Top 11 Solana RPC Node Providers (2024)
Written by Alchemy
Reviewed by Brady Werkheiser
What is a Solana RPC provider?
A Solana RPC node provider builds and manages the infrastructure necessary for decentralized applications (dApps) to send transactions, make requests, and receive information from the public Solana blockchain. There are multiple types of Solana RPC node providers including public, private, and shared.
What does RPC mean?
A Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a software communication protocol that allows one program to request services from another system, without having to understand that system’s network. For example, your local computer may use a Remote Procedure Call to retrieve data from a remote server network.
When running a Solana dApp, RPC requests are used to request data from the Solana node cluster. Then, specially designed RPC nodes (sometimes called RPC endpoints) process RPC requests made by a decentralized application (dApp), run transactions through the network’s validator protocol, and send back the data the dApp asked for.
What is the difference between public and private RPC endpoints?
Public RPC endpoints are available to anyone that wants to connect to the Solana blockchain and private RPC endpoints are dedicated connections that only the owner of the API key can use to access the Solana blockchain.
Using Solana’s public RPC nodes, dApps can send their RPC requests for free. However, public endpoints often lack any advanced features including: automatically scaling to program needs, reliable resource availability, and providing responsive customer service. Public endpoints are also competed for by many program’s on the network, so they impose rate-limits and frequently deny requests from clients overusing resources.
While public RPC nodes are suitable for low-volume requests in development, consumer-ready program’s need the features of dedicated, or private RPC endpoints to allow users to benefit from Solana’s lightning-fast transactions speeds and low-latency.
Solana RPC providers handle all the overhead of managing RPC nodes, giving your dApp access to its own, private RPC nodes. Additionally, some RPC providers will adhere to explicit service-level agreements (SLAs), providing you and your web3 development team with guaranteed service, whenever you need it.
This article will take a look at some of the best Solana RPC providers in the market. After learning the traits that characterize great Solana RPC node providers and exploring your options, you can choose the best RPC solution for your needs and budget.
How to Choose a Solana RPC Provider
Because there are many options in the market, choosing the right Solana RPC node provider can be difficult. Some of the most important traits of the best RPC node providers are reliability, scalability, data correctness, latency, advanced APIs, and customer support.
1. Reliability
High RPC performance necessitates reliable infrastructure. The Solana RPC through which your dApp is sending requests needs to have consistent uptime to guarantee all requests are serviced. One method to achieve reliability is by avoiding any single point of failure so that when something unexpected happens with a node, there are backups in place to maintain 99.99% uptime.
2. Scalability
As a dApp's user-base grows, so will the total amount of RPC requests made to the RPC node as well as the total requests per second. Great RPC providers are able to scale throughput on demand to support naturally growing companies and hyped NFT drops without failing or a degraded user experience.
3. Data Correctness
When a person interacts with a dApp, they should always receive correct and consistent data. Unfortunately, data accuracy is a problem in web3. Because each node running a blockchain keeps its own copy of blocks, transactions, and logs, the same load balancers used in Web 2.0 are unable to properly keep data in sync.
Without correct data, your dApp may run into a variety of problems:
Smart contract executions might return different answers to the exact same query
Transaction nonces can become inconsistent, causing new transactions to fail because they use invalid nonces
Data correctness is essential to improving the web3 user experience, and dApps should expect node providers to serve correct data.
4. Latency
The latency of an RPC node is measured by the time between a dApp making an RPC request and the time when the data response is returned to the dApp. Using private RPC nodes guarantees availability to service your requests, instead of having to wait for public RPC node resources to become available.
There are two primary types of nodes offered by RPC providers:
Dedicated nodes - The same node, or node pool, always services your dApp.
Geo-load balanced nodes - Requests are always routed to a node closest to the user.
Using dedicated nodes provides the lowest-latency but is most fit for requests that are all made close to the node location. Dedicated nodes are often used by traders or others who consistently work from the same place and do not need the versatility of many node locations.
Geo-located nodes are great for providing low-latency to user-bases that are spread across many locations.
