# On-chain Analytics Platforms

Wallets, flows, protocol metrics and the queries behind them — and which of the four very different products you are actually shopping for.

*https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/onchain-analytics*

## What this category is

Products that read the chains themselves rather than the venues on top of them. The raw material
is public and free; what is sold is indexing, labelling and the judgement embedded in a metric's
definition.

The boundary against market data runs through where the number comes from, not what it describes.
A token's price on a DEX is market data even though the trade settled on-chain. A token's holder
distribution is on-chain analytics even though it moves the price. Products that do both are
listed under the job they are bought for, with the other as a secondary category — which is why
the listing below carries four [market-data APIs](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/market-data-apis) alongside the
seventeen cards that call this category home.

## Four products, one category

Comparing across these four is close to meaningless; comparing within one is exactly what a buyer
needs. The job facet on each card says which one it is, and the four groups are unevenly sized in
a way that tells you where the money is.

**A SQL editor over indexed chain data** — [Dune](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/dune), [Allium](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/allium),
[Footprint Analytics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/footprint-analytics) and [Bitquery](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/bitquery). You write the
query. The product is the indexing, the schema and the execution engine, and the ceiling is your
own SQL. Buy this when the question you have is not one somebody else has already asked, and
expect to spend time on the schema before you get an answer. Note that only three of those four
actually speak SQL — Bitquery is GraphQL, which is a different skill and a different query you
cannot lift from a colleague's dashboard.

**A labelled dashboard** — [Nansen](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/nansen), [Arkham](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/arkham) and
[Bubblemaps](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/bubblemaps). The product is the label set: the work of deciding that this
address is a particular exchange's hot wallet and that one is a fund. You do not write queries;
you read somebody's attribution. Buy this when the question is "who", and understand that you are
buying a judgement you cannot audit. Labels are proprietary, rarely dated, and wrong often enough
to matter.

**A curated metric set** is the largest group by some way — eight of the seventeen, including
[Glassnode](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/glassnode), [CryptoQuant](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/cryptoquant), [Santiment](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/santiment),
[Artemis](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/artemis) and [Token Terminal](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/token-terminal). Somebody has already
defined the metrics they think are worth watching and computes them consistently. You get
comparability over time and no ability to ask anything outside the list. Buy this when you want
the same number next quarter that you got this quarter.

**Protocol and chain accounting** is the fourth kind and the one usually missed —
[DefiLlama](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/defillama) and [Trading Strategy](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/trading-strategy) on the DeFi side,
[L2BEAT](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/l2beat) and [growthepie](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/growthepie) on the rollup side. These answer
questions about a protocol or a network rather than about an address or a price, and the last two
are the only cards in the category published as open source, under grant funding rather than a
subscription. That is not a discount — it is a different incentive, and it shows in what they
measure.

## Nothing here is as fresh as it looks

Twelve of the seventeen cards record a latency that is not real-time. Five claim real time —
Arkham, Nansen, Bitquery, Santiment and its [API sibling](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/sanapi) — and two say end-of-day
outright, which are Artemis and Token Terminal, the two most focused on protocol revenue. The rest
sit in between at "delayed".

This is not a flaw and it is rarely disclosed as a lag. Indexing a block, decoding contract calls,
resolving labels and recomputing a metric are four sequential steps, and a platform that recomputes
a daily series has no reason to do it more than daily. What it means for you is narrow and
absolute: **a decision that has to be made inside a block cannot be made from this category.**
Front-running a whale is not a product here. Understanding what a whale did is.

## The dashboard and the API are two products at two prices

The catalogue has a natural experiment sitting in it. Santiment ships two cards because it is two
products — the dashboard and [SanAPI](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/sanapi), the programmatic access to the same
numbers — and the cheapest paid month on the API card is more than three times the cheapest paid
month on the dashboard. That is the shape across this whole category, usually hidden inside one
pricing page rather than split across two.

If you intend to pull numbers into your own system, price the API tier, not the one on the front
page. The gap between the two is routinely larger than the gap between free and paid.

