Read the drawdown column first
If you take one thing from this page: drawdown type matters more than account size, profit target, or payout split. It is the difference between a rule you can plan around and a rule that moves while you trade.
- Static. The breach level sits at a fixed amount below your starting balance and does not move. Your risk budget is knowable on day one and stays knowable. Easiest to size against.
- End-of-day trailing. The breach level follows your highest closing balance upward and never comes back down. Intraday dips are forgiven. You can be deep underwater at noon and fine at the close.
- Intraday trailing. The breach level follows your peak equity including unrealised gains, in real time. An open trade that goes your way and then reverses can end the account without you ever closing a losing position.
The same strategy can pass on one and die on another with nothing changed. This is why the Test-to-PRO transition catches so many people at Take Profit Trader: the Test forgives intraday drawdown and the funded account does not.
Apex vs Topstep
Both futures-only, both trailing, and the honest summary is that they suit opposite temperaments.
Topstep runs the tighter daily loss limit. That is a constraint, but constraints are protective — the daily wall stops a bad morning turning into a dead account. It fits a trader who takes few, planned trades and wants the platform to enforce discipline they might not enforce themselves.
Apex gives more daily room and runs several products whose trail mechanics differ meaningfully. That flexibility rewards traders who already know their own risk profile and punishes those who do not read which product they bought. The most common Apex surprise is not the daily number at all — it is discovering the trail was intraday rather than end-of-day.
If you are choosing between them on the numbers alone, you are choosing on the wrong axis. Choose on whether you want a hard daily wall.
Take Profit Trader vs everyone else
TPT's headline feature is the absence of a daily loss rule, and it is genuinely different — but not in the direction the marketing implies. No daily limit does not mean more room. It means no wall. Every other firm here will stop you out of the day and let you come back tomorrow with the account alive. TPT will let you keep going until the trailing drawdown is gone.
The other structural quirk is that TPT's drawdown does not scale with account size. A 25k gives you 6% of room; a 150k gives you 3%. Scaling up buys you half the proportional cushion while the profit target scales linearly at 6% of account. That trade-off is invisible in every comparison table that just lists "trailing drawdown" and moves on.
The column almost nobody publishes
Contract caps. Futures firms limit maximum position size per account, and exceeding the cap breaches the account on its own — the dollar risk is irrelevant. Your broker's margin will happily let you take 40 contracts on an account capped at 6.
This is the most avoidable way to lose an evaluation, and it is barely mentioned anywhere. The calculator on this site enforces the cap for firms where we have confirmed the figure, and tells you when it has floored your size.
Why some rows say "not confirmed"
Because they have not been checked against the firm's own published rules, and stating a number we have not verified would be worse than stating none. Prop firm rules change without notice — daily limits move, drawdown types get switched, consistency rules appear overnight. Review sites that scraped a number in 2024 are still confidently displaying it.
Rows are promoted to verified as each firm's live rules are read directly, with the date recorded on that firm's page. If you want the gaps closed in a particular order, the fastest way to tell us is to ask.