NOWNodes and QuickNode both solve the same underlying problem — getting your application connected to a blockchain without you running the node yourself — but they price and scope that access very differently. NOWNodes covers 120+ networks under a flat monthly request quota, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and privacy coins that most RPC providers skip. QuickNode covers roughly 79 chains and 135+ networks with a deeper add-on marketplace, billed through a credit system that weights each RPC method by how much work it takes to answer.
For a team that wants predictable pricing and broad non-EVM coverage under one account, NOWNodes is usually the simpler starting point. QuickNode earns its keep when a project needs Solana-specific tooling or a real-time indexing pipeline and can absorb a bill that moves with its method mix.
What Are NOWNodes and QuickNode, 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 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 a dashboard, endpoint analytics, and a marketplace of add-ons for things like NFT metadata and gas estimation.
RPC (remote procedure call) is the mechanism underneath both services — a way of asking a remote server to run a function, such as “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, which is why standard JSON-RPC calls can move between providers without an application rewrite.
Why Do You Need a Provider Like NOWNodes or QuickNode?
Running your own node is a genuine operational commitment, 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’s own co-founder, Auston Bunsen, described that maintenance load in an interview with Sacra: “You have to deal with server upgrades, protocol upgrades, etc. and the same thing applies to blockchains. The London Hard Fork, the Berlin Hard Fork, the merge, etc.” Each of those events means a client update and a resync before production traffic can safely touch the new version.
A provider takes that work off your team’s plate: you get an authenticated endpoint, the provider keeps the software current and the hardware scaled, and your engineers focus on application logic instead of server operations. That trade-off holds on either NOWNodes’ flat-rate shared nodes or QuickNode’s credit-billed endpoints — only the pricing mechanics differ.
Who Actually Uses NOWNodes vs. QuickNode?
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 instead of 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. Its own case studies cite analytics platform Dune scaling from 16 to 91 supported chains on its infrastructure within 12 months.
| Use case | Better fit with NOWNodes | Better fit with QuickNode |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-chain wallet or exchange (BTC + ETH + others) | Yes — one account, one API key, non-EVM coverage included | Requires checking chain coverage first |
| Real-time indexing pipeline into S3 or PostgreSQL | Possible, but you build the pipeline yourself | Yes — built-in Streams product |
| Trading bot needing predictable monthly cost | Yes — flat request quota | Depends on which methods dominate traffic |
| Backend that only checks balances and broadcasts transactions | Yes — lighter, cheaper fit | Works, but pays for unused tooling |
| Solana-native app needing deep ecosystem tooling | Possible | Yes — a QuickNode specialty |
A backend that reads balances and sends transactions rarely touches most of what QuickNode’s marketplace offers, and that unused surface area is worth weighing against a flatter-priced endpoint doing the same job.
Pricing: Flat Quotas vs. Method-Weighted Credits
This is where the two 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. A light call like a balance check costs fewer credits than a heavier one, such as a log scan — a model that mirrors the compute-unit billing other providers, including Alchemy, also use.
| Plan tier | NOWNodes (shared, flat quota) | QuickNode (credit-based) |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 100,000 requests/month, 15 RPS, 1 API key | 10M credits/month, 15 RPS |
| Entry paid | ~€20/month, 1M requests, 3 API keys | $49/month ($34 annual), 80M credits, 50 RPS |
| Mid tier | ~€200/month, 30M requests, 25 API keys | $499/month ($424 annual), 950M credits, 250 RPS |
| Top published tier | ~€500/month, 100M requests, 100 API keys | $999+/month ($849 annual), 2B credits, 500 RPS |
| Enterprise | Custom, dedicated nodes available | Custom, dedicated clusters up to 50,000 RPS |
Both companies change pricing often — verify current numbers against NOWNodes’ pricing page and QuickNode’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 shifts with whatever methods your app happens to call most that month. Overage on QuickNode runs $0.50 to $0.62 per million additional credits depending on tier, and usage past $200 on paid plans is billed immediately rather than waiting for the next cycle.
Network and Feature Coverage
NOWNodes advertises 120+ blockchain networks, including non-EVM chains such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, and Monero alongside Ethereum, Solana, and other EVM networks. QuickNode currently states support for roughly 79 blockchains across 135+ networks — broad, but concentrated in EVM-compatible chains and the Solana ecosystem.
That gap matters most for multi-asset products. An EVM-only dApp won’t notice much difference in raw chain count between the two. A wallet or exchange that also needs Bitcoin, Litecoin, or a privacy coin will find several of those simply aren’t part of QuickNode’s lineup, which NOWNodes’ network list covers under one account instead.
