Kalshi vs Manifold
One is a federally regulated exchange where contracts settle in dollars. The other is a community platform where anyone can open a market and the currency is mana, which has no cash value. People compare them because both put probabilities on future events; almost everything past that differs. Kalshi facts date to 2026-07-09 from its own docs, Manifold facts to 2026-07-24 from its site and API docs.
| Feature | Kalshi | Manifold |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | ||
| Stakes | Real money, dollar-settled | Play money (mana) |
| Oversight | CFTC-regulated exchange | Platform moderation; no financial regulator |
| Market creation | Listed by the exchange | Anyone can create a market |
| Access | ||
| Signup | Funded account with KYC | Ordinary account, no funding |
| Audience | US-facing | No geo wall found on its site |
| Trading | ||
| Fees | $0.02/contract flat, maker and taker | No dollar fees; creating markets costs mana |
| Auth to trade via API | RSA-PSS request signing | API key |
| Developer access | ||
| API cost | Free | Free |
| Rate limit | Volume-tiered (Expert…Prestige) | 500 requests/min per IP |
| WebSocket | Yes | Yes |
Source: kalshi.com/fee-schedule + docs.kalshi.com (2026-07-09) + manifold.markets and docs.manifold.markets/api (2026-07-24).
Stakes and what they buy you
A Kalshi contract pays out in dollars under CFTC oversight, so its price reflects people risking money they'd rather keep. Manifold's mana arrives free at signup and can't be cashed out as money, so its prices reflect reputation and the enjoyment of being right.
A trader who needs a price they can act on financially wants Kalshi's dollar stakes, harder to manipulate and easier to trust. Someone who just wants a market for a thousand niche questions, from tech milestones to a specific open-source project's release date, gets that only from Manifold's mana stakes, since no regulated exchange would ever list them.
Market catalogs
Kalshi lists what it chooses to list, with every market written and settled by the exchange itself: elections, economic releases, weather, and a growing sports book. Manifold's catalog is whatever its users have created across politics, technology, sports, culture, and business, which makes it enormous and uneven, and occasionally the only market on earth for a given question.
Settlement follows the same split. Kalshi resolves against rules it publishes as a regulated entity. On Manifold, the market's creator typically resolves it, and the platform's mechanisms for disputes carry no financial-regulatory weight.
The two APIs
Both are free. Kalshi's requires RSA-PSS request signing, where you generate a key pair and sign the timestamp, method, and path of every call, and its rate limit depends on a volume tier the exchange assigns you. Manifold's takes a plain API key at 500 requests a minute per IP, and placing a mana bet programmatically is a single authenticated POST.
For a weekend project, Manifold's API is the one you'll have running before lunch. Kalshi's signing scheme is the price of talking to a regulated exchange's live order book.
Using them together
The pairing is more complementary than competitive. Forecasters often develop a thesis on Manifold, where trying an idea costs nothing real, and express it on Kalshi when a corresponding dollar market exists. The overlap in listed questions is thinner than you'd expect, which limits direct price comparison to major events like elections.
Common questions
Can I make money on Manifold?+−
Is Manifold regulated like Kalshi?+−
Which has more markets?+−
Who resolves a market when the outcome is disputed?+−
How hard is Kalshi's API compared to Manifold's?+−
Kalshi's prices, next to Polymarket's
The match at the center of this feed is Kalshi paired against Polymarket, scored for confidence on every pair, since Manifold's play-money prices sit outside what dino.markets covers. We built it to serve both venues' order books through one API key, skipping Kalshi's request signing when the data is all you need. Free to start at 10,000 requests a month, with the MCP server included throughout.