Top 15 Best Solana RPC Providers (2026)

One of the first decisions engineers and Product Managers need to make after deciding to build a product on Solana is choosing an RPC provider. RPC Providers allow builders to access current network data, query archival state, and send transactions.

Picking the right provider is an important decision because it impacts everything downstream: the cost to operate your product, request latency, uptime, data correctness, landing rates, etc.

One challenge when evaluating and selecting an RPC provider is that information about each provider is typically self-reported. Every “10x faster,” or “99.99% uptime,” claim traces back to a benchmark the provider ran on itself, under narrow conditions it chose.

Below we explain an open-source, non-gameable, and reproducible Solana RPC benchmarking tool that developers can use to measure and compare providers. Then, we highlight the top 15 companies offering RPC services on Solana, and explain which vendor is best for use cases across trading, wallets, payment apps, and consumer products.

Open-source Solana RPC Benchmarks

We released an open-source RPC Provider benchmarking tool to help companies evaluate and choose a Solana RPC provider. 

Every performance number below comes from a continuously running, open-source benchmark in which test inputs are cryptographically committed before any provider sees them, correctness is decided by cross-provider consensus across the benchmarked panel, and every challenge, sample, and score is open data that can be recomputed.

The fastest way to verify these results is to use the Read API. We provide nine public, unauthenticated endpoints including:

• The RPC leaderboard
• Per-method p50 and p95 latencies
• Head-to-head win rates
• Latency distributions
• Fleet status
• Raw challenge feed with honeypot flags
• Per-challenge correctness verdicts

Every figure in this article can be pulled with curl and recomputed against your own arithmetic in about a minute.  

Reproducing RPC Benchmark Results

The code is available on GitHub. A standalone CLI runs from your own machine against your own endpoints in a few minutes and doesn’t need a database. 

Reproducing the full published leaderboard (i.e., commit-reveal, honeypots, multi-region fleet) requires a Postgres instance, at least three provider endpoints to form a consensus panel, and paid tiers on each of them, since free-tier caps—if the provider has one—run out before the sample count stabilizes. 

The scoring weights for the default (i.e., balanced preset) are as follows: 0.25 for latency, 0.25 for win rate, 0.25 for reliability, 0.2 for correctness, and 0.05 for freshness. If you disagree with these weights, pull the sub-scores individually and re-weight them yourself. 

The window can also be widened beyond the 24-hour default, and filtered by any of the six regions (e.g., NA East, NA West, EU Central, EU West, AP Northeast, and AP Southeast), four infrastructure vantages (e.g., AWS Cloudflare, GCP, TeraSwitch), and 45 Solana RPC methods.

Top 15 Solana RPC Providers at a Glance

Below we highlight the top 15 RPC providers on Solana across their benchmark score (if available, free tier limits, introductory paid tier, cost per 1M requests, and best use cases.

RPC Provider Scoring

‍Scores represent the balanced preset based on hundreds of thousands of samples at the time of writing. Currently, only Helius, Quicknode, Triton, Chainstack, and Alchemy are on the benchmarking tool. 

The other Solana RPC providers are included in alphabetical order because they are real RPC providers with real users, but we currently do not have any measured data on them, so it is better to say so than imply a ranking that wasn’t earned empirically. 

Note: Pricing is the monthly listed price; several providers discount annual billing. 

Who are the best RPC providers for my use case?

Below we look at the best RPC providers across various use cases (e.g., overall, trading, wallets, consumer apps, multichain products, etc.). Because every company has unique needs, choosing the best provider means picking the best provider for your explicit needs and goals.

Best Overall RPC Provider for Solana: Helius

Helius ranks first when analyzing latency over time with per-method and per-region breakdowns, and ranks first on three different presets at the time of writing, including the overall balanced benchmark:

1. Balanced preset - 89.2/100 
2. Trading preset - 87.9/100 
3. Apps preset - 96.6/100

Helius also offers the broadest Solana-native product suite, covering surfaces across trading, streaming, and agentic development:

1. Transaction landing: ultra-low-latency Solana transaction submission with multi-path routing via Helius Sender
2. Preconfirmations: stream scheduled transactions the moment a validator commits to executing them before they are shredded 
3. Shred delivery: stream pre-execution data; raw Solana shreds via UDP or preprocessed transactions via gRPC
4. MEV protection: route transactions away from validators statistically linked to sandwich attacks
5. Parsed streams: stream parsed Solana transactions and address history into decoded instructions, transfers, and summaries over REST or GraphQL
6. Agentic workflows: first-class support for AI agents building on Solana from programmatic account creation to real-time data streaming

Helius is Solana-only, with no plans to expand to other networks; this vertical expertise shines throughout the rankings for different use cases. This is also exemplified by the innovative work done at the RPC layer, including the releases of getTransactionsForAddress and getTransfersByAddress.

