Alchemy vs. Chainstack - Blockchain Developer Platform Comparison

Written by Alchemy

Reviewed by Logan Ross

Published on 2022-08-128 min read

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Alchemy's blockchain development platform provides RPC nodes with more accurate and reliable blockchain data, and more web3 tools and APIs compared to Chainstack.

Nodes play a crucial role in the architecture of a blockchain, maintaining decentralization and holding a copy of the entire transaction history of a given chain. Just as many large web companies use AWS as their cloud platform instead of hosting their own, blockchain node providers host and manage nodes on behalf of their clients.

Information requests about the blockchain are routed through the provider to the blockchain, and the information is then returned via the provider. These providers are critical to developing more advanced blockchain technologies and dApps, as they facilitate scalability. More fragile infrastructures can be overwhelmed by a sudden surge in requests (such as a popular NFT drop) and may fail, resulting in lost profits and dissatisfied customers.

There are a number of providers in the industry, but this article will focus on comparing Alchemy and Chainstack. Alchemy and Chainstack will be compared across nine categories:

1. Supported Blockchains

2. Node Latency

3. Data Accuracy

4. Node Reliability

5. Pricing

6. Enhanced APIs

7. Developer Tools

8. User Experience

9. Customer Support

Alchemy vs. Chainstack Comparison

Choosing the correct node provider for your project is mission critical. Reliability, speed, efficiency, and accuracy are all important factors to consider. 

What is Alchemy?

Alchemy is a multichain node provider offering specialized APIs, developer tools, and support to individual blockchain developers and larger companies. It is used to build NFT marketplaces, DAOs, Web3 wallets, DeFi protocols, and data analytics. 

By outsourcing their node infrastructure to Alchemy, builders can focus on more critical aspects of their projects. Alchemy's SDK makes it easy to make calls and implement any necessary tools for a project with just a few lines of code. While many high-profile web3 companies use Alchemy's platform, it is particularly popular among NFT marketplaces.

What is Chainstack?

Chainstack offers a service similar to Alchemy, providing access to Ethereum and Bitcoin nodes and a range of hosting solutions for developers. They describe their platform as a “control panel for blockchains.” 

Chainstack tends to focus more on enterprise and business-level clients than individual developers. It supports multiple chains and offers hybrid options, allowing clients to choose how much they want to manage in-house based on their customization needs and computing capabilities.

1. Supported Blockchains

Both providers support a variety of blockchains.

Alchemy supports the following chains:

• Ethereum

• Optimism

• Arbitrum

• Polygon PoS

• Starknet

• Solana

• Polygon zkEVM

• Base

• Astar (Polkadot)

Alchemy supports the following testnets:

• Goerli (Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum)

• Sepolia (Ethereum)

• Mumbai (Polygon)

Chainstack supports a slightly broader range of blockchains, including:

• Ethereum

• Polygon

• BNB Chain

• Avalanche

• Fantom

• Solana

• Harmony

• StarkNet

• Tezos

• Fabric

• Corda

• Bitcoin

• Quorum

• MultiChain

• and more
  

Scalability is a critical aspect of blockchain systems. The challenges associated with blockchains only become more pronounced at scale, and adding more nodes to a system can negatively impact accuracy and speed. Alchemy’s Supernode is designed to handle any number of requests and can instantly scale to meet the needs of its users. For instance, one of Alchemy’s clients, Polygon, has grown 95x since it began using Alchemy, yet its systems remain as fast and efficient as ever.

Chainstack’s primary scaling solution is Warp Transactions. By utilizing a global server network, nodes are propagated through the Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN), allowing for faster validation. This increases transaction speed and enables a more rapid mempool service.

2. Node Latency

The two main types of web3 node latency are block discovery latency - the time it takes to discover a new block, and request latency - the time between sending an RPC request and receiving a response.

Node Latency Test: Alchemy vs. Chainstack

In this test, we measured the time between the origination of the request and the receipt of the response on the Ethereum mainnet by querying eth_blockNumber.

We ran this query every 15 minutes, aggregated the results, and averaged the number. In our most recent test between August 10th, 2022, - August 17th, 2022, Alchemy averaged 38.72 ms and Chainstack averaged 426.28. ms for the US East location.

Even after taking Alchemy's secondary infrastructure, which provides additional data accuracy and reliability guarantees, Alchemy is 10x more performant.

3. Data Accuracy

Blockchain data accuracy is a measure of how many requests to the blockchain returned correct and consistent data. Incorrect data can occur because nodes recieve new information at different times, and don't always have the same view of the network as the newest blocks propagate across the network.