5. APIs
Solana uses the JSON-RPC protocol. Thus, the standard for RPC providers is to offer support for Solana's JSON-RPC API. Besides the default API support, some node providers offer enhanced APIs that build additional API endpoints to expand the use cases their RPC nodes can offer dApps.
6. Customer Support
The best Solana RPC node providers offer customer support to help dApps minimize downtime that can result in user churn and lost revenue. When a dApp encounters RPC issues, a dedicated customer support team that responds quickly, is knowledgeable, and efficiently resolves issues alleviates pressure from dApp teams.
11 of the Best Solana RPC Providers
Based on the characteristics that make for great RPC node providers, here are some of the best providers for Solana. Because every dApp's needs are different, this list does not rank providers. This list is simply meant to highlight the available options, present pricing information, and showcase a few differentiators.
1. Alchemy
Alchemy now supports Solana, and is proud to bring the innovative Supernode technology to the Solana blockchain. Solana developers building on Alchemy can expect the same dedication to reliability, scalability, and low-latency performance that is trusted by the world's largest dApps like OpenSea.
Pricing
There are three pricing tiers to Alchemy’s RPC node service:
Free - $0/month, approximately 12 million transactions per month
Growth - $49/month, approximately 16 million transactions per month
Enterprise - customized usage and throughput based on specific needs
Alchemy’s competitive pricing and high volume free tier is the largest free tier in web3.
Because it is building season, developing on Solana with Alchemy will be free for the remainder of 2022 for the first 500 teams to sign up.
Performance
With a proprietary node coordinator service, Alchemy’s RPC nodes guarantee constant data correctness. Supernode uses a distributed design where each component of your Solana RPC node functionality, including, but not limited to, getting blocks, account information, node information, and transaction information is serviced by a separate, dedicated distributed system. When any discrete part of one of these systems fail, there is always another available node to service your dApp.
Between this distributed design and proprietary data coordination, Alchemy is able to guarantee 99.9% node uptime, infinite scalability, extremely low-latency, and 100% data correctness. Alchemy’s Solana endpoint supports most JSON-RPC Solana methods, and allows access to full archive data on the Solana blockchain.
Alchemy’s Supernode has shown industry-leading performance as the most widely used web3 API for Ethereum applications with 70% of Ethereum’s top applications, and over $100 billion dollars in yearly volume are enabled by Supernode’s reliable, scalable, and low-latency node infrastructure.
Customer Support
Alchemy maintains a 98% Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score, and dedicated Customer Product Engineers (CPEs) provide consistent, hands-on support. Customers get direct access to Alchemy’s team, advising as they build their products, and the opportunity to interact with Alchemy’s many valuable connections in the blockchain industry.
Deploy a Solana RPC Node with Alchemy
To start building on Alchemy:
Create a new Solana app during the onboarding flow
Copy your Solana RPC endpoint URL
Update your dApp to use Alchemy's Solana RPC endpoint
2. Helius
Helius is one of the leading Solana RPC providers, and they offer a broad range of enhanced APIs, flexible pricing, and an intuitive dashboard.
Product Features
In addition to Helius' highly scalable RPC services that are used by some of the largest companies building on Solana like Backpack and Helium, Helius offers a suite of custom APIs to help Solana developers ship products faster.
Digital Asset Standard (DAS) API - query any tokens, NFTs, and compressed NFTs
Custom Webhooks - stream onchain Solana events in real time
Geyser API - stream data about accounts, slots, blocks, and transactions
Enhanced APIs - token metadata, token balances, and parsed transactions
Mint API - mint compressed NFTs in bulk
Pricing
Helius offers three tiers of shared pool RPC services, a dedicated node offering for customers that require heavy
Free (shared) - $49/month for 30M credits and 150 RPC requests/s
Hacker (shared) - $49/month for 30M credits and 150 RPC requests/s
Startup (shared) - $199/month for 130M credits and 300 RPC requests/s
Business (shared) - $399/month for 400M credits and 500 RPC requests/s
Dedicated Nodes - Starting at $900/month
3. Triton
With RPC nodes across the US, EU, and Asia Pacific, Triton is another RPC provider dedicated exclusively to running Solana RPC nodes.
