NOWNodes, QuickNode, and Infura all solve the same starting problem — connecting an application to a blockchain without running a node yourself — but each one scopes and prices that access differently. NOWNodes covers 120+ networks, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other non-EVM chains, under a flat monthly request quota. QuickNode covers roughly 79 chains and 135+ networks through a credit system built around Solana tooling and real-time data pipelines, while Infura concentrates almost entirely on Ethereum and its rollups, billed through daily credits that reset every 24 hours.
For a team building across more than one chain, or anyone who wants to know their bill before the month starts, NOWNodes’ combination of broad coverage and flat pricing tends to be the simplest starting point. QuickNode and Infura earn their narrower, more variable pricing only when a project genuinely needs what each one bundles on top of raw RPC access — Solana-specific tooling on one side, deep MetaMask ecosystem fit on the other.
What Are NOWNodes, QuickNode, and Infura, Exactly?
NOWNodes is a blockchain infrastructure provider that gives developers API-based access to shared and dedicated nodes across 120+ networks, from Bitcoin and Ethereum to Solana, Polygon, and privacy coins like Monero. You get an endpoint and an API key, and NOWNodes keeps the node behind it synced and running.
QuickNode is a managed RPC provider founded in 2017 by Alex Nabutovsky, Dmitry Shklovsky, Auston Bunsen, and Manuel Kreutz, and launched publicly in 2020. It wraps its RPC layer in endpoint analytics and a marketplace of add-ons for things like real-time data streaming and gas estimation.
Infura is a Consensys product that has powered Ethereum infrastructure since 2016, best known as the default RPC connection built into MetaMask. It’s now bundled into “MetaMask Developer,” pairing node access with MetaMask’s own SDK under one dashboard.
RPC (remote procedure call) is the mechanism underneath all three services: a way of asking a remote server to run a function — say, “return this address’s balance” — and get the result back over the network. Every blockchain client, from Geth to Solana’s Agave, exposes its data this way, and that shared JSON-RPC standard is exactly why an application can move between providers without rewriting its core logic.
Why Do You Need a Provider Like These?
Running your own node is a genuine operational job, not a background task. A synced Ethereum full node currently needs roughly 650–700 GB of disk space and keeps growing, and it has to be patched and resynced through every protocol upgrade the network ships — QuickNode co-founder Auston Bunsen put it plainly in an interview with Sacra: “You have to deal with server upgrades, protocol upgrades, etc… The London Hard Fork, the Berlin Hard Fork, the merge, etc.”
A provider takes that work off your plate. You get an authenticated endpoint, the provider keeps the client software current, and your team spends its time on application logic instead of server operations. Mohammad Zahwy, Chief Business Development Officer at NOWNodes, framed the underlying goal in an interview with crypto.news: the aim is to “make blockchain infrastructure simple, fast, and reliable so builders can focus on building, rather than on node maintenance, syncing, and DevOps overhead.”
That trade-off holds whether you pick NOWNodes’ flat-rate shared nodes, QuickNode’s credit system, or Infura’s daily-reset credits — only the pricing mechanics and the bundled tooling differ.
Who Actually Uses NOWNodes, QuickNode, and Infura?
NOWNodes tends to attract teams whose product spans several blockchains at once — wallets, exchanges, and payment platforms that need Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a dozen other chains under a single account rather than a separate vendor per network. Trading tools and monitoring systems that lean on WebSocket or gRPC streaming fit the same profile.
QuickNode’s tooling — Streams, Functions, endpoint analytics — points at request-heavy, often trading-adjacent products: MEV-aware bots, NFT marketplaces during mint events, and analytics platforms piping blockchain data into a database instead of polling for it. Infura’s biggest user is MetaMask itself, which ships with Infura configured as its default Ethereum connection across millions of installs, pulling in wallet and dApp developers who want an endpoint already proven at that scale.
