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Kite charts (Zerodha's web and mobile charting platform)

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Kite charts is the charting subsystem inside Zerodha’s Kite trading platform, available on the kite.zerodha.com browser terminal and the Kite mobile applications for Android and iOS. It is the principal price-action visualisation surface for clients of Zerodha , serving equities and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange , equity derivatives on NSE and BSE, currency derivatives, commodity derivatives on MCX and NCDEX, and government securities. Kite charts is built around two interchangeable rendering engines, ChartIQ and TradingView, both licensed from third-party vendors and integrated into Kite’s data plumbing.

The charting subsystem evolved from the simpler chart panels of Zerodha’s earlier desktop platforms (Zerodha Trader on NEST, and later Pi ) into a fully browser-native experience as part of the Kite product launch in 2015 and the Kite 3 rewrite in 2017. The introduction of TradingView as a secondary engine in 2019 broadened the charting feature set, and the migration to TradingView v2 in 2024 introduced the Trade From Charts (TFC) workflow, which allows order placement directly from the chart canvas alongside the established marketwatch order entry. ChartIQ remains the default engine for new Kite users on most regional rollouts, with TradingView selectable on a per-user basis.

Kite charts is positioned by Zerodha as a free, no-installation-required alternative to standalone charting software such as Amibroker, MetaTrader, MotiveWave, and TradingView’s own subscription tiers, while the Kite Connect API exposes historical chart data programmatically for clients who require it in third-party tools or in custom algorithmic workflows. The charting environment is closely integrated with the Kite order window: an indicator-triggered or pattern-triggered trade can be initiated without leaving the chart, and the resulting order is sent to the same Kite order management system used by the marketwatch and basket workflows.

History and engine architecture

From NEST chart panels to ChartIQ on Kite

The first generation of charting available to Zerodha clients was the chart panel embedded inside the NEST terminal, branded as Zerodha Trader between 2010 and 2015. NEST chart panels supported standard candlestick and line views with a modest indicator library and were sufficient for retail traders of that era but did not match the experience of dedicated charting packages.

When Zerodha launched Pi , its proprietary Windows-only desktop trading application, in 2014, the company licensed the ChartIQ HTML5 charting library and embedded it into Pi’s interface. The licensing decision reflected ChartIQ’s positioning as the dominant white-label charting vendor for financial-services applications in the United States and Europe at that time. The same ChartIQ engine was carried into Kite when Kite launched as a browser-first replacement for both NEST-based and Pi-based terminals in 2015. ChartIQ has remained continuously available on Kite charts ever since.

TradingView introduction in 2019

In 2019 Zerodha announced the addition of TradingView’s charting engine as an optional second rendering surface inside Kite. The integration was the result of a licensing agreement with TradingView (then a Cyprus-based and now British Virgin Islands-incorporated company) and was rolled out behind a per-user toggle on Kite web. The TradingView engine brought a different set of indicators (notably TradingView’s proprietary indicator library), a different drawing-tool palette, and a different default visual style that many retail traders recognised from TradingView’s own subscription product. The two engines coexisted from 2019 onward, with no plans announced to discontinue ChartIQ.

The TradingView integration was upgraded to TradingView v2 in 2024, which moved Kite onto the newer Charting Library version maintained by TradingView and introduced the Trade From Charts (TFC) order placement flow directly from the chart canvas. The v2 upgrade also reset some saved layouts and drawings for users who had pinned configurations on the older v1 engine, a transition that Zerodha documented in support announcements during the rollout.

Why two engines

The decision to maintain two charting engines reflects three practical considerations:

  • Indicator library breadth: ChartIQ and TradingView each ship a distinct indicator set that overlaps in core indicators (moving averages, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands) but diverges in specialised ones. Traders familiar with one engine’s specific implementation prefer to retain it.
  • Visual familiarity: TradingView’s appearance is recognisable from the standalone TradingView product, which is widely used in Indian retail trading communities. ChartIQ has a distinct visual signature that long-time Kite users prefer.
  • Vendor risk diversification: maintaining two licensed engines reduces the single-vendor risk that would arise from depending entirely on one charting library, particularly given the regulatory and commercial uncertainties around foreign-incorporated financial technology vendors operating in the Indian market.

The engine choice is per-user, persists across logins, and can be toggled inside Kite’s chart settings. Both engines share the same Kite data feed (real-time WebSocket tick stream and historical REST endpoints) so the price data and indicator outputs are identical across engines; only the rendering layer differs.