While low request latency is important, it becomes less significant if the information returned by blockchain nodes is incorrect. Without accurate data, your dapp may experience several issues, such as:

1. Requests return different answers to the same question

2. Dapps may retrieve incorrect transaction nonces

3. Users have a poor experience when tokens and NFTs appear incorrectly

The reorganization of blockchain data can sometimes result in consistency issues for users. Alchemy’s Supernode maintains accuracy even in the face of such reorganization, ensuring 100% data correctness. In contrast, Chainstack uses a fault-tolerant load balancer that employs an aggregated API running on top of Ethereum, Polygon PoS, Binance Chain, Avalanche, Fantom, and Bitcoin nodes, as well as elastic Solana RPC nodes, to prevent inaccuracies.

4. Node Reliability

The Alchemy Supernode ensures reliability even as developers scale their projects by utilizing a more distributed system rather than running directly on nodes, which reduces overall latency. Through its proprietary coordinator service, Alchemy provides accurate and up-to-date data.

Compared to competitors that provide 72% reliability with standard nodes, the Alchemy Supernode ensures a 99.9% up-time for blockchain accessibility. All Alchemy plans offer access to the Supernode.

5. Pricing

Price is an important consideration when choosing either Alchemy or Chainstack. Here are the main pricing tiers for each company and a few key features.

Alchemy Pricing

Alchemy has four main pricing tiers: Free, Growth, Scale, and Enterprise.

Alchemy Free ($0/month)

• 300 million compute units (CUs)/month

• 330 compute units per second (CUPS)

• All developer tools

• Enhanced APIs and SDK

• Full archive data

• Multichain mainnets and testnets

• No daily request limits

• 5 apps

• 24/7 Discord Support

Alchemy Growth ($49/month)

In addition to everything included in Alchemy's free version, Growth tier customers receive:

• 400 million compute units (CUs)/month

• Auto-scaling compute units at $1.2 per 1 million additional CUs

• Parity Trace and gETH debug

• Enhanced transaction propagation

• 2x higher throughput (660 CUPS)

• 15 apps

• 24/7 dedicated Discord support

Alchemy Scale ($199/month billed annually and $289/month billed monthly)

For teams with big goals who want to move quickly, Scale tier provides Alchemy's best products and prices at the click of a button.

• 1.5 billion compute units (CUs)/month

• 3,000 compute units per second

• Auto-scaling compute units at $1 per 1 million additional CUs.

• Ability to purchase discounted additional CUs at $0.7 per 1 million on the annual plan.

• 30 apps

• 24/7 dedicated Discord support

Alchemy Enterprise (Custom Pricing)

• Committed use discounts

• Custom SLAs

• Pay with crypto

• Custom throughput

• Unlimited apps

• 24/7 VIP support

Chainstack  Pricing ‍

Chainstack has four main pricing tiers: Free, Growth, Business, and Enterprise.

Free ($0/month)

• Full nodes

• Consortium nodes

• Unlimited users/projects

• Analytics

• Platform API

• 3 million full nodes per month

• 0 archive nodes per month
  

Growth ($49/month)

• Archive Nodes

• Warp Transactions

• Dedicated nodes

• Bolt turbocharged sync

• 20 million full node requests per month

• 3 million archive node requests per month

Business ($349/month)

• Debug and trace APIs on

• Elastic archive nodes

• BNB Smart Chain dedicated nodes

• Hybrid hosting

• 140 million full node requests per month

• 20 million archive node requests per month

Enterprise ($990/month)

• Custom configuration

• Tailored load balancing

• White label branding

• Custom monitoring

• Private networking

• Priority support option

• 400 million full node requests per month

• 60 million archive node requests per month

The primary difference between the two providers lies in the level of access provided in their free tiers. Alchemy allows for 9 million more transactions per month and offers unlimited access to archive nodes, which can be challenging to implement otherwise. Alchemy’s business tier is also more customizable, allowing customers with intermediate needs to avoid paying full business and enterprise pricing, as they would with Chainstack.

6. Enhanced APIs

It is relatively straightforward to connect the Alchemy SDK to your existing project, requiring only two lines of code to install, and it is fully compatible with Ethers.js if that is already in use in a given project. In addition to RPC services, Alchemy and Chainstack offer APIs to enhance the functionality of your dApp. Instead of writing complex code to utilize APIs and SDKs, you can deliver improved functionality more quickly.

Alchemy and Chainstack each have their own collection of APIs for their developers to use.

Alchemy APIs

The additional APIs and SDKs offered by Alchemy include:

• NFT API

• Web3 SDK

• Trace API

• Notify API (Webhooks)

• Subscription API (Websockets)

• Flashbots API (send private transactions)

• Token API

• Transfers API

• Transaction Receipts API

Chainstack APIs

Chainstack provide developers APIs to access the following:

• Blocks info

• Transactions info

• Executing transactions

• Debug & trace

• Chain info

• Gas data

• Accounts info

• Logs and events

• Client information

NFT API

Because both Alchemy and Chainstack offer an NFT API, let's compare the comprehensiveness of the API endpoints.

