Welcome to Quantopian! I'll give my answers to your questions, but others here may have some insights too. I am assuming the reference to 'the API' is the online IDE and Notebook environments.
1- Can I use my own data sets if I take the API route ?
Yes, one can upload their own datasets to both the IDE (ie algos) and notebooks by using the 'self serve' feature. See the docs here .
2- Are there more functions or Datasets available through the API or the same ?
Yes, there are a large number of both US and non-US equity datasets available using the online platform. These are documented here. These are not provided when using a local install and would need to be sourced from third party providers by the user. Additionally, there are a few tools available online that are not included in the open source zipline. Most notably are the optimization methods. See the docs here.
3- Can you run big computations requiring medium computation power and live price streaming on Quantopian ?
This is a bit subjective. There are some time constraints placed on algos however, notebook calculations do not have time limits. The bigger issue is that the online tools only support historic backtesting and not live algorithms. Actually, the open sourced zipline isn't really made for live streaming either. One would need to use a package like zipline-live.
A typical use case for the Quantopian tools is to provide a ready made environment to test one's trading ideas. A real benefit is the ability to work between the algo and notebook environments to easily test and visualize data. One could then migrate these ideas to another platform if live trading capability and/or more computing options are required.
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