Where Kite charts is available

Kite web (kite.zerodha.com)

The browser terminal is the primary surface for Kite charts. Opening a scrip from a Kite marketwatch and selecting Chart opens a full-page chart canvas with the configured engine. Kite web supports multiple chart tabs (up to a documented limit), full-screen view, side-by-side charts for relative-performance comparison, and the multi-chart layout for monitoring several instruments simultaneously. The web terminal exposes the broadest feature surface and is the recommended environment for active intraday and swing traders.

Kite mobile apps

The Kite mobile applications for Android and iOS include a chart view that supports a substantial subset of the web charting features. Both ChartIQ and TradingView are available on mobile, with engine selection mirrored from the web terminal. Mobile charts support indicator overlays, drawing tools, and intraday timeframes; the Trade From Charts order placement flow is available on mobile as well, with a touch-optimised order ticket. Some advanced features (such as saving and loading multiple chart layouts under different names) are present but with a simplified interaction model compared to web.

Kite Tablet and embedded surfaces

The Kite tablet experience runs the same browser-based chart engine and is functionally similar to Kite web. Charts also appear in selected partner surfaces that consume Kite’s chart embed (notably for educational content on Varsity ), but in those embedded contexts the chart is read-only and does not provide the Trade From Charts flow.

Engine selection and switching

Default engine

For most Kite users, ChartIQ is the default charting engine. The default was established in 2015 when ChartIQ was the sole engine and has been retained across product upgrades. New Kite users entering through the standard onboarding flow see ChartIQ when they open a chart for the first time.

Switching to TradingView

The engine toggle is in Kite’s chart settings panel. The toggle is per-user and persists across logins and sessions on the same Kite account. Switching engines does not delete saved drawings or layouts on the original engine, but the saved configurations on one engine are not portable to the other: TradingView and ChartIQ store their layout state independently, so a saved layout on ChartIQ will not appear on TradingView even after switching.

Some Kite users keep ChartIQ as the default for routine trading and switch to TradingView for specific use cases (such as multi-pane studies that TradingView renders more cleanly, or specific TradingView-only indicators).

Trade From Charts (TFC)

Both engines support Trade From Charts order placement, which lets a user click on a price level on the chart canvas and open a Kite order ticket pre-populated with the clicked price as the limit price. The feature reduces the time between identifying a trade level and submitting an order. TFC respects all the standard order types (Limit, Market, SL, SL-M) and order codes (CNC, MIS, NRML, CO) available on the Kite order window.

The TFC implementation on TradingView v2 (post-2024) is fully featured and is the engine most commonly cited in Zerodha’s marketing materials when describing chart-based trading. On ChartIQ, the TFC flow is implemented through a context menu rather than a direct-click handler.

Instruments and segment coverage

Kite charts supports every tradeable instrument visible in a Kite marketwatch:

  • Equities and ETFs on NSE and BSE: cash market scrips, exchange-traded funds, REITs, InvITs.
  • Equity index derivatives: Nifty 50, Bank Nifty, Fin Nifty, Midcap Nifty, Nifty Next 50, Sensex futures and options, and other listed indices on NSE and BSE.
  • Stock futures and options: monthly contracts in the equity F&O universe, including the current and the next two expiries where exchange-listed.
  • Currency derivatives: USDINR, EURINR, GBPINR, JPYINR futures and options on NSE and BSE.
  • Commodity derivatives: gold, silver, crude oil, natural gas, copper, zinc, aluminium, lead, nickel, and the bullion-mini and crude-oil-mini contracts on MCX, plus the agri-commodity suite on NCDEX and the energy futures contracts.
  • Government securities and bonds: T-bills, dated G-secs, state development loans (SDLs), and corporate bonds listed on the Zerodha bonds platform are chartable where exchange-traded price data exists.

Charts are not available for mutual fund schemes traded via Coin , since open-ended mutual fund NAVs are daily-disclosed values rather than intraday tick-stream data and are visualised in the Coin app’s own scheme detail pages rather than in Kite’s chart canvas.

Timeframes

Kite charts supports the standard interval ladder used across Indian retail charting:

  • Tick and minute-level intraday: 1 minute, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes (1 hour).
  • Sub-daily aggregations: 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours.
  • Day-level: daily, weekly, monthly.
  • Higher: quarterly and yearly aggregations are available on supported instruments for long-term historical review.

Historical data on intraday timeframes is available for several years on most instruments, with longer history available on daily and higher timeframes. Expired F&O contract data is retained as a separate historical series and is queryable; the precise retention period varies by exchange and is documented in Zerodha’s chart support pages.

A small known constraint is that the period from approximately midnight to the start of the trading session may show a single empty candle on some intraday charts; this is an artifact of the exchange’s session boundary rather than a charting defect.