Pricing
Triton offers three tiers of shared pool RPC services, or a custom configured private server or pool.
Tier 1 (shared) - $500/month for an average of 50 requests/second
Tier 2 (shared) - $1,000/month for an average of 100 requests/second
Tier 3 (shared) - $1,500/month for an average of 150 requests/second
Custom - Scales to meet client needs
Because of Triton's expensive base tiers, new teams launching dApps without product-market fit, may want to consider alternative Solana RPC node providers that offer a more comprehensive free tier.
Performance
To support an extremely high level of reliability, Triton focuses their Solana RPC nodes around avoiding any single point of failure. Using geo-routing, low-latency is achieved by sending requests to highly available servers that are best located to service any user location.
When nodes in any RPC pool become unavailable, Triton automatically switches to backups in the same region. If all the servers in a region were to fail, your dApp remains backed up by their nodes in other regions. Further, their servers are operated by multiple different providers, guaranteeing no centralized point of failure.
Customer Support
Triton commits to 24/7 monitoring and support. Like their servers, support staff is located throughout the world to help teams across time zones.
4. Syndica
Syndica is an RPC provider exclusively supporting the Solana blockchain, and does not offer nodes for any other blockchain. Syndica is currently offering a limited access private beta to use their RPC nodes.
Pricing
Developers will find three pricing tiers for Syndica’s RPC nodes:
Starter - Free for 1,000 requests per month
Developer - $65/month for 1 million requests per month
Business - $499/month for unlimited requests
Because the number of free requests offered by Syndica is significantly lower than alternatives, new teams looking to extensively test their dApps before they start generating revenue, may want to consider another Solana RPC provider with a more robust free tier.
Performance
Using their fault-tolerant RPC node infrastructure, Syndica claims 99.9% uptime of their RPC network. Syndica offers dedicated nodes and globally located nodes.
While dApps communicate directly with their dedicated nodes, sitting between your dApp and Syndica’s geo-located RPC nodes is the Syndica API gateway. The API gateway always routes requests to the highest-performing nodes–avoiding slow or failing nodes.
Lastly, all of Syndica’s nodes are elastic, meaning they are able to scale appropriately to meet request volume.
APIs
In addition to basic Solana API support, Syndica has a custom account indexing API that alleges a 10x speed increase in the getProgramAccounts RPC method.
Customer Support
Syndica does not advertise any active customer support. However, their docs answer many questions about using their technology. The Syndica team can also be reached via email or in their community Discord server.
5. GenesysGo
GenesysGo is an infrastructure provider on Solana that manages a validator node, a Solana-based decentralized storage platform, and a network of RPC nodes.
Pricing
Access to GenesysGo’s RPC nodes is completely free because of the profits generated from the company’s validator node, called the Shadowy Super Coder DAO (SSC-DAO) Validator, and the sale of GenesysGo’s utility NFT, the Shadowy Super Coders NFT.
While access is free, request limits are placed on a per IP basis, and depend on the request. The more costly operations, sendTransaction and getProgramAccounts, are capped at 10 requests per second and 15 requests per second respectively. All other JSON-RPC calls are limited to 200 requests per second.
Because of these hard caps on requests per second, Solana dApps that achieve significant scale will need to migrate to an enterprise-grade solution to handle additional throughput.
Performance
The GensysGo RPC Network is composed of a global server cluster, with 300+ bare metal servers located in 9 countries across 3 continents. This decentralized and distributed network avoids a single point failure. Additionally, Shadow Network RPC nodes all give access to full archival Solana data.
To distribute requests across their global network, GenesysGo uses GeoDNS load balancing. Each request is sent to the geographically closest server to achieve the lowest possible latency from any location.
