MetaTrader 4 vs MetaTrader 5: What Is Actually Different?

MT4 ships with nine timeframes, from one minute up to one month. MT5 ships with 21, adding finer intraday steps such as 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12 and 20 minutes, plus 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8-hour charts. For most strategies built around the standard 5-minute, 15-minute, 1-hour and 4-hour charts this makes no practical difference, but if your entry logic depends on a less common interval, MT5 gives you more native options rather than requiring a custom indicator to approximate one.

MT5's charting engine also supports more simultaneous timeframes open at once and slightly faster rendering on accounts with heavy indicator loads, though this becomes noticeable mainly when running several EAs across many charts.

MT4 offers four pending order types: buy limit, sell limit, buy stop, sell stop. MT5 adds two more — buy stop limit and sell stop limit — which place a limit order only once price first reaches a trigger level, giving finer control over entries around breakout levels without needing to sit at the screen.

MT5 also includes a depth of market (DOM) window showing the order book for instruments where the broker provides that data, along with a wider range of order-filling policies (fill or kill, immediate or cancel, return). MT4 does not expose an order book at all. Neither feature changes your drawdown limits or trading rules on a funded account, but DOM can be useful context for traders who watch order flow around key levels.

This is where the two platforms diverge most. MT4's strategy tester runs single-threaded and single-currency backtests, which is adequate for testing one EA on one instrument but slow for anything larger. MT5's tester supports multi-threaded optimisation, tests across multiple instruments and timeframes within a single run, and includes an agent-based cloud testing option through MetaQuotes' network for faster optimisation.

If backtesting and optimising expert advisors is a core part of your process, MT5 will save you real time. If you mostly trade manually and only occasionally check an idea historically, the difference is unlikely to matter.

MT4 uses MQL4 for indicators and expert advisors; MT5 uses MQL5, a more object-oriented language closer to C++ with more built-in functions for statistics and trade management. Code is not directly portable between the two, so an EA written for one platform needs to be rewritten, not just copied over, to run on the other.

MT4 accounts are hedging by default — you can hold a long and a short position on the same instrument simultaneously. MT5 supports both hedging and netting account modes depending on how the broker configures it. This affects how positions are reported in your terminal but has no bearing on how MixFunded calculates drawdown, which is based on account equity regardless of how individual positions are structured.

Neither platform is objectively better; they suit different habits. Traders who rely on a large library of older, freely available MQL4 indicators and EAs, or who simply learned on MT4 years ago, often stay with it because switching has a real cost in re-learning and rewriting code. Traders starting fresh, running multiple instruments through one EA, or doing heavy optimisation work generally find MT5 more capable out of the box.

On a MixFunded account the rules — drawdown limits, profit targets, payout structure — are identical regardless of which platform you choose. Pick the one whose tools match your actual workflow rather than the one with the newer version number.