Hands-on reviews of the top Solana RPC providers — Helius, QuickNode, Alchemy, Triton — on pricing, speed, free tiers, gRPC streaming, DAS API, webhooks, plus private/dedicated and archival RPC. Written by a team that runs Solana RPC + gRPC at production scale. For the live side-by-side feature table, see our RPC comparison page.
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If you've built anything on Solana — a trading bot, a dApp, an NFT minting site, or even a simple wallet tracker — you've hit the same wall: the default public RPC endpoints are slow, rate-limited, and unreliable during high-traffic periods. When Solana network activity spikes, public endpoints return errors, drop transactions, and add seconds of latency.
That's where dedicated RPC providers come in. They give you fast, reliable access to the Solana blockchain with higher rate limits, priority transaction routing, and specialized APIs. But with a dozen providers competing for your attention, choosing the right one isn't straightforward.
We've tested the three most popular providers — Helius, QuickNode, and Alchemy — along with several alternatives, to help you pick the right RPC for your specific needs.
This post is the in-depth review: what each provider is actually like in production. If you just want the numbers side by side — uptime, pricing, feature matrix, live health checks — the RPC comparison page is the faster tool; come back here for the judgment calls.
Before comparing providers, here's why the free public endpoints (api.mainnet-beta.solana.com) aren't enough for anything beyond casual use:
A dedicated RPC provider gives you reserved capacity, better uptime, and access to Solana-specific features that public endpoints simply don't offer.
Helius is a Solana-focused infrastructure provider spanning RPC, enhanced APIs, WebSockets, LaserStream gRPC/WSS, transaction landing and raw shreds. Its current pricing is materially more transparent than many older Helius comparisons.
| Plan | Price | Rate Limit |
|---|
Tools mentioned
Live health scores, average ratings, and direct links on MadeOnSol.
gRPC, WebSockets, and full RPC in one plan from $38/mo. No credits, no multipliers, no add-ons and nothing gated behind a higher tier.
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import { MadeOnSol } from "madeonsol";
// Get a free API key at madeonsol.com/pricing
const client = new MadeOnSol({ apiKey: "msk_your_key" });
const { trades } = await client.kol.feed({ limit: 10 });
const { alerts } = await client.deployer.alerts({ limit: 5 });
const { tools } = await client.tools.search({ q: "trading" });Keep reading
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Open the KOL Tracker| Credits/Month |
|---|
| Free | $0 | 10 req/sec | 1M |
| Developer | $49/mo | 50 req/sec | 10M |
| Business | $499/mo | 200 req/sec | 100M |
| Professional | $999/mo | 500 req/sec | 200M |
Digital Asset Standard (DAS) API: Helius pioneered the DAS API for compressed NFTs and token metadata. If you're building anything involving NFTs or need rich token data, Helius's DAS endpoints save you from stitching together data from multiple sources.
Enhanced Transactions API: Returns parsed, human-readable transaction data instead of raw byte arrays. Instead of decoding instruction data yourself, you get structured swap data, transfer details, and NFT operations in a clean JSON format.
Webhooks: Set up event-driven notifications for wallet activity, token transfers, or program interactions. Useful for building alerting systems or reactive bots without constant polling.
Priority Fee API: Get real-time priority fee estimates to optimize your transaction landing rate. Critical for trading bots and time-sensitive operations.
Staked Connections: Helius offers staked validator connections that improve transaction landing rates. Transactions submitted through staked connections get preferential treatment from validators.
Solana-native builders who need rich transaction parsing, NFT/token metadata APIs, and don't need multi-chain support. Particularly strong for NFT platforms, wallet apps, and analytics tools.
QuickNode is the multi-chain veteran. Supporting 30+ blockchains, it offers Solana as one of many chains on a mature, battle-tested infrastructure.
| Plan | Price | Rate Limit | Credits/Month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | $0 | 15 RPS | 10M credits, no overage |
| Build | $49/mo monthly ($42/mo annual) | 50 RPS | 80M credits |
| Accelerate | $249/mo monthly ($212/mo annual) | 125 RPS | 450M credits |
| Scale | $499/mo monthly ($424/mo annual) | 250 RPS | 950M credits |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Dedicated infrastructure |
Multi-Chain Support: One account, one dashboard, 30+ chains. If you're building across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, and others, QuickNode lets you manage all your RPC endpoints in one place.
Marketplace Add-Ons: QuickNode has a marketplace of installable add-ons — token metadata lookups, Jupiter price feeds, NFT data, and more. You can extend your endpoint's capabilities without switching providers.
Streams & Functions: QuickNode Streams let you filter and transform blockchain data in real-time. Functions allow you to run serverless code triggered by on-chain events. Think of it as a lightweight data pipeline.