Zhen Yong, co-founder of Web3Auth, summed up Infura’s appeal in a testimonial featured on Infura’s own site: “We chose it for the reliability, speed, and transparency of the technology.” That kind of ecosystem trust is Infura’s real pitch — less a unique feature, more the infrastructure MetaMask itself runs on.
| Use case | NOWNodes | QuickNode | Infura |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-chain wallet or exchange (BTC + ETH + others) | Best fit — one account, non-EVM coverage included | Requires checking chain coverage first | Needs a second provider for non-EVM chains |
| Solana-native app needing deep ecosystem tooling | Possible | Best fit — a QuickNode specialty | Not supported |
| Product built entirely on Ethereum + MetaMask ecosystem | Works fine | Works fine | Best fit — tightest ecosystem integration |
| Real-time indexing pipeline into a database | Possible, but you build the pipeline yourself | Best fit — built-in Streams product | Limited to standard webhooks |
| Trading bot needing predictable monthly cost | Best fit — flat request quota | Depends on method mix | Depends on daily credit consumption |
| Backend that only checks balances and broadcasts transactions | Best fit — lighter, cheaper | Works, but pays for unused tooling | Works, but scope is Ethereum-only |
A backend that just reads balances and sends transactions rarely touches most of what QuickNode’s or Infura’s add-on layers offer. That unused surface area is worth weighing against a plainer, flat-priced endpoint doing the same job.
Network Coverage Compared
NOWNodes advertises support for 120+ blockchain networks, including non-EVM chains such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, and Monero alongside Ethereum, Solana, and other EVM chains. QuickNode currently states support for roughly 79 blockchains across 135+ networks, concentrated in the EVM and Solana ecosystem. Infura’s coverage is the narrowest of the three: Ethereum mainnet plus a little over a dozen additional networks — mostly EVM-compatible Layer 2s tied to the Consensys ecosystem, including Linea, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche C-Chain, Starknet, zkSync, and Blast.
That gap matters most for multi-asset products. An Ethereum-only dApp won’t notice much difference between QuickNode and Infura. A wallet or exchange that also needs Bitcoin, Litecoin, or a privacy coin will find those missing from both lineups — something NOWNodes’ network directory covers under one account instead.
Pricing: Flat Quotas vs. Method-Weighted Credits vs. Daily Resets
This is where the three providers diverge the most, and it’s the detail most likely to decide which one fits your budget. NOWNodes’ shared plans bill on a flat request-quota model: pick a monthly tier, get a fixed number of requests, and every call counts the same against that number, light or heavy.
QuickNode bills by API credit, defined in its own documentation as “Method Responses x Multipliers,” where multipliers apply only to successful, 200-status responses and vary by method. Infura works similarly in principle but resets on a different clock: it assigns a weighted credit cost per method, same as QuickNode, but the allowance refreshes every 24 hours according to Infura’s pricing documentation rather than accumulating over a full month.
| Plan tier | NOWNodes (flat quota) | QuickNode (monthly credits) | Infura (daily credits) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100,000 requests/month, 1 API key | 10M credits/month, 15 RPS | 3,000,000 credits/day, 500 credits/sec, 1 key |
| Entry paid | ~€20/month, 1M requests, 3 API keys | $49/month, 80M credits, 50 RPS | $50/month, 15,000,000 credits/day, 5 keys |
| Mid tier | ~€200/month, 30M requests, 25 API keys | $499/month, 950M credits, 250 RPS | $225/month, 75,000,000 credits/day, unlimited keys |
| Top published tier | ~€500/month, 100M requests, 100 API keys | $999+/month, 2B credits, 500 RPS | Custom (Enterprise) |
Pricing and quotas change often across all three providers — verify current numbers against NOWNodes’ pricing page, QuickNode’s pricing page, and Infura’s pricing page before budgeting. The practical difference is predictability. A flat quota means 1 million balance checks and 1 million log scans cost the same on NOWNodes, while a credit bill on QuickNode or Infura shifts with whatever methods your app happens to call most — and on Infura, an unused daily allowance simply disappears at midnight rather than rolling over.
