MetaTrader 4 vs MetaTrader 5: the real differences and which one to choose for an Expert Advisor

MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 are two separate platforms from the same company, MetaQuotes, and they aren’t compatible with each other: an Expert Advisor built for one won’t run on the other, and an MT4 account won’t work in MT5. If you’re starting out with a trading robot today, MT5 is the option with the longer runway: its Strategy Tester simulates the market more faithfully, and it’s the platform MetaQuotes is backing. MT4 only makes sense if your robot exists solely for MT4 or your broker offers nothing else.

What are MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, and who makes them?

Both are trading platforms: the program you install on your computer or phone to view charts, place orders and connect to your broker account. They’re developed by MetaQuotes, a software company that isn’t a broker and doesn’t hold anyone’s money: it licenses the platform to brokers, who then give it to you for free.

MetaTrader 4 (MT4) came out in 2005 and became the standard for retail forex and CFD trading. MetaTrader 5 (MT5) arrived in 2010. Despite the higher number, it isn’t an upgrade of MT4: it’s a new program, with a different architecture, a different programming language and a different way of recording trades. That’s why the two coexist—you can’t “upgrade” MT4 to MT5. If you’re still not sure what a trading robot is, start with what an Expert Advisor is.

MT4 vs MT5: the key differences at a glance

Here’s the short version, limited to what actually matters if you use a robot. Each point is explained below.

If you only remember one row, make it the compatibility one: in practice, the robot you plan to use decides the platform.

MQL4 vs MQL5: why an MT4 robot won’t run on MT5

An Expert Advisor is a program written in each platform’s own language: MQL4 on MetaTrader 4 and MQL5 on MetaTrader 5. The developer writes the source code (.mq4 or .mq5) and compiles it—that is, turns it into an executable file (.ex4 or .ex5). That executable is usually what you receive when you buy or rent a robot.

Here’s the catch for beginners: an .ex4 file won’t run on MT5, and an .ex5 file won’t run on MT4. There’s no official converter, and renaming the extension doesn’t help: on the wrong platform, the robot simply doesn’t show up. Each platform even has its own data folder: MT4 robots go in MQL4 ▸ Experts and MT5 robots in MQL5 ▸ Experts. If you have an .ex4 file and an MT5 account, there’s no shortcut: you need the developer to offer an MT5 version.

Having the source code isn’t enough either. The two languages look alike, but the way a robot sends orders, checks positions or reads an indicator is completely different: in MQL5, orders, deals and positions are separate things. Moving a robot from MT4 to MT5 means rewriting much of the code and testing it again from scratch, because a small mistake in order handling can change how it behaves. If a developer offers both versions, treat them as two different programs and ask for the results of each one.

MT4 vs MT5 Strategy Tester: the difference that matters most in a backtest

The Strategy Tester runs a robot on past data to see how it would have behaved. It’s where every backtest starts, and it’s where MT5 pulls furthest ahead of MT4.

Generated ticks vs real ticks

A tick is each price update your broker sends, and a single one-hour gold candle can contain thousands of them. In MT4, the tester’s most detailed mode doesn’t use those ticks: it rebuilds them from one-minute bars, guessing how price moved inside each bar, and applies a fixed spread for the whole test. MT5 added a real ticks mode (“Every tick based on real ticks”) that replays the ticks your broker recorded, variable spread included.

Why does it matter? Picture a trade with the stop on one side and the target on the other, and a candle that touches both levels. With generated ticks, the tester has to guess which level was hit first; with real ticks, it knows. And gold’s spread widens when liquidity is thin or news hits: with a fixed spread, a system can look cheaper to trade than it really is.

Faster, and across multiple symbols

MT4’s tester uses a single processor core and one symbol at a time. MT5’s is multi-threaded: it spreads the work across all your cores, tests multi-symbol strategies, and lets you add agents from other computers on your network—or from MetaQuotes’ paid cloud, the MQL5 Cloud Network—to speed up optimizations.

A word of caution: testing more combinations in less time doesn’t make a system any better, and over-optimizing is the fast track to overfitting. With or without real ticks, a backtest is still a simulation; to read one with a critical eye, see our guide to the Strategy Tester report.

Timeframes, order types and account modes

There are more technical differences, although they matter less than many comparisons suggest.

Timeframes and pending orders

MT4 offers 9 timeframes: 1, 5, 15 and 30 minutes; 1 and 4 hours; daily, weekly and monthly. MT5 offers 21, adding in-between ones such as 2, 10 or 20 minutes and 2, 6 or 8 hours. That only matters if your strategy uses one of the new ones; the classics, like H1, are on both. For pending orders, MT4 has four (Buy Limit, Sell Limit, Buy Stop and Sell Stop) and MT5 adds Buy Stop Limit and Sell Stop Limit: when price reaches one level, a limit order is placed at another.

