I agree with everything
@Warr87 said.
Random, stream of consciousness thoughts...
I describe the difference between RT and AB this way (it's just an analogy, it's not perfect):
AB is analogous to Python: it's big, can do a lot, requires strong programming skills, will likely take you longer to code, you can shoot yourself in the foot if you're not careful.
RT is analogous to Excel: it can't do as much as Python, requires less programming skills, you can likely code it faster, harder to shoot yourself in the foot, there are many things it does better than Python.
If all you needed was a financial spreadsheet, would you code it up in Python? You probably could, but why would you?
AB is more a programming environment, RT is more a scripting environment.
You're not going to suck in a web page, or read and write to external files (except built in functionality), create fancy charts that are beautiful eye candy (but do they make you money or just impress your friends?).
RT makes if very hard to code a future leak...you have to really try, almost do it on purpose. It's possible, just much harder than with AB.
RT makes "sense" in places that AB doesn't. One example: if you are using weekly bars, it will show your buy date as Monday, not Friday. I mean, WTF Amibroker? It's just software - can't you work out what day Monday is on a weekly bar?
In RT, you import your data from Norgate (or other providers) into a binary format. Think of it like your hiberfil.sys file when you hibernate to disk. It a memory image saved to disk. It can take a long(ish) time to do the download (like 5 mins, sometimes longer if you're importing the entire NYSE from 1990-today), but once you've done so, RT is really really fast. I actually did a walkforward in RT, something that would have taken days in AB using my laptop. But for live trading you would just import the data you need (shorter time frames). Sometimes I can run a backtest in 1-2 seconds, especially when run repeatedly - the first time caches the data formulas in memory. Think of it like static variables for the first run, then subsequent runs only update those formulas when required. In many ways it's faster than AB.
It has built in rolling backtests via optimization, so I don't need my Powershell script to do that.
You can easily combine multiple strategies in one, say a long/short hedging strategy, where the two strategies are "self contained" (hard to describe - I'd show you the samples but that probably violates the RT license, esp. if I posted it here). As Warr said, the examples are really good, not just to illustrate the many capabilities of RT but as trading systems themselves.
The documentation is clear, written by a native English speaker, and not full of typos, grammar errors, and incomplete or inconsistent examples.
One thing that is really cool is the strategy can use it's own equity curve as input. I like to describe it as being "self aware". I read in a Bandy book that you should use daily mark to market performance to make trading decisions (position size, whether to switch off, etc). With RT this is easy.
RT is written by a very successful trader, and is built for traders. AFAIK Tomasz is not a trader.
Things you have to use the CBT for you can just easily code in RT. A quote from Marsten:
RT is much "younger" than AB, so it doesn't have all of AB's bells and whistles. For now, I will still use both, esp. AB's charting capabilities to visualize price patterns that I can try to code into a system. Hopefully, when my license for AB expires (AFAIK it will still work, I just won't get updates), I will have completely transitioned to RT.
I won't miss the the toxic culture of the AB forums. The culture in the forums, like the culture in many organisations (or even recent US Presidencies) is toxic because it flows down from its leader. Its members follow the example set by its leader.