Global Edge Network: With endpoints distributed globally, QuickNode routes your requests to the nearest node. This matters for latency-sensitive applications like trading bots.
Solana-Specific: Despite being multi-chain, QuickNode has dedicated Solana JSON-RPC/WebSockets, Streams/Webhooks and Solana gRPC. Its current Solana page makes gRPC available from the Scale tier upward. WebSocket billing also changed July 1, 2026 from flat per-message credits to metered uncompressed data size.
Teams building across multiple blockchains who want a single provider. Also strong for projects that need the Marketplace add-on ecosystem or real-time data streaming.
Alchemy entered the Solana market after dominating Ethereum infrastructure for years. It brings enterprise-grade reliability and developer tooling to Solana.
| Plan | Price | Rate Limit | Compute Units/Month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 25 req/sec | 30M CU |
| Pay as You Go | $0.525 per 1M CU | 300 req/sec included | Usage-based |
| Enterprise | Custom | 1,000+ req/sec | Custom |
Compute Unit Model: Alchemy uses compute units (CU) instead of simple request counts. Lightweight calls (like getBalance) cost fewer CUs than heavy calls (like getParsedTransactions). This can be more cost-effective if most of your calls are simple.
Enhanced APIs: Alchemy offers token balance lookups, NFT metadata, and transaction history APIs for Solana. These are similar to Helius's enhanced APIs but follow Alchemy's standardized patterns across chains.
Developer Dashboard: The monitoring dashboard shows request volumes, error rates, latency percentiles, and usage patterns. Useful for debugging production issues and optimizing your RPC usage.
Reliability Track Record: Alchemy's Ethereum infrastructure serves major platforms like OpenSea, Aave, and Dapper Labs. That operational experience carries over to their Solana infrastructure.
Free Tier: 30M compute units on the free tier is enough to get started, especially for read-heavy applications, though above the free tier Alchemy has moved to usage-based (pay-as-you-go) pricing rather than fixed monthly plans.
Teams already using Alchemy for Ethereum who want to add Solana. Also good for projects that need enterprise SLAs, detailed monitoring, and a compute-unit pricing model that rewards efficient API usage.
| Feature | Helius | QuickNode | Alchemy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | 1M credits / 10 RPS | 10M credits / 15 RPS trial | 30M CU / 25 RPS |
| Solana Focus | Solana-only | 30+ chains | Multi-chain |
| DAS API | Native, best-in-class | Supported | Supported |
| Enhanced Txs | Yes (parsed) | Via add-ons | Yes |
| Webhooks | Built-in | Via Streams | Via webhooks |
| Staked Connections | Yes | Limited | Limited |
| gRPC Streaming | LaserStream | Yes, from Scale | Yes, PAYG from $75/TB |
| Priority Fee API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Token Metadata | Built-in | Marketplace add-on | Enhanced API |
| WebSocket | Stable | Stable | Stable |
| Entry paid | $49/mo | $49/mo ($42/mo billed annually) | Pay as You Go |
| Higher-throughput self-serve | Business $499 / 200 RPS | Scale $499 / 250 RPS | PAYG starts at 300 RPS capacity |
Triton is a Solana-focused provider known for its Yellowstone gRPC implementation. If you need real-time streaming of Solana data (program account updates, transaction notifications), Triton's gRPC endpoints are among the most reliable. Pricing is usage-based (pay-as-you-go, no tiers) — a $125 prepaid minimum plus per-GB bandwidth and per-million-call rates that vary by endpoint category.
Syndica offers Solana RPC with a focus on reliability and a clean developer experience. Their free tier includes 10 million requests per month, which is generous compared to most competitors' credit-based free tiers. Worth trying if you're evaluating options.
Chainstack provides Solana alongside a broader multi-chain node platform. Its current public Solana pricing uses fixed monthly request-unit plans rather than the old "elastic only" description: the entry Developer tier is free, with paid Growth/Pro-style tiers increasing request units and RPS. Check the live Chainstack pricing page before sizing production traffic because quotas and plan names can change.
Shyft combines RPC access with pre-built Solana APIs for tokens, NFTs, and DeFi. If you want a higher-level API abstraction rather than raw RPC calls, Shyft's approach can save development time.
Supanode is a newer Solana infrastructure provider offering RPC, Yellowstone gRPC, ShredStream, and stake-weighted transaction landing, alongside dedicated single-tenant nodes and a historical data indexer — with support handled directly by engineers over Telegram rather than a ticketing system. It wasn't part of our hands-on testing above, so treat it as another option worth evaluating rather than a tested recommendation.