Customer Support
The GenesysGo founders hold frequent town hall meetings for their community, showing a dedication to building a strong customer base. Additionally, they can be reached through their Discord.
6. Quicknode
Another blockchain infrastructure industry leader, Quicknode, offers scalable and reliable Solana RPC nodes with claims of serving over 50 billion requests monthly and powering over 50% of Solana’s projects.
Pricing
Quicknode offers four service tiers, where usage is measured in API Credits, which vary depending on how many resources an RPC request requires.
Free - $0/month for 10 million credits/month
Build - $49/month for 20 million credits/month
Scale - $299/month for 120 million credits/month
Enterprise - Custom, for 300+ million credits/month
Comparing Quicknode's free tier and Alchemy's free tier can be challenging because Alchemy's Compute Units and Quicknode's API Credits are not equivalent.
Because we know Alchemy's average transactions is 12 million on the free tier, and the minimum cost of a Solana request on Quicknode is 1 API credit, we can infer that Quicknode's free tier offers significantly lower free compute resources than Alchemy.
Performance
Quicknode offers both dedicated endpoints and geolocated nodes. All nodes scale to match a dApp's request volume, and are guaranteed with 99.99% uptime via Quicknode’s SLA. Quicknode's global RPC nodes are significantly faster than Solana’s public RPC endpoints.
APIs
In addition to support for the standard JSON-RPC methods, Quicknode's Solana RPC nodes support two custom APIs. These methods allow developers to fetch NFTs by creator and by wallet, directly through their RPC node.
Customer Support
Quicknode's level of support depends on pricing tier, which ranges from community support for free users to 8-12hr response times for teams in their highest tiers.
7. Chainstack
Deploying self-healing RPC nodes, Chainstack is an RPC provider with reliable node uptime.
Pricing
There are four plan options for Chainstack users to choose from:
Developer - Free for 3 million requests/month
Growth - $49/month for 20 million requests/month
Business - $349/month for 140 million requests/month
Enterprise - $990/month for 400 million requests/month
Each plan gives access to their elastic full nodes, which scale to request volume. However, only tiers Growth and above may deploy dedicated nodes.
Compared to other free plans, Chainstack's 3 million requests per month are significantly lower than alternative RPC node providers.
Performance
Whenever RPC nodes encounter issues, Chainstack’s self-healing technology allows each failing node to quickly be replaced by a healthy one. Their elastic Solana RPC nodes are located across many geographical locations, and the company guarantees 99.9% uptime through their SLA.
Further, Chainstack has developed their patented Bolt technology, which can sync new nodes with the blockchain instantaneously. To give access to the whole blockchain, Chainstack allows full archival data access in partnership with SolanaFM.
Customer Support
Support is varied depending on a developer’s subscription. In the “Dedicated” support tier, developers will receive 24/5 support over email with responses in less than 24 hours.
In their “Priority” support tier, 24/7 support with less than 12 hour response times can be found through email, live chat, and phone.
Additionally, their public Telegram and Discord are available to connect with the community.
8. Ankr
Alongside a broad range of infrastructure and multichain support, Ankr provides fast and accessible Solana RPC nodes.
Pricing
Ankr’s pricing model is split solely between a free tier, and a premium pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model. Ankr's public tier rate limits clients during moments of high traffic, and restrains dApps to 1 million requests per day. In the premium tier, dApps can send unlimited requests through Ankr’s RPC nodes while getting charged per request.
Performance
For those in the public tier, Ankr maintains 30 public nodes around the world. When any node fails, Solana RPC requests are rerouted to any of the other functioning public nodes. These public nodes serviced ~2,000 requests per second over the past 30 days (as of 7/20/22).
By opting for Ankr’s premium tier, users get access to faster, dedicated Solana RPC endpoints. For those in the premium tier, Ankr promotes creating a custom SLA, to guarantee you are receiving precisely the service you pay for.
Ankr emphasizes a distributed and decentralized Solana RPC node service, as such, their servers do not rely on any centralized hosting authority, and are instead maintained across the globe in independent data centers.
