DefiLlama vs Token Terminal vs Artemis: Only One Is Free to Pull

Three free websites, one free API

All three cards sell the same idea: somebody has already decided what fees, revenue, TVL and active users mean, applied it to every protocol, and written it down, so two protocols on two chains can be read side by side. All three are free to read in a browser. The difference is what happens the moment the numbers have to leave the browser.

• DefiLlama — the public REST API needs no key. $300 a month buys the catalogue the free endpoints do not serve (unlocks, active users, token liquidity), a documented rate limit and the MCP server.
• Token Terminal — free to read with full history, Pro at $350 a month, and the API as a third tier with no published price, booked through a demo. Pro does not include it.
• Artemis — a free Intern tier and a $100-a-month Investor seat, both sold in Analyst queries. API keys start at the $500-a-month-per-user Plugin seat, the spreadsheet add-in.

So the cheapest way to get protocol fundamentals into your own code is $0 at DefiLlama, $500 a month at Artemis, and unknown at Token Terminal until a sales call. Everything below either explains that gap or qualifies it.

The same word, counted three ways

Each card records where its vendor writes its definitions down, and the three places say different things about the same words.

TVL. DefiLlama is the one whose TVL definition is the product: two docs pages, one for contributors and one for analysts, and a per-protocol methodology string returned inline by the API. Deposits into a protocol's own contracts count. Borrowed coins, the protocol's own token, tokens it mints itself, vesting tokens and native chain staking are excluded or split into toggles, and double counting is flagged rather than summed. Token Terminal and Artemis both list TVL among their metrics, and neither card records how either vendor defines it. Two TVL figures for one protocol from two of these sites are not known to be the same measurement, and the cards cannot tell you whether they are.

Fees and revenue. Here DefiLlama and Token Terminal agree, and both publish it: revenue is fees minus supply-side revenue, the share the protocol keeps after paying lenders and liquidity providers. DefiLlama frames it as an income statement "inspired by GAAP", on an accrual basis, with negative values recorded rather than clamped. Artemis publishes a different distinction: FEES folds application-level fees on top of raw gas, while CHAIN_FEES does not. If you put an Artemis chain-fee series next to another vendor's fees, check which of the two you pulled.

Earnings. This is where Token Terminal stands alone. Its earnings are revenue minus cost of revenue, token incentives and operating expenses. Token incentives are framed explicitly as the analogue of stock-based compensation. The vendor also warns that the figure can understate costs a project does not report on-chain. The DefiLlama card names earnings as one of the terms it defines, but records no subtraction beyond protocol revenue and token holder revenue. The Artemis card does not list earnings at all. A multiple built on Token Terminal's earnings or its P/S ratio inherits every one of those judgements. It is a valuation input, not a valuation.

Active users. Artemis is the only one of the three that names the trap. CHAIN_DAU counts addresses that send a transaction on the chain, and DAU counts addresses that use a protocol's products. It also states that splitting DAU by category double-counts addresses active in two categories: 605,380 against 439,738 for Ethereum on the same day. Token Terminal lists daily, weekly and monthly users, and DefiLlama serves active users on its paid API. Neither card records the definition behind either number.

One more Artemis warning travels with any long series: in July 2026 its stablecoin transfer volume changed from an adjusted figure to gross transfers minus mints and burns under the same field name. A chart that crosses that date is two measurements.

What the price ladder actually buys

The three ladders meter different things, so the headline numbers do not line up.

DefiLlama — Free $0; Pro $49 a month ($490 a year), for CSV downloads, custom columns, spreadsheet functions and LlamaAI; API $300 a month ($3,000 a year), for 1,000 requests a minute, 1 million calls a month and then $0.60 per 1,000; Enterprise on request, for hourly history, raw database access and TVL by token address. The checkout opens on the yearly tab, so it shows $40.83 and $250. The figures here are the month-to-month rates.

Token Terminal — Free $0; Pro $350 a month, with annual billing advertised only as "Save 15%"; API custom, at 250,000 requests a day and 1,000 a minute; Datashare custom, with tables shared into your own BigQuery or Snowflake, where you also pay the query compute. Its pricing page contradicts itself on whether Free includes CSV exports, the spreadsheet plugin and MCP, and the card does not settle the question.

Artemis — Intern $0, which the docs put at 20 Analyst queries a month and the pricing page leaves unnumbered; Investor $100 a month for 100 queries; Plugin $500 a month per user for 1 million add-in calls and API access; Managing Director custom, from $50,000 a year in the docs, and the only tier with MCP and the Snowflake share.