Chart types

Kite supports the standard set of chart styles:

  • Candlestick: the default style for most Indian retail traders. Body colour by default is green for an up-candle and red for a down-candle; both colours are user-configurable in chart settings.
  • OHLC bars: open-high-low-close bar representation, popular among traders who prefer non-coloured visualisation.
  • Line: close-price line chart, useful for long-horizon trend identification and for comparisons against benchmarks.
  • Heikin Ashi: smoothed candle style derived from a recursive averaging formula; used by traders who want a less noisy trend visualisation.
  • Renko: fixed-brick representation that ignores time and renders price movement only. Useful for trend traders. Renko parameters (brick size or ATR brick) are user-configurable on both engines.
  • Point and figure: available on at least one engine, used by a niche of long-term traders.
  • Hollow candle: a variation of candlestick where the body is filled only for down-candles.

Switching between chart types is a per-chart setting and is preserved when the layout is saved.

Indicators

Kite charts ships approximately 100 indicators across both engines, with significant overlap. The indicator library is grouped into commonly-used categories:

  • Trend-following indicators: simple moving average (SMA), exponential moving average (EMA), weighted moving average, Hull moving average, Supertrend , Parabolic SAR.
  • Momentum oscillators: Relative Strength Index (RSI), Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD), stochastic oscillator, rate of change (ROC), Commodity Channel Index (CCI).
  • Volume-based indicators: on-balance volume (OBV), volume profile (where licensed), money flow index, accumulation/distribution.
  • Volatility indicators: Bollinger Bands, Average True Range (ATR), Keltner channels, standard deviation channels.
  • Pivot-based indicators: Camarilla pivots, Fibonacci pivots, Woodie pivots, classical pivots, central pivot range (CPR).
  • Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP): both the standard daily VWAP and the rolling-period VWAP variants.

Each indicator carries adjustable parameters (length, source, type) and styling controls (line colour, width, plot type). Multiple instances of the same indicator are permitted on the same chart pane, allowing layered analysis (for example, three RSI lines at different periods).

Indicator output is computed on the Kite server from the same OHLCV data stream that powers the chart rendering, so the indicator values are identical across the two engines for the same instrument, timeframe, and parameter set.

Drawing tools

Both engines provide a comprehensive drawing toolkit:

  • Trend lines, horizontal lines, vertical lines, and rays: the fundamental drawing primitives.
  • Channel tools: equidistant channels, regression channels, fork channels.
  • Fibonacci tools: retracement, extension, time zones, fan, arc, and spiral on the TradingView engine.
  • Geometric shapes: rectangles, ellipses, triangles, polygons.
  • Annotations: text labels, callouts, arrows, price labels.
  • Pattern tools: head-and-shoulders, double top/bottom, Elliott wave (TradingView), Gann fan and Gann box (TradingView).
  • Pitchfork: Andrews pitchfork and Schiff pitchfork.

Drawings are persistent and tied to a specific instrument on a specific timeframe. Saving a layout (see below) preserves drawings as part of the saved configuration.

Layouts and templates

Kite charts supports saving the active chart configuration as a named layout:

  • Save layout captures the active engine, timeframe, chart type, applied indicators (with their parameter sets), and drawings. The saved layout can be reloaded later on the same instrument or applied to a different instrument.
  • Templates are layout subsets that exclude drawings; useful for applying a fixed indicator stack to multiple instruments without carrying instrument-specific drawings across.
  • Apply to all quickly applies the current indicator configuration across all open chart tabs.

Saved layouts are stored against the Kite user account and are accessible across the user’s web and mobile sessions, though as noted earlier they are engine-specific (ChartIQ layouts are not visible on TradingView and vice versa).

Trade From Charts (TFC)

Trade From Charts is the order-placement workflow that lets a user submit an order without leaving the chart canvas:

  • Click or tap on the chart’s price level (TradingView v2) or use a context menu (ChartIQ) to open an order ticket pre-filled with the clicked level as the limit price for a Limit order.
  • Select buy or sell, order type (Limit, Market, SL, SL-M), and order product code (CNC, MIS, NRML, CO).
  • Submit. The order is routed through the same Kite order management infrastructure used for marketwatch orders, with the same risk-management checks and the same status updates in the order book.

TFC is particularly useful for technical traders who base entries on chart-level patterns, since it eliminates the eye-movement and click-path between the chart and the order window. The feature is available on both Kite web and the mobile apps.

