Do you trade, or are interested in trying cTrader? Are you an Apple Mac user? Are you trying to find a cTrader desktop installation package for Mac OS? Unfortunately, there is no desktop version of cTrader for Mac OS. However, cTrader Web is not a bad solution, and you can effectively trade forex and CFDs on cTrader with the workarounds and hack mentioned in this article.
What is the difference between the Desktop and Web versions of cTrader?
Actually, there is not that much difference between cTrader for Web and cTrader for desktop in terms of manual trading features. All of the same order types, indicators, objects, layouts, colour themes, and colour customisation options are the same. The main differences you will notice are:
- On cTrader Web, charts are locked, so they can only move left and right, whereas on cTrader desktop, they are unlocked so that they can be moved up, down, left and right.
- cTrader Web has Heiken Ashi, and the desktop version does not.
- The desktop version of cTrader allows you to pop out charts into a new window. The web version does not.
- cTrader Copy is only available in the Web-based version of cTrader. The desktop version simply has a link that launches the cTrader Copy inside cTrader Web.
- cTrader Automate is not available in cTrader Web. To develop, test and run trading robots, you need the desktop version of cTrader.
The above list contains the only noteworthy differences between the two versions that we could see. The only major game changer listed above, in our opinion, is the absence of cTrader Automate for web users and, therefore, Mac users. Read on to find out how you can get around this obstacle.
Why isn’t there a Mac version of cTrader?
You may be wondering why there isn’t a Mac version of cTrader yet when the company and cTrader itself have been around for almost 10 years, and Macs are only getting more and more popular.
The main reason, in our opinion, is the cost of implementing and supporting a dedicated Mac version of cTrader. It seems like the company’s Mac user base is not extensive enough to justify the investment and loss of focus on features for its predominantly Windows-based user base. Naturally, cTrader attracted a lot of Windows users since the cTrader Automate (cAlgo) is complemented by Visual Studio and the .Net framework and the huge community which follows it. Although last year Microsoft did announce Visual Studio for Mac, we have not had a chance to review this version of the incredibly popular development environment and what it’s like developing indicators and robots for cTrader in Visual Studio for Mac.
From our interpretation of Spotware’s answers to traders in their community and social network sites, we say, don’t get your hopes up. But there is a chance that the task may at least be a bit easier for the company as Visual Studio is now available for Mac.
How to use the cTrader Automate feature to build trading robots on Mac.
Just because there isn’t a native version of cTrader Desktop for Mac doesn’t mean that you are completely out of luck. There are two well-known ways around this.
Mac Partition Software
There are a number of well-known software solutions for partitioning your Mac. Partitioning allows you to run both Mac OS and Windows on a single Apple machine, thereby allowing you to install cTrader Desktop on the Windows partition of your Apple computer. Some Mac partition solutions require you to restart when you switch from the operating system instance. However, there are solutions like https://www.parallels.com, which allow you to switch from one OS to another seamlessly.
VPS
There is an abundance of Forex trading VPS providers on the market. From your Mac, you can connect to a Windows VPS to develop, test and run your cTrader Automate robots and indicators. You could even write the code for your robots and indicators on your Mac machine, thanks to the recent release of Visual Studio for Mac.