Alchemy’s NFT API

Alchemy's NFT API is one of the most widely used in the industry, powering marketplaces such as Opensea, Makersplace, SuperRare, and many others. When used in combination with Alchemy's SDK, it is both easy to use and effective. 

The API supports 19+ different methods usable in the Ethereum ecosystem. For more information, check out the detailed documentation of all available Alchemy NFT methods.

Alchemy offers the following NFT API endpoints for Ethereum:

• getNFTs

• getNFTMetadata

• getContractMetadata

• getNFTsForCollection

• getOwnersForToken

• getOwnersForCollection

• getSpamContracts

• isSpamContracts

• reingestContract

• getFloorPrice

• computeRarity

• summarizeNFTAttributes

• reportSpam

Chainstack NFT API

Chainstack provides NFT APIs that allow developers to:

• Fetch NFTs

• Search NFTs

• Mint NFTS

• Manage NFTs

Any builders in the NFT space will find Alchemy to be far superior compared to Chainstack.

Alchemy's Account Abstraction SDK

The Account Abstraction SDK can be used to simplify the interaction with account abstraction primitives (user operations and bundlers).

It's a complete solution that implements an EIP-1193 provider, handling gas estimation, signing the tx, and fetching paymaster data (if you use one) with one method call. If you're using eth_sendTransaction, the SDK converts that into a user operation for you and sends it along.

7. Developer Tools

In addition to APIs, Alchemy and Chainstack offer a range of developer tools.

The Alchemy dashboard is a powerful developer tool that eliminates the need to build a logging system for user requests. It automatically logs and categorizes all user requests, making debugging and software improvement easier. The dashboard also displays request success rates and current response times. Alchemy Notify can also alert users and developers about specific user actions, transaction states, or gas fees.

Alchemy Developer Tools:

• Alchemy AI - generate web3 code quickly to supercharge your development cycle

• Explorer - see historical request information to quickly identify patterns

• Mempool Visualizer - monitor the current status of confirmed, stuck, and dropped transactions

• Composer - troubleshoot RPC requests, replay failed transactions for easier debugging

• Debug Toolkit - scan recent requests and quickly detect errors while debugging

• Dashboard - get high-level analytics on your dapp performance

• Usage Analytics - get dapp’s usage over different timeframes, app versions, and individual methods.

• Command Center - get high-level app health, requests per second, response times, and error rates

• User Insights - get geographic usage, traffic, and activity data, all without compromising user privacy or data security

• Alerts & Digests - get automated alerts of error points, and a daily digest reporting all key health metrics of your dapp

• Faucets - Alchemy provides multiple testnet faucets, including Sepolia faucet and Mumbai faucet

Chainstack offers organized viewing of historical ledger data, as well as notifications about specific transactions and infrastructure alerts. They also list tools created by other developers on their website, along with their best use cases.

8. User Experience

Both Alchemy and Chainstack provide a relatively straightforward user experience.

As mentioned earlier, implementing Alchemy’s SDK requires only a few lines of code. Alchemy provides a clear and detailed explanation of usage in its documentation.

Chainstack offers a high degree of customization in its nodes and deployment options, particularly at the enterprise level. Depending on their needs, clients can use all or part of Chainstack’s infrastructure.

9. Customer Support

Alchemy provides 24/7 support from its engineers to all users and maintains a 98 CSat score.

Chainstack offers 24/5 customer support to some customers and priority support (24/7) to enterprise-level customers. Both companies also offer community assistance and support through fairly active Discord servers.

Which node provider is better - Alchemy or Chainstack?

Alchemy's blockchain development platform provides RPC nodes with more accurate and reliable blockchain data, and more web3 tools and APIs compared to Chainstack.

Alchemy’s Supernode is particularly noteworthy, as it is unique to the company and extremely powerful in terms of scalability and accuracy. While Chainstack offers unique customization options in its enterprise tier, Alchemy’s free/developer tier allows for approximately nine million more transactions per month and provides unlimited access to archive nodes, which require significant computing power.

For large enterprises, the customization options offered by Chainstack may be attractive. However, web3 development is largely driven by individual innovators, and for the average developer, Alchemy is likely the better choice due to the enhanced capabilities of its free tier and the power of its Supernode. By providing a single solution to the many challenges faced by node providers rather than separate ones (such as an enhanced load balancer or elastic nodes), Alchemy positions itself as both more reliable and useful as blockchain technology evolves.

Therefore, there is no one correct answer to which node provider is best for your web3 project. To decide which multichain node provider is the right choice, determine the non-negotiable areas of your project (e.g., blockchains), test both options and choose the one that works best.

With its extremely powerful free tier, developers can get started on Alchemy with zero risk. Begin using Alchemy now to gain access to an extensive set of developer tools available for developers.