Charts and the broader Kite ecosystem

Kite charts integrates with several adjacent surfaces:

  • Kite alerts : a chart-defined price level can be saved as a Kite alert that triggers notifications when the live price crosses the level.
  • Sentinel : more complex alert conditions involving indicators or multi-condition logic are configurable in Sentinel rather than in the chart itself.
  • Streak : chart-defined patterns and indicator combinations can be translated into algorithmic strategies in Streak for backtesting and live deployment, with Kite as the execution broker.
  • Sensibull : option chain and payoff diagrams are available in Sensibull (rather than Kite charts) for F&O strategy visualisation.
  • Tickertape : fundamental data, scorecards, and stock-comparison views complement Kite’s price-action charting.
  • Kite Connect : historical OHLCV data underlying the chart engine is exposed programmatically via the Kite Connect API to clients building custom analysis or strategy tooling.

Charts on the Kite Connect API

The same historical data series that powers Kite charts is exposed through the Kite Connect historical data API. Clients with a Kite Connect subscription (Kite Connect Personal or Kite Connect 3) can retrieve OHLCV data for a configured instrument across the available timeframe ladder, and stream live ticks through the Kite Ticker WebSocket. This allows programmatic clients to apply the same indicator logic outside the Kite chart UI, in libraries such as pandas (Python) or built-in TA libraries.

The Kite Connect historical data endpoint is rate-limited per the published Kite Connect rate limits, and access requires a paid Kite Connect subscription separate from the Kite trading platform itself.

Common chart-issue patterns

Kite chart users report a recurring set of issues, documented in Zerodha’s chart support articles:

  • Charting lag during high-volume sessions: extremely active scripts on volatile days can show a brief delay between live ticks and chart-candle updates. See how to fix Kite charting lag for the standard remedy.
  • Saved drawings disappear after refresh: typically a browser-cache or layout-not-saved issue. The fix is to explicitly save the layout via the save button rather than relying on auto-save.
  • OHLC differs from another platform: the cause is usually a difference in session boundary or aggregation policy. Kite uses the exchange’s actual tick stream and aggregates per the exchange’s defined session.
  • Indicator values look different across engines: typically because the two engines use slightly different default parameter values or smoothing methods for the same-named indicator. Confirm the parameter set on both engines.
  • ChartIQ vs TradingView feature-availability differences: some features (such as specific Gann tools, or certain indicator variants) exist on only one engine. Switch engines if a particular feature is required.

Comparison with peer platforms

Kite charts is one of three major charting environments used by Indian retail traders, alongside the chart environments of Upstox Pro and Dhan (each with their own engine licensing arrangements), and the standalone TradingView subscription tier. Kite charts is free at the point of use for Kite account holders, with no additional subscription required, whereas standalone TradingView requires a paid plan for advanced indicators and saved layouts beyond the free tier.

The principal distinction of Kite charts is the direct integration with the Kite order management system: a chart action can become an order without leaving the platform. Standalone TradingView users in India typically have to switch between the TradingView window and a separate broker terminal to execute, which adds friction.

Settings and customisation

Kite charts settings, accessible via the chart-page settings menu, include:

  • Engine selection: ChartIQ or TradingView (per-user, persistent).
  • Default chart type: candlestick, OHLC, line, Heikin Ashi, Renko.
  • Default timeframe: which timeframe is selected when a new chart opens.
  • Candle colours: up-candle colour, down-candle colour, body fill style.
  • Background and grid: dark mode and light mode, with grid colour and line style adjustable.
  • Scales and axis: price scale on the right or left, log or linear price scale, time scale adjustments.
  • Crosshair: visible or hidden, snap to nearest candle.
  • Drawing tool defaults: line colour, width, transparency.

Settings are saved against the user account on Kite servers and persist across web and mobile sessions, including across the engine toggle within the same engine.

See also

External references

References

  1. Zerodha, “Kite charts: feature documentation,” support.zerodha.com, accessed May 2026.
  2. Zerodha, “Charts and Trade From Charts category articles,” support.zerodha.com, accessed May 2026.
  3. Zerodha, “Kite Connect API documentation,” kite.trade/docs, accessed May 2026.
  4. Z-Connect blog archive, “Kite chart engine choice and engine switching,” zerodha.com/z-connect, accessed May 2026.
  5. ChartIQ product documentation, chartiq.com, accessed May 2026.
  6. TradingView Charting Library documentation, tradingview.com/charting-library, accessed May 2026.
  7. National Stock Exchange of India, “Trading session schedule,” nseindia.com, accessed May 2026.
  8. Bombay Stock Exchange, “Trading session schedule,” bseindia.com, accessed May 2026.

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The WebNotes Editorial Team covers Indian capital markets, payments infrastructure and retail investor procedures. Every article is fact-checked against primary sources, principally SEBI circulars and master directions, NPCI specifications and the official support documentation published by the intermediary in question. Drafts go through a second-pair-of-eyes review and a separate compliance read before publication, and revisions are tracked against the SEBI and NPCI rule changes referenced in the methodology section.

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