Skip to content
StreamSync Run a Node

← Back to writing

StreamSync vs Helius: An Honest Comparison

StreamSync Team · ·
comparehelius

If you build on Solana, you probably already use Helius. They run a clean hosted RPC, ship genuinely good webhook tooling, and have built one of the better developer experiences in Web3 infrastructure. We respect them. We compete with them.

We don’t think you’ll be served by a comparison that lists ten features Helius is missing and concludes we win on a points system. So this is going to be the honest version: where Helius wins, where StreamSync wins, where the two are essentially the same, and how to actually pick.

What Helius does that we don’t

Webhooks are the obvious one. Helius’s enhanced webhook stream is the cleanest “Solana event → my server” path in the industry. The decoders are good, the throughput is high, and the developer experience is end-to-end. We have building blocks for this — Geyser ingest, IDL synthesis, program-decoded state — but we don’t ship a managed webhook product, and we won’t pretend otherwise. If your application architecture is “send me everything that happens to these accounts, decoded,” Helius is the right answer today.

Their dashboard and documentation are better than ours. They’ve spent five years polishing them. We have spent the equivalent time on the protocol; the marketing surface is several quarters behind. If your evaluation includes “how fast can a junior engineer get an API key and a first response in their terminal,” Helius wins that race.

They have a relationship with most of the major Solana validators. We have relationships with a different cohort — independent operators who choose to stake into StreamSync. Neither is “better”; they are different distribution channels.

What StreamSync does that they don’t

The structural difference is multi-operator. Helius is a vendor; StreamSync is a protocol. If Helius has an incident — and they have, like every vendor has — your application sees the incident. If a StreamSync operator has an incident, the gateway routes around them inside the same query because three other operators raced the same request.

The pricing model is different. Helius is a monthly subscription with rate limits. StreamSync is per-query with no rate limit, billed only on successful response under the 10ms SLA. For workloads with bursty traffic, the per-query model is cheaper. For workloads with steady traffic, the subscription is sometimes cheaper. We’ll come back to this.

The SLA is structurally different. Helius’s SLA is what their contract says; ours is what the payment contract enforces. If you care about the difference between “we’ll credit you” and “you won’t be billed in the first place,” that matters.

The query surface is different. Helius is excellent at point lookups and webhook streams. StreamSync’s query surface is SQL via DuckDB. If you want to ask “give me every program-derived account owned by this program where this field is greater than X,” we serve that directly. Helius wants you to enhance webhooks into a Postgres you maintain and then query the Postgres.

What’s the same

Both of us decode SPL and Metaplex state correctly. Both of us have reasonable archive history. Both of us support priority fee estimation. Both of us speak the standard Solana RPC interface for the common methods. If you’re doing standard account lookups, you will not feel a difference at the API level — only at the bill and the failure mode.

Both of us are run by people who care about the chain. We disagree about the right structure, not the right goal.

When to pick Helius

Three cases where we will tell you to use Helius:

  1. Your application is webhook-driven. Specifically, if “subscribe to these accounts and tell me when they change” is your dominant integration pattern, Helius’s enhanced webhooks are the right tool. Building this on top of StreamSync’s query surface is possible but adds a polling layer you don’t need.

  2. You have a hosted-vendor preference for compliance reasons. Some teams require a single named counterparty with a SOC2 report. Helius can sign one. StreamSync, as a protocol with multiple operators, cannot give you a single counterparty in the same way. We can sign contracts as the protocol entity, but the underlying execution is distributed across operators who may or may not be SOC2-certified themselves.

  3. You need to ship a first integration in under an hour. Helius’s onboarding is faster than ours, full stop. If “time to first useful response” is the binding constraint and the project is a prototype, use Helius and revisit later.

When to pick StreamSync

Three cases where we are the right answer:

  1. You’ve been burned by vendor lock-in before. If migrating off your last RPC provider took three engineers two weeks, you know the cost. StreamSync removes the migration entirely — if one operator fails, the next one is already serving you under the same protocol.

  2. You want enforceable latency. Not “average latency under 50ms in their internal dashboard” — actual “if I get a result, it came in under 10ms or I don’t pay.” Several wallet and trading desk customers picked StreamSync specifically because they could not get this guarantee anywhere else.

  3. Your workload is analytically heavy. Indexers and analytics teams who would otherwise stand up their own Postgres or ClickHouse on top of webhook streams can write the same queries directly against StreamSync’s DuckDB surface and get them answered by operators who specialize in that workload.

On the pricing math

A common question: “show me a real bill comparison.” Pricing changes every epoch on the StreamSync side, so we can’t make a clean static claim. But here’s the framework:

If your monthly query volume is steady and predictable, a Helius subscription often comes out cheaper because subscription pricing rewards smooth utilization. If your query volume has long quiet periods punctuated by bursts — common for trading apps and event-driven indexers — StreamSync is often cheaper, because you don’t pay for the quiet hours.

If you’ve ever paid for a tier overage on a hosted provider, the per-query model is probably worth modeling. We’ve seen customers cut spend by 40-60% by moving bursty workloads to StreamSync and keeping their steady baseline on Helius. Splitting is fine. We’re not religious about exclusivity.

A practical recommendation

If you’re starting fresh, do this:

  1. Build the first integration on Helius. Get to production.
  2. Add a StreamSync gateway behind a feature flag for query types that are sensitive to latency or vendor risk.
  3. Watch which one you actually reach for during incidents. That’s your answer.

Nobody is well served by a one-vendor monoculture. Helius’s existence makes StreamSync better, because we have to be honest about what we’re improving on. StreamSync’s existence makes Helius better, because they have to keep their SLA real to compete with a contract-enforced one. The Solana stack is better with both of us in it.