Netting vs hedging

An MT5 account can run in netting or hedging mode. With netting there’s only one position per symbol: if you’re long 0.10 lots of gold and sell 0.05, you don’t open a new trade—you reduce the one you had. With hedging, each trade lives on its own, even in opposite directions, just like in MT4. An EA designed for hedging can behave unexpectedly on a netting account, where your manual trades and the robot’s get merged into a single position. The mode usually appears in MT5’s title bar (“Hedge” or “Netting”); if your robot’s developer asks for a specific one, stick to it.

Depth of Market, economic calendar and 64-bit

MT5 has a built-in Depth of Market (how useful it is depends on what your broker publishes) and its own economic calendar (the Calendar tab in the Toolbox); with MT4, you have to look one up elsewhere. We cover how to read it, and which releases move gold, in our guide to the economic calendar for gold. It’s also a 64-bit application, versus MT4’s 32-bit: it makes better use of memory and the processor, something you’ll notice in long backtests.

One practical detail: the button that lets robots trade is called AutoTrading in MT4 and Algo Trading in recent versions of MT5. AUREUM’s installation guide uses it as a pause button: with it off, the robot doesn’t trade, open trades keep their stop and target on the broker’s server, and the automatic Friday close doesn’t run.

Brokers, Mac support and accounts: where MT4 and MT5 stand today

In 2018, according to industry reports at the time, MetaQuotes stopped granting MT4 licenses to new brokers, and it now focuses its development on MT5. That doesn’t mean MT4 is going away: many brokers that already had a license still offer it.

AUREUM’s installation guide stresses one detail: many brokers only advertise MetaTrader 4, and MT4 won’t work for AUREUM. When you open your account, explicitly choose “MetaTrader 5” or “MT5.” For everything else to look for, see our guide on how to choose a broker.

If you use a Mac

MT5 has an official macOS installer on metatrader5.com (Download → macOS). According to AUREUM’s installation guide, it requires macOS 10.15.7 or later and runs on both Apple Silicon (M1 and later) and Intel Macs; many brokers also offer their own MT5 installer for Mac, which is usually the easiest route. If MT5 gives you trouble on your Mac, the guide suggests a plan B: a Windows VPS, where the platform runs in the cloud 24/5 without depending on your computer.

How to tell whether your account is MetaTrader 4 or MetaTrader 5

If you opened your account a while ago, there are several clues:

• Your broker’s welcome email. It includes your account number, password and server name, and it almost always states the platform.
• The server name. Many brokers include “MT4” or “MT5” in it, though not all of them do.
• Your client portal. The broker’s website usually lists your accounts along with their platform and type.
• The platform you have installed. Under File → Open Data Folder you’ll see either an MQL4 or an MQL5 folder. On a Mac, AUREUM’s installation guide explains where to look: inside Library, in a folder whose name starts with net.metaquotes.wine.; if there isn’t one, you may not have MT5 installed, or you may have installed MT4 by mistake.

And one rule that will save you headaches: an MT4 account won’t work in MT5. They run on different servers: with those login details, MT5 won’t find the server or will tell you the account is invalid. The fix is to open an MT5 account, which many brokers let you do from the client portal. Do it before you activate a robot licensed per account: with AUREUM, the license is tied to the MT5 account number it first runs on.

MT4 or MT5 for an Expert Advisor: which one should you choose?

Sticking with MT4 makes sense in two cases: the robot you want to use only exists for MT4 and its developer has no MT5 version, or your broker only offers MT4 and you have strong reasons to stay with it. Even then, think about the medium term: according to 2018 reports, MetaQuotes stopped selling it to new brokers, and its development now focuses on MT5.

MT5 is the better choice in almost every other case:

• You’re starting from scratch and have nothing to migrate.
• You want more faithful backtests, with real ticks and variable spreads.
• You want the economic calendar and Depth of Market inside the platform itself.
• The robot you’re interested in is built for MT5.

That last point is AUREUM’s case: it only runs on MetaTrader 5. It’s delivered as an .ex5 file and written in MQL5. The figures on our home page come from the MT5 Strategy Tester on gold’s price history from 2020 to 2026, with real spreads—a profit factor of 1.49 and a maximum drawdown of 21.84%, for example—and they’re a simulation, not a live account. If you’ve already made up your mind, the steps are in how to install an Expert Advisor in MetaTrader 5.