The pricing that is not published follows the four kinds above rather than the vendors. Every one
of the query platforms keeps a tier with no number on it, and Allium publishes no number anywhere.
None of the three labelled dashboards does — Nansen prints a per-call rate next to its monthly
plans, Arkham prices its intel API by the month, and Bubblemaps charges nothing for the map at all.
What Bubblemaps does instead is reserve its advanced features for holders of the vendor's own
token, with no threshold published, which is a cost that never shows up in a price comparison
because it is not a price;
[a token threshold is not a price](https://cryptomarkets.tools/guides/a-token-threshold-is-not-a-price) is the long version.
The per-category counts are on
[tools you cannot buy without a sales call](https://cryptomarkets.tools/collections/priced-on-request), and why the silence
clusters where it does is in
[why this market won't quote you a price](https://cryptomarkets.tools/guides/why-half-this-market-wont-quote-a-price).

## The mistake this category invites

**Two platforms' versions of the same metric can differ by more than the thing you are measuring.**
"Active addresses" can mean senders, receivers, or either. Exchange netflow depends entirely on
whose label set says which addresses belong to the exchange, and those label sets are built by
different teams from different evidence. TVL may or may not net out collateral counted twice across
two protocols.

None of that is error. It is two methods, and the numbers are not interchangeable even when they
carry the same name — the same problem the price side of the catalogue has with
[aggregate prices](https://cryptomarkets.tools/guides/where-the-bitcoin-price-comes-from), one layer down. The practical rule
is to pick one platform per series and stay on it, because a chart that switches sources mid-way is
an artefact with a trend drawn through it.
[Glassnode versus CryptoQuant](https://cryptomarkets.tools/compare/glassnode-vs-cryptoquant) is the two-vendor version of this
argument in full.

## What to check before you commit

**Which chains, at what depth.** Every platform here claims multi-chain. Depth varies enormously:
a chain may be indexed to full contract-call level, or it may be balances and transfers only. The
chain you care about is either a first-class citizen or a line in a coverage table, and the table
does not distinguish.

**Entity labels go stale silently.** An address labelled as an exchange wallet two years ago is
still labelled that way after the exchange stopped using it. Ask when the label set was last
revised, and treat an unlabelled address as unlabelled rather than as retail.

**Historical recomputation.** When a platform revises a metric's definition, some backfill the
history and some do not. If you are charting a two-year series, that decision is the difference
between a trend and an artefact.

**What the credit actually buys on a query platform.** A metered plan on a SQL product is charged
against execution, not against calls, so an unselective query costs what a careless index costs.
The meter, the window and the penalty are three separate [rate-limit](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/rate-limit)
choices, and they are made independently.

**Whether the output may leave your organisation.** A research subscription and a
[redistribution](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/redistribution) licence are different purchases here exactly as they are
for price data, and the clause is in the terms rather than on the pricing page.

## What is not here

Block explorers, node providers and indexing infrastructure sold as a developer backend. Reading a
single transaction is not analysis, and an RPC endpoint is plumbing rather than a market tool.
Wallet and custody products are out of scope for the catalogue entirely. Anything whose output is
which token to buy is advice, not tooling.

One more thing belongs in this section, because it is a fact about the category rather than about
any card in it. **Three on-chain platforms have pages here written for readers whose product has
already gone, and all three shut down outright rather than changing their terms**:
[Flipside](https://cryptomarkets.tools/alternatives/flipside), [IntoTheBlock](https://cryptomarkets.tools/alternatives/intotheblock) and
[Parsec](https://cryptomarkets.tools/alternatives/parsec). Read that as a warning about dependency rather than about any
vendor on this page: a dashboard is a habit, but a query you scheduled, a metric you charted for
two years and a label set you cited are all things that stop existing on somebody else's
timetable.

## What this category looks like

Counted across the 21 cards below, not quoted from anyone.