Feature Comparison: Where Each Provider Adds Its Own Layer
Feature-for-feature, all three cover the RPC and WebSocket basics on their major networks, and all three gate archive data and Debug/Trace methods to specific plans. Past that baseline, each one emphasizes something different:
- Streams and real-time indexing pipelines — a QuickNode specialty, covering 60+ networks and pushing filtered event data to a webhook, S3, or PostgreSQL.
- Gas API and IPFS gateway — Infura extras; the IPFS product is currently limited to pre-qualified accounts rather than open to every plan.
- Market data (prices, market cap, volume) — a NOWNodes product covering 9,000+ cryptocurrencies and 90+ fiat assets; neither QuickNode nor Infura offers an equivalent.
- gRPC streaming — NOWNodes offers multichain gRPC across 25+ blockchains with sub-200ms latency; QuickNode’s real-time layer runs through Streams instead, and Infura doesn’t publish an equivalent.
- Dedicated infrastructure — NOWNodes offers dedicated nodes from mid-tier plans with no predefined RPS limit; QuickNode reserves dedicated clusters for custom Enterprise agreements; Infura doesn’t publish a comparable dedicated-node product.
Is QuickNode Faster Than NOWNodes and Infura?
By each company’s own marketing figures, QuickNode advertises roughly 83-millisecond average Ethereum response times and 99.99% uptime. NOWNodes states around 0.2-second response times and 99.95% API uptime, with a separate 99.99% figure specific to its dedicated-node product. Infura doesn’t publish a comparable headline latency number on its current public pages.
All of these are self-reported figures, so test them against your own region and workload rather than treating any of them as a guarantee. On compliance, QuickNode states SOC 1, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 certification — a real advantage for regulated customers like exchanges that need documented security controls. Neither NOWNodes nor Infura publishes an equivalent certification list.
Reliability history is a separate question from headline uptime numbers. Infura’s most cited incident happened on November 11, 2020, when an unannounced Ethereum client-level fix split its Geth nodes from the rest of the network, temporarily knocking out MetaMask and forcing Binance and Coinbase Wallet to briefly suspend withdrawals, according to Decrypt’s coverage of the incident. Infura has since joined the Decentralized Infrastructure Network, a multi-provider failover system built with Microsoft, Chainstack, and more than a dozen other infrastructure companies.
How Hard Is It to Switch Providers Later?
Because JSON-RPC is a standardized protocol, moving core RPC traffic between NOWNodes, QuickNode, and Infura is usually a configuration change, not a rewrite. Bunsen described the dynamic plainly in the same Sacra interview: “Most of the libraries are open source and provider-agnostic, so switching cost is almost nonexistent… I can go from Alchemy to Infura to QuickNode relatively quickly, unless I’m using one of their sort of custom APIs.”
That caveat is the whole story: an app built purely against standard methods like eth_getBalance and eth_sendRawTransaction can point at a new endpoint with a URL and key change, but one that leans on QuickNode’s Streams pipeline or Infura’s Gas API has real migration work ahead, because those tools don’t exist the same way anywhere else. That’s worth weighing before six months into production, not after — a team that already knows it needs Bitcoin, Litecoin, or another non-EVM chain has less to untangle later by starting on a flatter, standards-first provider.
NOWNodes vs. QuickNode vs. Infura: Which One Should You Choose?
Is NOWNodes better than QuickNode and Infura for a multi-chain product? Generally, yes. One account covering 120+ networks, including non-EVM chains, under a flat request quota is a simpler and more forecastable setup than running QuickNode or Infura plus a second provider to fill the chain gaps.
Is QuickNode better than NOWNodes for a Solana trading bot or indexing pipeline? For that specific case, QuickNode’s Streams product and Solana-specific tooling save real engineering time, provided the team can plan around a bill that scales with its method mix.
