | Free software; you pay for hosting | No subscription or management fee; gas and exchange trade fees apply |
What are Freqtrade and Hummingbot?
Freqtrade
Freqtrade is a free, open-source crypto trading bot written in Python. You write strategies with pandas, test them on downloaded history, and tune their parameters with hyperopt. FreqAI adds machine-learning models. You control the bot through Telegram or a web UI and can run it in dry-run mode with simulated money before going live. It supports spot on exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, Kraken, OKX, and Hyperliquid, and futures on several of them, including Hyperliquid.
Its own documentation is blunt: the software is for educational purposes, and you use it at your own risk. It ships no strategy you should trust out of the box.
Hummingbot
Hummingbot is the open-source framework market makers use, maintained by the Hummingbot Foundation under an Apache 2.0 license. It connects to more than 300 venues, including Binance, OKX, Bitget, Gate, KuCoin, Hyperliquid, and Solana DEXs such as Orca and Meteora. You run it through a command-line client, an API server, or Condor, an AI harness. Market making is its core, and its strategy templates also cover arbitrage, including funding-rate arbitrage.
Both frameworks give you complete control and complete responsibility. You manage API keys, servers, monitoring, updates, and every decision about risk.
Deploy Finance: the strategy and the operation, handled
Deploy Finance runs two live agents, both funded and settled in USDC.
- Income: Funding Rates holds roughly 75% of capital as the spot asset and uses 25% to back a 3x perpetual short of matching notional on Hyperliquid. It collects funding and rebalances automatically, closing positions rather than paying when funding turns negative. This is the trade a Hummingbot funding-arbitrage template would have you configure and supervise.
- Superstar takes long or short positions on perpetual markets under a strategy Deploy defines and manages.
You sign in with email or Google, which creates a self-custodial wallet on Privy's embedded-wallet infrastructure. You fund it with USDC, choose an agent, and approve a session key that can trade but cannot transfer or withdraw. There is no server to run, no code to maintain, and no exchange API key to scope.
The trade-off is control. Freqtrade and Hummingbot can run any logic on almost any venue. Deploy runs two strategies on one venue. If you have a strategy and the skills to operate it, an open-source framework is the more flexible tool.
When should you choose Deploy Finance, Freqtrade, or Hummingbot?
Choose Deploy Finance when:
- You want a funding or directional strategy running without writing or hosting anything.
- You want custody in your own wallet without managing exchange API keys.
- You do not want to monitor a server or patch software to keep trading.
Choose Freqtrade when:
- You write Python and want to research, backtest, and optimize your own strategies.
- You want machine-learning models in the loop through FreqAI.
Choose Hummingbot when:
- You want to make markets or run arbitrage across many CEXs and DEXs.
- You want an open-source, foundation-maintained framework you can extend.
Toolkit or service: Freqtrade and Hummingbot give you free software to run your own strategy. Deploy Finance runs a defined strategy for you. No integration between the products is implied.
Learn more
- Deploy Finance vs Crypto Trading Bots
- Best open-source crypto trading bots
- Funding-rate arbitrage explained
- Income: Funding Rates overview
- Freqtrade documentation
- Hummingbot
Start with Deploy Finance
Create a self-custodial Deploy Finance wallet and review the live agents.