Normalised to the question a developer asks: DefiLlama and Token Terminal both document 1,000 requests a minute on their API tiers, but DefiLlama also caps the month at 1 million calls and meters past that, while Token Terminal caps the day at 250,000. The Artemis card records no API rate limit, only add-in call allowances. An Artemis query is a question to its chat Analyst, not an API call, so the $100 tier buys nothing a script can use.

How many protocols, and who decides

DefiLlama listed 8,308 protocols across 468 chains in 102 categories on 19 September 2026. A protocol gets in through a pull request: a JavaScript adapter against a public repository, reviewed by the team. The card's caveat is that the adapter's author is usually the protocol being listed. The rules are public, but the person applying them is not neutral.

Token Terminal counts coverage per metric, and the spread is wide: on the same date, 718 projects with circulating market cap, 323 with fees, 322 with revenue, 233 with earnings and 201 with TVL. A project on the site is not necessarily a project in the metric you came for. Projects are added weekly from submissions, with priority to those that arrive with complete smart contract descriptions. You cannot add a metric. The vendor's own pages disagree on chains: "14+" in the FAQ, "hundreds" on the data-approach page.

Artemis documents 112 chains, names a core set of twenty, and quotes 600-plus protocols alongside 30,000-plus equity tickers in the same namespace. Its card records how coverage leaves rather than how it arrives. On 27 May 2026 Artemis turned off the pipelines for 122 chains and protocols "where customer demand had significantly declined", and stopped supporting them on 26 June. On 12 June it removed a list of application-level activity metrics as part of a move toward equities.

Getting the numbers out

Into a spreadsheet. All three have Google Sheets and Excel functions. DefiLlama's come with the $49 Pro plan, and CSV downloads are switched off during its trial. Token Terminal's come with Pro at 500,000 calls a month, or at Free if you believe the plan card rather than the matrix. Artemis's =ART() add-in is the $500 Plugin seat. It also pulls Token Terminal and Dune data on API keys you already hold, which makes it worth more to a reader already paying for those, and it can break for reasons that have nothing to do with Artemis.

Into code. DefiLlama: public REST with no key, and paid endpoints with one. Token Terminal: REST at /v2 with a bearer key and Python and TypeScript SDKs. A lapsed subscription answers 402 rather than 403. Artemis: three REST endpoints serving every series, and an unlisted Python client on PyPI that still points at the pre-rebrand docs. Artemis returns errors as HTTP 200, with a string where the array should be. A client that checks only the status code will see a full response and no failure.

Into a warehouse. Token Terminal's Datashare (BigQuery or Snowflake, compute on you) and Artemis's Snowflake share (Managing Director only) both exist. DefiLlama's equivalent is raw database access on Enterprise.

Into an AI client. The three MCP servers are three different things. DefiLlama's has 23 tools returning data and requires the $300 API subscription. Token Terminal's is on every plan, with tighter limits on Free, and has a single research tool that answers in prose, so two runs need not agree. Artemis's is Managing Director only.

Freshness. DefiLlama updates TVL hourly, and fees and revenue hourly for most protocols, with the site trailing its own API by up to an hour. Token Terminal and Artemis are daily. Artemis returns the current day as null until it closes.

Read on one day, edited on three

All three cards record pricing and coverage as verified on the same day, 19 September 2026, so the prices and protocol counts above were taken together, not months apart. The cards were last edited on different days: Token Terminal on 19 September, Artemis on 21 September and DefiLlama on 4 October. None of the three is marked as tested hands-on. The Artemis card says outright that nobody on this site has held a paid Artemis account. DefiLlama's checkout page sits behind a bot check, and its prices were read through a text-extraction proxy. Anything that moved after 19 September — and Artemis has been moving — is not reflected here.

Which one, and when

Take DefiLlama if the question is a TVL figure, a fees or revenue series across many protocols, or anything a script has to fetch without a budget. It is the only one of the three where code reaches the data for free, the only one with a self-serve API price, and the only one whose protocol metrics update hourly. The trade, written on its card, is that the adapter behind a number was usually written by the protocol being measured.

Take Token Terminal if the view you need is the income statement: revenue through token incentives and expenses to earnings, with quarterly and yearly financial statements, on a smaller set of projects counted strictly. Read it free. Treat the API as a quote you have to request before you plan anything around it, and check the metric page for your project before assuming it is covered.

Take Artemis if you are comparing chains with each other under one written definition, live in a spreadsheet, and can justify $500 a month a seat. Its named metric pairs and stated aggregation rules are the cross-chain methodology the other two do not offer. Before you commit, confirm your chain survived the May–June 2026 cut, and that no field you rely on changed meaning in July.

The condition that decides most readers: if the data has to reach your own code and nobody has signed a budget, it is DefiLlama, whatever the other two do better. Move to Token Terminal when the question is earnings rather than activity. Move to Artemis when the question is one chain against another, and the answer has to sit in a sheet.