Best RPC Provider for Trading: Helius

Helius ranks first on the trading benchmark preset, which weights the methods that matter under execution pressure (e.g., getLatestBlockHash, getSlot, getAccountInfo, getProgramAccounts) rather than averaging all 45 Solana JSON-RPC methods evenly.

The supporting trading product suite is the part no generalist builds: 

1. Sender for transaction landing
2. Preconfirmations for sub-slot confirmation signals
3. Raw and decoded shred delivery
4. MEV protection
5. Transaction rebates

Helius also runs the number two validator on Solana by stake at 15.6M SOL, which feeds landing performance directly through Stake-weighted Quality of Service (SWQoS). For comparison, Alchemy’s validator ranks #50 at 2.2M SOL. 

Best RPC Provider for Wallets and Consumer Apps: Helius

Helius ranks first on the application benchmark preset (i.e., 96.6/100, at the time of writing), and by the widest margin of any preset. The read mix that dominates wallet backends is where the gap is the largest:

1. getAccountInfo: returns all information associated with the account of the provided pubkey
2. getBalance: returns the lamport balance of the account of the provided pubkey
3. getTokenAccountsByOwner: returns all SPL token accounts for the token owner provided
4. getSignaturesForAddress: returns signatures for confirmed transactions that include the address provided in their accountKeys list 

Helius also covers the tech stack needed by most wallet and consumer apps, without having to assemble the data from raw RPC requests:

• DAS API - get token and NFT assets and metadata
• Wallet API - get wallet balances, histories, and funding information
• Webhooks - monitor onchain events and get real-time notifications
• Parsed streams - streaming real-time data with server-side filtering to reduce usage

The Wallet API is particularly powerful for identifying wallets and funders, drawing from an account tagging database populated by over 21.5M accounts, 32.5K labeled entities, and 3K programs. The Wallet API can also query historical token balances for a given wallet, which other RPC providers don’t offer.

Combined with the ability to add non-custodial embedded wallets to your Solana application via the helius-wallet-kit, Helius remains the leading choice for wallets and consumer apps on Solana. 

Best RPC Provider for Multichain Teams: Quicknode

If Solana is one of several networks that your product supports, and you want a single vendor and invoice, a Solana specialist is the wrong provider for you. 

Among the generalists, Quicknode is the one to pick. At the time of writing, they rank second on three presets:

1. Balanced preset - 85.0/100
2. Trading preset - 85.5/100
3. Apps preset - 94.3/100 with 99.5% correctness. 

Quicknode covers 80+ chains and 135+ networks. You give up some Solana performance and Solana product coverage compared to a Solana-native provider like Helius, but it is demonstrably better than other multichain providers that support Solana like Alchemy.

On Alchemy

For multichain teams, choose Alchemy if you are already standardized on their EVM stack (i.e., account abstraction, smart wallets, gas manager), and Solana is genuinely peripheral to your product. 

However, choosing Alchemy simply because you’re using them for Ethereum RPCs and APIs carries real tradeoffs, and we should be clear about what it costs on Solana specifically.

Alchemy ranks fifth of five on the balanced preset (i.e., 69.2/100 at the time of writing), has the lowest correctness rate on the panel at 98.2%, and returns “unsupported” for getStakeMinimumDelegation. 

Unverifiable Marketing Claims

Alchemy marketing claims their Solana performance is 10x faster on heavy methods like getProgramAccounts. However, that statistic is demonstrably false. Measured at cold-start (i.e., every request opens a new connection, rather than reusing a pooled keep-alive connection), p95 latency across all infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP, Teraswitch, etc.), Alchemy returns getProgramAccounts in 558ms compared to 82ms for Helius, 82ms for Quicknode, 220ms for Chainstack, and 532ms for Triton.

Best RPC Provider for Historical Data on Solana: Helius

Deep history is served from a purpose-built RocksDB archival layer rather than a Google BigTable fallback, and it’s the fastest archival path measured on the panel. 

The benchmark’s archival buckets sample uniformly from 182-365 epochs back—one to two years ago, well past any provider’s warm storage—and Helius leads on all seven methods that carry them. Archival calls bill at 1 credit, the same as any standard call, with no deep-history surcharge. 

Best RPC Provider for Self-Hosting: Triton

Triton’s open-source work is a genuine outlier on this list, as it comprises most of their stack. 

Old Faithful

Built with Protocol Labs and sponsored by the Solana Foundation, Old Faithful packs the entire ledger from genesis into content-addressable CAR files, verifies their integrity, mirrors them to Filecoin and S3-compatible storage, and serves them free from a CDN at files.old-faithful.net. If you want to own a complete, independently verifiable copy of Solana’s history with no vendor relationship and no per-query metering, this is the only way to do it.