- **Free tier:** 19 of 21
- **Cheapest paid month:** median $72, across $35 to $350 — from the 14 cards that publish a monthly price
- **Has a "call us" tier:** 14 of 21
- **Publishes no tiers at all:** 1 of 21
- **Open source:** 2 of 21
- **Ships an MCP server:** 14 of 21

## Cards

- [Allium](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/allium.md) — Institutional SQL over 85+ indexed chains, with labels and no published price.
- [Arkham](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/arkham.md) — Address explorer where wallets already carry a named owner and a confidence grade.
- [Artemis](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/artemis.md) — Chain and protocol fundamentals — fees, revenue, users — one definition everywhere.
- [Bitquery](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/bitquery.md) — GraphQL over indexed chains — self-service plans are a real-time window, not history.
- [Bubblemaps](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/bubblemaps.md) — Token holder graphs that show which wallets have been sending funds to each other.
- [Coin Metrics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coin-metrics.md) — Institutional reference rates, exchange market data and network metrics behind one API.
- [CoinGecko API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coingecko-api.md) — Prices, market data and onchain DEX data for 18,000+ coins, via REST, websocket or MCP.
- [CoinMarketCap API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinmarketcap-api.md) — Prices, rankings, DEX and derivatives data billed by data points returned, not by call.
- [CryptoQuant](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/cryptoquant.md) — Exchange reserves, miner flows and MVRV for four chains, as charts, alerts and an API.
- [DefiLlama](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/defillama.md) — DeFi's default metric set, with the TVL definition written down in public.
- [Dune](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/dune.md) — SQL over 100+ indexed chains, with the API on every plan including the free one.
- [Footprint Analytics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/footprint-analytics.md) — Drag-and-drop charts or SQL over an indexed warehouse, free — with a slowing pulse.
- [Glassnode](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/glassnode.md) — A curated metric set in a charting studio, with the API on a separate annual plan.
- [growthepie](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/growthepie.md) — Ethereum L2 economics, CC BY licensed, on an API with no key — and chains pay for depth.
- [L2BEAT](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/l2beat.md) — Ethereum L2 metrics with the risk assessment behind them, MIT-licensed and free.
- [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari.md) — Asset profiles, 500-source news and analyst-verified event monitoring, with an API.
- [Nansen](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/nansen.md) — A labelled view of the chain — who is buying, not just which address.
- [SanAPI](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/sanapi.md) — The GraphQL API under Sanbase, sold on its own plans with its own call budget.
- [Santiment](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/santiment.md) — On-chain, social and developer metrics for a few thousand assets, on one set of axes.
- [Token Terminal](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/token-terminal.md) — Protocol fundamentals as an income statement — fees, revenue, earnings, multiples.
- [Trading Strategy](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/trading-strategy.md) — Normalised DeFi vault returns, TVL and risk across 117 protocols, with an AGPL backtester.

## FAQ

### What is the difference between on-chain analytics and crypto market data?

Market data is what the venues report — prices, order books, trades. On-chain analytics is derived from reading chain state directly — balances, transfers, contract calls, holder distributions. A product that does both is listed here only when reading the chain is what it is bought for.

### Is there a free on-chain analytics platform?

Yes, at both ends. Some curated-metric platforms publish a substantial free dashboard and charge for the API, and at least one SQL platform includes API access on every tier including the free one. What free almost never includes is entity labels — the thing that turns an address into a name is the most expensive part of this category.

### Why do two platforms report different numbers for the same protocol?

Because almost every headline metric here is a definition rather than a measurement. Active addresses, TVL and volume each depend on which contracts count, whether bridged assets are double-counted and how wash trading is filtered. Read the methodology note before treating a difference as an error.

### Do I need to know SQL to use an on-chain analytics platform?

Only for one of the four kinds of product on this page. The query platforms hand you a schema and an editor and the ceiling is your own SQL — and one of them speaks GraphQL rather than SQL, so even that skill does not transfer across the whole group. Labelled dashboards and curated metric sets are read rather than queried, and are bought precisely by people who do not want to write the query.

### Is on-chain data real time?

Usually not, and most cards here say so plainly. Twelve of the seventeen record a latency other than real-time — indexing, decoding, labelling and metric computation each add a lag, and the products built around daily protocol accounting record end-of-day outright. If a decision has to be made inside a block, this is the wrong category to make it from.