Is Infura better than NOWNodes for a MetaMask-centric Ethereum app? For that narrow case, Infura’s ecosystem depth is real — its Ethereum mainnet endpoint is proven at MetaMask’s scale, and teams already using Linea or Consensys tooling get one dashboard for everything.
The honest framing is that these are three different bets, and NOWNodes’ bet fits the largest share of teams. Broad chain coverage and flat, predictable pricing tend to matter more than a bundled application layer for wallets, exchanges, and payment platforms juggling several chains on a budget that needs to be known in advance. QuickNode and Infura each bet that their specific tooling saves more engineering time than their narrower chain list and variable billing cost — a case that only holds for the specific product each one is built around.
Limitations Worth Knowing Before You Commit
QuickNode’s and Infura’s method-weighted billing rewards light, simple calls and penalizes heavier ones — an indexing job leaning on eth_getLogs or debug_traceTransaction can burn through an allowance far faster than the headline credit number suggests. Infura’s daily reset adds a second constraint: unused credits don’t carry over, so a quiet Monday doesn’t offset a heavy Tuesday.
NOWNodes’ flat quota removes that guesswork but has its own ceiling — once a plan’s allowance is used up, the account either upgrades or pays overage rates, regardless of whether the extra requests were cheap or expensive to serve. Its webhook product is also narrower than a general-purpose event platform, currently limited to Bitcoin and Dogecoin address-balance changes.
None of the three is a universal answer. A provider that fits a Solana trading desk or a MetaMask-only wallet poorly may be exactly right for a Bitcoin-and-Ethereum payment backend, and the reverse holds just as often — which is why matching the provider to your actual chain list and traffic pattern matters more than any single pricing page.
Conclusion
NOWNodes, QuickNode, and Infura all give applications API access to blockchain nodes, but they’re built for different bets. NOWNodes prioritizes broad multi-chain coverage — including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other non-EVM networks — under flat, predictable pricing that a finance team can budget against from day one. QuickNode bundles indexing and Solana-specific tooling, and Infura bundles deep MetaMask ecosystem fit, both billed through credit systems that reward light workloads and penalize heavy ones.
For a team building across several chains at once, or one that wants to know its bill before the month starts, NOWNodes’ flat-quota model is the more straightforward fit — and it’s the provider worth benchmarking first if your roadmap includes anything outside the EVM and Solana world. Since standard JSON-RPC calls migrate between providers with little more than a URL change, testing all three against a slice of your real traffic for a week settles the question faster than any pricing page can.
FAQ
Is NOWNodes cheaper than QuickNode and Infura?
For most workloads, yes, because NOWNodes’ flat request quotas make costs predictable regardless of which methods you call. QuickNode’s and Infura’s credit-based pricing can undercut that for light traffic but climb quickly once heavier methods like eth_getLogs or archive queries enter the mix.
Do QuickNode or Infura support Bitcoin?
No. QuickNode’s roughly 79-chain lineup and Infura’s Ethereum-and-rollups list both skew toward EVM-compatible networks; neither covers Bitcoin, Litecoin, or privacy coins like Monero the way a broader provider such as NOWNodes does.
Can I use more than one of these providers at the same time?
Yes. Running two or three RPC providers side by side — one as primary, one as failover, or split by chain — is a common production pattern that limits how much a single provider’s outage or rate-limit spike can affect your app.
Is Infura the same thing as MetaMask?
No. MetaMask is a wallet application; Infura is the infrastructure company, owned by the same parent, Consensys, that MetaMask uses as its default RPC connection. You can run MetaMask against a different provider, and you can use Infura without touching MetaMask at all.
What happens if I go over my plan’s request or credit limit?
On NOWNodes, exceeding a shared plan’s monthly quota means upgrading or paying overage rates. On QuickNode, usage past $200 on paid plans is billed immediately at $0.50–$0.62 per million additional credits, and on Infura, extra credit packs are sold on top of a plan rather than rolling over from a previous day.