Go with Helius. Staked connections for better transaction landing, priority fee API for optimal fee estimation, and enhanced transaction parsing for monitoring your trades. The Business tier ($499/mo) gives you 200 req/sec with staked connections. If you need the lowest latency possible, pair Helius with Jito bundles for MEV-protected execution. Once you've picked a provider, our Solana Telegram bot developer tutorial shows how to wire that RPC endpoint into a working bot.
Go with QuickNode or Alchemy. One provider for all your chains simplifies infrastructure management. QuickNode if you want marketplace add-ons and streaming; Alchemy if you want enterprise monitoring and compute-unit efficiency.
Start with Helius Free or Alchemy Free. Both offer enough for development and small-scale applications. Helius's free tier gives you access to enhanced APIs; Alchemy's free tier is generous on compute units. For hobby projects that don't need specialized APIs, even the public RPC endpoint works — just expect rate limits during peak traffic.
Go with Helius or Triton. Both offer production-grade Yellowstone gRPC endpoints for real-time Solana data streaming. Triton is the original gRPC specialist; Helius integrates it into a broader feature set. gRPC streaming is essential for applications that need instant notifications of on-chain events — like deployer tracking or real-time price feeds.
Go with Helius. The DAS API is purpose-built for NFT and compressed NFT operations. No other provider matches Helius's depth of NFT infrastructure. Low latency matters especially during mints and high-demand drops.
Go with Alchemy or Helius. Alchemy brings enterprise SLA experience from Ethereum. Helius offers Solana-specific optimizations that matter at scale. Both can negotiate custom enterprise plans with dedicated node infrastructure.
Regardless of which provider you choose, these practices will improve your RPC performance:
getParsedTransactions with multiple signatures instead of fetching one at a timegetBalance is cheaper than getAccountInfo. getSignaturesForAddress is cheaper than fetching full transactions. Only request the data you actually needTwo intents that send people to the wrong plan:
Private / dedicated RPC. Shared endpoints (even paid ones) put you in a pool — during a memecoin frenzy you're competing with every other customer for the same nodes. A dedicated (private) node reserves capacity to you alone, with a fixed location you can pin for latency. It costs more (typically a few hundred dollars a month and up), and it's worth it only when consistent latency under load is the requirement — trading bots, snipers, anything time-sensitive. For read-heavy analytics, a shared plan with caching is usually the better value. Helius, QuickNode, Triton, and Chainstack all offer dedicated nodes; ask for the region closest to your workload.
Archival RPC. Solana validators prune aggressively, so older transactions and account states aren't on a standard node. If your queries reach back more than a couple of days — backtests, historical PnL, "what did this wallet do last month" — you need an archival endpoint (a premium add-on at most providers) or, more cost-effectively, an analytics layer like Flipside/Dune/BigQuery. We cover the full menu in our Solana historical data access guide. Don't pay for archival RPC to do what a SQL warehouse does for free.
The third thing buyers get wrong: paying for RPC to solve a data problem. Raw RPC returns byte arrays and account states. Building a portfolio tracker, wallet explorer, or tax tool means parsing all of that. You decode transactions, resolve token metadata, price every asset, and detect DeFi positions. That work sits above the RPC layer, and data APIs have already done it.
CoinStats Solana API is one example of this category. You pass a Solana address and get parsed SPL balances back. The same endpoints return transaction history and detected DeFi positions. CoinStats API also covers prices for 100,000+ coins and data from 200+ exchanges. The same key works across 120+ chains if you later add Ethereum or Bitcoin. There is an MCP server for agent-based setups, and a free tier with credit-based pricing.
The tradeoff is control. A data API decides how transactions get parsed and which protocols get detected. If you need raw account data or custom decoding, RPC is still the right layer. If your app sends transactions or needs slot-level latency, you need RPC. If it mostly reads balances, history, and prices, a data API covers it with less code. Some stacks use both: RPC for sending, a data API for display data.
For context, MadeOnSol runs Solana RPC and gRPC in production behind a real-time data product, and the biggest lesson is counter-intuitive: the highest-leverage decision isn't which provider — it's not hammering RPC in the first place.
We process the DEX trade firehose and 1,100+ active Solana KOL wallets (within a wider 2,000+ cross-chain KOL corpus), yet our actual RPC request rate sits around 1–2 calls/second. The reason is a stream-first architecture: real-time data comes off a gRPC firehose (which costs zero RPC calls), and plain RPC is the safety net, not the default path. We never touch a public endpoint — not even as a last resort. Payment verification runs through our primary Kaldera region, fails over to the second Kaldera region, and only then to a per-request-billed backup (dRPC); if all three fail, the request fails closed with a 503 rather than trusting an endpoint we don't control. Even a premium node can lag mainnet by a slot or two, so the second region is what gives payment checks a second source of truth. Our Wallet X-Ray analyzer (up to 1,000 parsed transactions per scan) and Deployer Hunter (gRPC-based real-time deploy detection) are built on exactly this split.