Customer Support
Your dApp’s Solana RPC node can be supported through Ankr’s Discord, Telegram, Reddit, and the company docs. For those in the premium tier, the custom SLA serves an explicit guarantee for the customer service your dApp needs.
9. Runnode
Runnode is aiming to simplify the Solana development environment by lowering the bar of entry to using Solana RPC nodes. They are exclusively a Solana RPC provider.
Pricing
Developers using Runnodes' RPC services have four service options:
Free - $0/month for 100,000 requests/day
Developer - $50/month for 200,000 requests/day
Essential - $200/month for 1 million requests/day
Enterprise - Custom and covers requests as needed
At 3,000,000 requests per month, Runnode's free tier is significantly lower than previously mentioned alternatives.
Performance
Runnode’s RPC nodes are guaranteed at 99.9% uptime, and boast unlimited scalability. Additionally, Solana developers get to experience no rate limits, allowing all of their user’s requests to be serviced. Runnode supports all Solana JSON-RPC methods, and delivers a simple, cost effective solution to Solana RPC node management.
Customer Support
Support varies depending on the level of the client’s plan. In the Free tier, customers will receive Discord support.
Up to the Enterprise level, direct and dedicated customer support seeks to satisfy their mission of an easy-to-use Solana RPC node service.
Finally, at the Enterprise level, projects are supported by a private Discord channel.
10. Blockdaemon
A large player in the blockchain development space, Blockdaemon provides infrastructure across many blockchains, including staking, funding, and nodes. Included in their product-suite, Solana developers can make use of their dedicated RPC nodes.
Pricing
All Blockdaemon RPC node pricing depends on your dApps needs. The company requires you contact their sales team for each project to determine the right plan unlike alternative Solana RPC providers which are self-serve, open to anyone, and many times completely free.
Performance
While Blockdaemon’s Solana RPC nodes are hosted by centralized providers - AWS and Google Cloud Service - multiple geo-locations guarantees high reliability. Blockdaemon focuses on providing extremely low-latency dedicated RPC nodes without automatic routing based on request location.
Each Blockdaemon dedicated node is exclusively yours, with secure and unique address, connection, and authentication keys.
Using their dedicated RPC nodes, developers can take advantage of Blockdaemon’s multi-cloud support. By deploying Solana RPC nodes across both of Blockdaemon’s server providers, dApps can achieve a level of decentralization and reliable redundancy.
11. Figment
Through Figment's Datahub platform, Figment supports developers with redundant Solana RPC nodes.
Pricing
Figment’s Datahub RPC nodes are available in three tiers, where the cost per request scales inverse to the amount of requests made.
Free - $0/month for 3 million requests/month
Pro - $50/month for 15 million requests/month
Enterprise - Contact for customized needs
Compared to alternative Solana RPC node providers, Figment's free tier is significantly lower.
Performance
Using a unique three-layer server structure, Figment’s Solana RPC nodes are extremely resistant to failure. After passing through the top two layers of Figment’s infrastructure, requests are processed in pools of Solana RPC nodes. Each pool contains a set of identical nodes, with synced data to always provide correct data.
If at any point a node in the Solana RPC pool fails, requests are instantly transferred to another node in a pool. In the worst case scenario, Figment reroutes RPC requests to new pools altogether.
APIs
In addition to all of the standard Solana JSON-RPC APIs, Figment gives developers access to their fast Transaction Search API. With 99.9% uptime, transaction data can quickly be retrieved from the Solana blockchain, regardless of the protocol’s latency.
Customer Support
In the free tier, developers can find support for troubleshooting their RPC nodes through the community Discord and by email to Figment. In the Pro and Enterprise tiers, private Telegram channels ensure quick response-times to any of your dApps RPC-related needs.
The Best Free Solana RPC Provider
Based on the total number of requests served on a monthly basis for free, scalability, reliability, data correctness, and support, Alchemy has the best free tier for Solana developers. To start building on Solana or to migrate your Solana RPC endpoint, sign up for a free Solana developer account.
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