Superbank

Open-sourced under AGPL-3.0 in June 2026, Superbank is a ClickHouse rebuild of the historical pipeline that replaces BigTable entirely. Cloudbreak does the same for account reads. Paired with Anza’s Jetstreamer for replay, developers can have and serve a complete, independently verifiable copy of Solana’s history.

Note that this is a self-hosted path, meaning it comes with real operational overhead and is not simply choosing a faster managed endpoint. At the time of writing, Triton ranks last on the panel for every archival-bucket method.

Triton’s managed pricing is pay-as-you-go (PAYG) rather than tiered: $0.08/GB bandwidth plus a per-million-request rate that varies by category, with historical queries at $10/M regardless of epoch, on a $125 minimum pre-paid deposit. 

Their legacy BigTable path still carries a separate $25-per-million-queries charge, billed per million or fraction thereof, though it can be disabled per request with the X-bigtable: disabled header. 

Best RPC Provider for Agent-driven Solana Development: Helius

Helius provides first-class support for AI agents building on Solana, offering a suite of tooling across all services to enable agent-driven Solana development. 

Agents can access the full Helius platform without any manual intervention: one-time and subscription payments can be made in crypto, meaning an agent can fund itself, autopay in USDC, and have a Helius account and API key within seconds. 

Helius offers the following tools for building on Solana with AI:

• Helius CLI: useful for shell-level automation, CI/CD pipelines, terminal workflows, and account management
• Helius MCP: an MCP server providing nine routed domain-grouped tools covering all Helius and Solana functionality at a fraction of the context of other providers’ MCPs, plus an expandResult tool for paging through larger responses
• Skills: model-agnostic instruction sets that teach AI assistants how to build on Solana using Helius, four partners Phantom, Jupiter, DFlow, OKX, a Build skill for core Solana development, and an SVM skill for deep protocol research
• Claude Code Plugin: the first, and currently the only, official Claude Code plugin for building in all of crypto. One install gives access to live tooling and expert Solana coding patterns inside Claude Code (i.e., the Helius MCP server, DFlow MCP server, and all of our skills bundled together)
• TypeScript SDK: type-safe methods for Helius APIs, making it the fastest way to build on Solana
• Rust SDK: async Rust bindings for all Helius APIs, ideal for high-performance agentic workflows 

All of these tools are open source, with the majority hosted in the official Helius AI tooling repository, and the TypeScript and Rust SDKs each having their own repositories.

Cheapest RPC Provider Per Request: Chainstack

Sticker price is a five-way tie with Helius, Quicknode, Chainstack, GetBlock, and Tatum starting at $49/mo for paid plans. Per request, Chainstack is the clear winner, as that $49 buys 20M requests, compared to 10M at Helius, for example. That 2x gap holds for the next $499 tier, as they offer 200M against 100M. Their free tier is also generous, offering 3M requests and 25 RPS (requests per second) with no card.

If per-request cost for lower paid tiers is a genuine constraint, and you don’t need Solana-native tooling, then Chainstack is the honest answer. 

However, note that Chainstack ranks fourth in the benchmark for the balanced preset (i.e., 71.6/100 at the time of writing). What the difference buys at Helius is an ~18-point benchmark gap, higher measured correctness, and a product surface that Chainstack doesn’t build.

How do RPC credit costs and costs per request compare across providers? 

The single most misleading number comparing RPC providers is the headline unit price because no two providers use the same unit. Credits, compute units, and requests are not interchangeable, and the conversion factor is the thing being priced.

All figures below are monthly listed prices, normalized to cost per 1M Solana requests.

Quicknode vs. Helius Pricing

Quicknode is the clearest illustration of why the unit matters. Their published rate of roughly $0.61 per million credits looks about eight times cheaper than Helius at $4.90 per million credits. However, Quicknode’s credit table prices every Solana method at 30 credits, against 1 credit for standard Helius calls. Multiply it out, and the same workload costs 3x to 4x more on Quicknode vs. Helius. 

If we also apply this to the next tier at $499 (i.e., Quicknode Scale and Helius Business), we have $0.53 per million credits against $4.99 per million credits, which looks nine times cheaper. However, using Quicknode’s credit model, this works out to $15.76 vs. $4.99, which is 3x more expensive.

Nothing here is hidden—the table is published, and the arithmetic is theirs—but a buyer comparing headline rates rather than per-request cost reaches exactly the wrong conclusion.