The takeaway for your stack: before you upgrade to a $499 tier to survive your call volume, ask whether half those calls should be a subscription instead of a poll. Pick the provider that matches your workload, use multiple for different jobs, and if even the top tiers feel steep, our API vs. self-hosting a node cost comparison shows when running your own node starts to pay off.
Helius and Alchemy both offer strong free tiers. Helius gives 1M credits/month with access to all enhanced APIs (DAS, transaction parsing, webhooks). Alchemy offers 30M compute units/month on its free tier, then moves to pay-as-you-go pricing. For hobby projects, either works well — Helius is better if you need Solana-specific features like DAS or parsed transactions.
For a serious trading bot, use production-grade RPC infrastructure rather than Solana's public endpoint. The public mainnet endpoint's documented limits are per 10-second window (including 40 requests per 10 seconds for one RPC method), and it does not provide a commercial provider's dedicated transaction-delivery features or SLA. A paid RPC like Helius ($49-$499/month) gives you staked connections for better transaction landing, priority fee APIs, and the reliability needed for time-sensitive trades.
Helius is Solana-only with deeper Solana-specific features: DAS API, enhanced transaction parsing, staked connections, and webhooks built-in. QuickNode supports 30+ blockchains and offers a marketplace of add-ons. Choose Helius for pure Solana development; choose QuickNode if you need multi-chain support from a single provider.
gRPC streaming (via Yellowstone) provides real-time Solana data — account updates, transactions, and program events — pushed to your application as they happen. Helius and Triton both offer production-grade gRPC endpoints. It's essential for applications that need instant on-chain event detection, like deployer trackers or real-time price feeds.
Entry-level paid plans start at $49/month for Helius and QuickNode. Alchemy has moved to usage-based pricing above its free tier (around $0.525 per 1M compute units) rather than a fixed entry plan. Mid-tier plans with higher rate limits range from $499-$999/month for Helius and QuickNode. Enterprise plans with dedicated nodes and custom SLAs are available from all three providers at negotiated pricing. The right tier depends on your request volume and latency requirements.
A shared RPC plan — even a paid one — puts your requests through a pool of nodes serving many customers, so performance degrades when network activity spikes. A dedicated (private) node reserves capacity exclusively for you and lets you pin a region for predictable latency, typically from a few hundred dollars a month. Choose dedicated when consistent latency under load is critical (trading bots, snipers); for read-heavy analytics, a shared plan plus caching is usually better value.
"Fastest" depends on your location and whether the node is dedicated — pin a private node in your region and pair it with Jito bundles for time-sensitive sends. Separately, if your queries reach back more than a day or two you need an archival endpoint (a premium add-on), because standard Solana nodes prune old data. For most historical work an analytics warehouse (Flipside, Dune, BigQuery) is cheaper than archival RPC — see our historical data access guide.
Usually not. A portfolio tracker reads balances, transaction history, and prices. A data API such as CoinStats returns all three parsed and priced in one call. You only need RPC if the app also sends transactions or streams slot-level events.
An RPC node gives raw chain access: account states, unparsed transactions, and transaction submission. A data API sits one layer above. It returns parsed balances, priced holdings, transaction history, and DeFi positions. RPC providers like Helius suit bots and dApps that write onchain. Data APIs like CoinStats suit trackers, tax tools, and dashboards that mostly read.
Disclaimer: Pricing and features are current as of September 2026. Providers frequently update their plans. Visit each provider's website for the latest pricing. MadeOnSol is a Solana data product, not an RPC provider, and is not affiliated with any RPC provider mentioned in this article.
Explore more: Best RPC Providers ranked by the community | All Solana RPC tools | Best Solana Developer Tools
The three main provider tables above were re-checked against current first-party pricing. Helius currently publishes Free $0 / 1M credits / 10 RPS, Developer $49 / 10M / 50 RPS, Business $499 / 100M / 200 RPS, and Professional $999 / 200M / 500 RPS. QuickNode's Solana page now includes an Accelerate tier between Build and Scale, and gRPC starts at Scale. Alchemy has retired its old $49 Growth subscription in favor of Free + usage-based PAYG; the live pricing page currently displays $0.525 per 1M CUs and Solana gRPC starting at $75/TB.
Sources: Helius pricing, QuickNode Solana pricing, QuickNode WebSocket billing, and Alchemy pricing.