I think it is a question of what you use them for. RT is a great package for stock trading and pretty stable although certainly not problem free. QCharts is great for a multimonitor setup if you like to watch a lot of stuff like tick and trin because the cursor tracks on all charts. For me that is a huge feature and makes QCharts a great package for daytrading the e-mini's. QCharts has issues from time to time, although it is definitely more reliable than it used to be. I do agree with metoxx's observation though. Cost really should not be a primary factor.
I see it all the time. "Where can I get free intraday charts with my IB data . . . . " They don't think twice about risking 50-100k out in the market for a daytrade yet they won't spend the lousy 100-200 a month for reliable data. They want it for free. This is a business and it requires a little overhead.
I have tried real tick but prefer qcharts. Realtick seems very old compared with qcharts. Qcharts is very easy to scale charts and generally easier to use but the qcharts option data is very slow. Real tick requires more bandwidth than qcharts. I use ISDN in London and had problems with real tick missing data.
Your are not alone with this problem. Even with a T5 the problem is there, bad system! The worse is that many fans of RT don't have this feeling until you put a more robust system aside it and that you show how crap is the data feed of RT. Need a big redesign for update RT!
Free data, where did you guys see this? Not sure why you guys are saying free data......... Reason I am looking at qcharts is due to numerous other programs that run off its data..........