Two further wrinkles in Quicknode’s Solana pricing: 

1. Advanced APIs, which include the getAsset family, carry a 2x multiplier (i.e., 60 credits)
2. Large Calls like getLargestAccounts and getSupply carry 4x (i.e., 120 credits)

On DAS-style queries, the ordering flips: 1M getAsset calls cost roughly $37 on Quicknode Build against $49 on Helius Developer because their lower per-credit price outweighs the credit ratio. Helius also bills getProgramAccounts at 10 credits, DAS at 10, and Enhanced Transactions at 100. 

If your workload is dominated by enriched endpoints rather than standard RPC, model it against your own method mix rather than trusting any headline rate, ours included. For paginated program reads, getProgramAccountsV2 bills at 1 credit.

Free Tiers

Most teams start on free tiers to explore a platform and test performance. While free tiers aren’t meant to provide the same level of performance or product coverage as paid options, they often dictate which platform a new team tests first given the credits, rate limits, and product coverage available.

Free tiers suffer from the same compute unit mismatch as paid tiers. In terms of what you actually get:

• Chainstack: 3M requests, 25 RPS
• Alchemy: ~1.11M requests (30M CU / 27)
• Helius: 1M credits, 10 RPS
• Quicknode: no perpetual free tier; a one-month trial of 10M credits at 15 RPS

For example, Alchemy’s free tier of 30M compute units could be compared to “Helius: 1M credits,” which reads like a 30x advantage, but Alchemy’s pricing page recommends assuming an average of 27 CU per request. Divide it out, and 30M CU is roughly 1.11M requests. The real gap is about 11%, and not 30x.

How do Helius’s Solana RPC benchmarks compare vs. the Solana Foundation’s RPC dashboard?

The Solana Foundation runs its own neutral, open-source RPC latency monitor. We encourage you to use it alongside this article. The numbers won’t match ours, and it’s worth understanding why rather than assuming one benchmark is wrong.

What does the Solana Foundation’s RPC benchmark tool show?

Out of the box, Solana Foundation’s dashboard shows a single method, in a single region, on a single infrastructure provider, over a six-hour window. This is a thin slice of a noisy signal, as six hours is short enough that one bad afternoon or one good one will dominate the result.

These are interface defaults, rather than limitations, which is multi-region and multi-method underneath, so we recommend widening the timeframe, region, and method selection before drawing conclusions.

For comparison, our RPC benchmarking dashboard averages 45 methods across six regions and four infrastructure providers over a rolling 24 hours.

How does the Solana Foundation benchmarking tool compare to Helius? 

Solana Foundation verifies responses against a Foundation-operated reference node, with cryptographic claim checks: blockhashes, signatures, and sampled account data are re-verified after settling. Our dashboard uses majority consensus across the measured panel.

Their anti-gaming documentation takes the stance that if truth is derived from the set being graded, then with a small panel the majority defines truth, and a wrong majority would mark an honest provider as a liar. We believe that our honeypots and commit-reveal design substantially mitigates this, while their reference-node design avoids the problem differently. 

Neither benchmark can prevent a provider from recognizing probe traffic and routing it to better hardware. The Foundation says so explicitly. No content check catches it because the answers on that path are genuinely correct and genuinely fast.

If two independently built benchmarks, run by different parties with different incentives and different ground-truth models, both put Helius at or near the top, that is worth considerably more than either one alone. If they disagree, we would rather you see the disagreement than take our word for it.

Conclusion: Choosing the Best RPC Provider for You

The hardest part of picking a Solana RPC provider is the fact that a lot of the information provided cannot be checked. Performance claims come from benchmarks the vendor ran itself, and pricing is quoted in units—credits, compute units, requests—that aren’t comparable until they’re converted.

There are five things worth doing before committing to any one RPC provider on Solana:

• Normalize cost per request, and not per credit: Quicknode’s rate looks eight times cheaper than what Helius uses per credit, but it works out to three to four times more expensive per call
• Check whether the performance claims are verifiable: If a provider publishes a number without a region, method, percentile, sample size, date, or a way to reproduce it, it isn’t a measurement
• Weight correctness alongside latency: A fast wrong answer is worse than a slow correct one
• Check rate limits: Most teams hit an RPS limit long before they exhaust monthly credit limits
• Test against your own method mix: Headline rates assume an average workload. If yours is archival-heavy, asset-heavy, or getProgramAccounts-heavy, then model it directly

If Solana is your main focus, where latency and trading are central to your company’s success, Helius is purpose-built to serve you. First on all three benchmark presets, the deepest Solana-native surface, and 1 credit for a standard call with no hidden multipliers.

However, there is no single right answer. If you’re multichain, consider Quicknode. If per-request cost is your main constraint, consider Chainstack. If you want to self-host Solana’s history, consider Triton.

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