Solana RPCs Compared 2025: Carbium vs. Helius vs. QuickNode
A transparent side by side comparison of Solana RPC providers. We compare Carbium, Helius, and QuickNode on pricing, rate limits, and Swiss-grade reliability.
Introduction
If you are building on Solana, choosing an infrastructure provider usually feels like a tradeoff. You generally have two "default" options: Helius and QuickNode.
QuickNode is the massive multi-chain generalist, reliable, but often expensive when scaling Solana workloads. Helius is the Solana specialist, brought us by Co-Founder of Solana, excellent for data parsing, but priced at a premium.
We built Carbium to fill the gap between them. We wanted a provider that combined enterprise-grade RPC performance, Swiss-based privacy and reliability, and a unified stack that includes the full-vertical one-stop-service for Solana developers.
This post compares the three providers based on measurable differences in pricing, reliability, and full-stack capabilities.
The Feature Breakdown
The table below removes the marketing fluff and focuses on the specs that matter to developers: Rate Limits, SLA, and Capability.
| Capability | Carbium | Helius | QuickNode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dedicated RPC Nodes | Yes | No | No |
| Solana Expertise | Specialist | Specialist | Generalist |
| Indexing (All Tokens) | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Transaction Parsing API | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| gRPC Included | Yes, >320$ plans | Add-on | Add-on |
| Wallet/Crypto Subs | Yes | Yes | No |
| RPC Rate Limit | 500 RPS | 500 RPS | 500 RPS |
| Uptime Guarantee | 99.99% | 99.99% | 99.85% |
| Support SLA | 8 Hours | 8 Hours | 12 Hours |
| Pro Tier Pricing | $640 / mo | $999 / mo | $1,000+ / mo |
Note: Rate limits and SLAs reflect published information at the time of writing. Uptime figures are rounded long-term availability claims.
Key Differences Explained
1. Performance & Infrastructure
- Carbium: We operate in dedicated faciltiies, mainly Swiss data centers. This isn't just a branding point, it allows for distinct neutrality and privacy advantages, along with low-latency access across European markets. Self-hosted bare-metal servers offers top of the chart P50 and P95 rates.
- Helius: maintains high-performance RPCs and is widely respected for their massive coverage with cloud solutions and high-scale stability.
- QuickNode: offers strong performance, but because they operate a shared multi-chain architecture, heavy load on other chains can occasionally introduce variability.
2. The Unified Stack Advantage
This is where the fragmentation of the Solana ecosystem hurts developers. Usually, you need one provider for RPC and another for trading execution.
- Carbium is the only platform that unifies the stack. We combine RPC, a SWAP with gasless swaps, API, and Validator into one whole ecosystem. This allows teams to build wallets, trading bots, or DeFi products without stitching together multiple vendors. Other upside is RPCs and validator are physically close to each other to eliminate jitter.
- Helius is excellent for transaction enrichment and data, but lacks the high-performance execution infrastructure (swaps/trading).
- QuickNode is great for raw RPC, but if you need high-level transaction parsing or swap routing, you will likely need to pay a second provider.
3. Pricing Models
- Carbium: We use predictable pricing by splitting plans into easy ingestable packages. No addons, all included. gRPC starting from 320$ and above plans. For enterprises highly customizeable plans with dedicated solutions.
- Helius: Features like gRPC are often gated behind higher pricing tiers.
- QuickNode: Uses an API Credit model. Because Solana is a high-throughput chain, Solana workloads consume credits significantly faster than Ethereum workloads, making scaling expensive.
Verdict: Which One is Right for You?
Choose QuickNode if:
You are a large enterprise team managing infrastructure across multiple blockchains (ETH, BTC, SOL) simultaneously and need a single billing dashboard for all of them.
Choose Helius if:
Your primary need is deeper data analysis. If you are building a block explorer or a dashboard that requires enriched transaction parsing for historical data, Helius is a strong choice.
Choose Carbium if:
You need a high-performance execution layer. If you are building a trading system, a wallet, or a dApp that needs to read data and execute swaps reliably, Carbium offers the best price-to-performance ratio. We rely on self-hosted bare-metal solutions. With higher rate limits (500 RPS) and Swiss infrastructure, it is the choice for developers who want a predictable, specialized partner.
Technical Reference & Resources
Carbium
RPC Comparison Docs
