MT4 vs MT5 who is the winner?
For me, I have traded on both MT4 & MT5 and I think MT5 is a clear winner based on my needs.
1. MT5 has more time frames than MT4: I like to view the market through different moments in time and MT5 offers a higher number of timeframes than MT4. For example on the Hour time frame, MT5 has 1,2,3,4,6,8,12 hours while MT4 has just 1 & 4 hours only.
On the minute time frame, MT5 has 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20 & 30 minutes while MT4 has just 1,5,15 & 30 minutes.
2. Wider Range of Instruments to Trade: most brokers don't offer stock, options & futures CFDs on MT4 but they all offer them on MT5.
3. MT5 comes with an inbuilt Economic Calendar: this is another feature I appreciate on MT5 because I can easily check when economic data will be released without having to leave the trading environment. Some brokers like Tickmill go a step further to insert economic calendar news release dates on the charts so you don't forget an important news event is coming.
MT5 takes the crown for me, because it has more pending order types.
Placing orders in advance is a very important part of my trading strategy so while MT4 only offers 4 pending orders types, MT5 offers 6 pending order types and this makes a whole lot of difference.
While both MT4 & MT5 have Buy Limit, Sell Limit, Buy Stop & Sell Stop orders, MT5 was equipped with two additional pending orders: Buy Stop Limit, & Sell Stop Limit.
MT5 takes the crown for me, because it has more pending order types.
Placing orders in advance is a very important part of my trading strategy so while MT4 only offers 4 pending orders types, MT5 offers 6 pending order types and this makes a whole lot of difference.
While both MT4 & MT5 have Buy Limit, Sell Limit, Buy Stop & Sell Stop orders, MT5 was equipped with two additional pending orders: Buy Stop Limit, & Sell Stop Limit.
MT4 cannot show you Trade History directly on the charts while MT5 can, and this is a big disadvantage of MT4. So, MT5 is my clear winner.
Purely from the point of view of charting library, both MT4 & MT5 in my opinion are not as good as Tradingview.
I use the broker's platform (it can be anything, MT4 or MT5 or proprietary) for placing orders only, not for charting.
But if you have to make a direct comparison between MT4 & MT5:
a. You can find higher number of instruments on a broker's MT5 platform like stock CFDs. But it necessarily does not make it better.
b. One good thing about MT5 is that you can code EAs & indicators in Python, while you have to write it in MQL4 in MT4.
It is much easier to write your own scripts in MT5 & run it on a server, compared to MT4. Not that you cannot do it on MT4, but it's just much easier to do it in Python, there are more libraries & help compared to MQL4.