Feature-for-feature, both platforms cover the RPC and WebSocket basics on their major networks, and both gate archive data and Debug/Trace methods to specific plans. Past that baseline, the two emphasize different things:
- Streams and indexing — a QuickNode specialty; NOWNodes leaves that pipeline work to the customer.
- Market data (prices, market cap, volume) — a NOWNodes product covering 9,000+ cryptocurrencies and 90+ fiat assets; not part of QuickNode’s core offering.
- gRPC streaming — NOWNodes offers multichain gRPC across 25+ blockchains with sub-200ms latency; QuickNode’s real-time layer runs through Streams instead.
- Dedicated infrastructure — NOWNodes’ dedicated nodes are available from mid-tier plans with no predefined RPS limit; QuickNode reserves dedicated clusters for custom Enterprise agreements.
- Log and archive retention — QuickNode keeps logs for as little as one hour on its Free and Build plans, extending to 14 days only on Enterprise; NOWNodes ties archive access to network support rather than a retention clock.
How Do Performance and Compliance Claims Compare?
Is QuickNode faster than NOWNodes? By each company’s own marketing figures, QuickNode advertises roughly 83-millisecond average Ethereum response times and 99.99% uptime, while NOWNodes states around 0.2-second response times, 99.95% API uptime, and a separate 99.99% figure specific to its dedicated-node product. Both sets of numbers are self-reported, so test them against your own region and workload rather than treating either as a guarantee.
On compliance, QuickNode states SOC 1, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 certification, which matters for regulated customers like exchanges that need documented security controls before signing a vendor contract. NOWNodes doesn’t publish the same certification list, so a team with a hard compliance requirement should confirm the specific standard it needs before committing to either provider.
Switching Costs: How Locked In Are You?
Because JSON-RPC is a standardized protocol, moving core RPC traffic between providers is usually a configuration change, not a rewrite. Bunsen made this point 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. An app that leans on QuickNode’s Streams pipeline or its Functions marketplace has real migration work ahead if it ever needs to leave, because those tools don’t exist the same way anywhere else.
That’s worth weighing before you’re six months into production, not after. A team that expects to stay EVM- or Solana-focused and wants QuickNode’s bundled tooling accepts that trade-off deliberately. A team that wants to keep its options open — or already knows it needs Bitcoin, Litecoin, or another non-EVM chain — has less to untangle later by starting on a flatter, standards-first provider like NOWNodes.
NOWNodes vs. QuickNode: Which One Should You Choose?
Is NOWNodes better than QuickNode 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 plus a second provider to fill 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 rather than its raw request count.
The honest framing is that these are two different bets. NOWNodes bets that broad chain coverage and flat, predictable pricing matter more than a bundled application layer — a bet that pays off for wallets, exchanges, and payment platforms juggling several chains on a budget that needs to be known in advance. QuickNode bets that its tooling saves more engineering time than its narrower chain list and variable billing cost, which is the stronger case for a team building indexers or Solana-native products from scratch.
Limitations Worth Knowing Before You Commit
QuickNode’s credit system is its biggest planning risk. A method-weighted model rewards light, simple calls and penalizes heavier ones unevenly, so a getLogs-heavy indexing job can burn through the advertised credit allowance faster than the headline number suggests.
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 right now, currently limited to Bitcoin and Dogecoin address-balance changes.
Neither company is a universal answer. A provider that fits a Solana trading desk 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 either company’s marketing page.
Conclusion
NOWNodes and QuickNode both 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 on top of RPC access, billed through a credit system that rewards light workloads and penalizes 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 both 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?
For most workloads, yes, because NOWNodes’ flat request quotas make costs predictable regardless of which methods you call. QuickNode’s credit-based pricing can undercut that for light traffic but climbs quickly once heavier methods like getLogs or archive queries enter the mix.
Does QuickNode support Bitcoin?
QuickNode’s roughly 79-chain lineup leans toward EVM-compatible networks and Solana; it does not cover Bitcoin, Litecoin, or privacy coins like Monero the way a broader provider such as NOWNodes does.
Can I use NOWNodes and QuickNode together?
Yes. Running two 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 an application.
Do I need QuickNode’s Streams product, or can I build that myself?
If your application only reads balances and broadcasts transactions, you likely don’t need it. If your product depends on continuous, filtered blockchain event data flowing into a database, building that pipeline yourself is real engineering time that Streams replaces.
How hard is it to migrate off QuickNode later?
Standard RPC calls migrate easily since JSON-RPC is a shared protocol across providers. The friction comes from QuickNode-specific tools — Streams, Functions, and marketplace add-ons — which don’t have direct equivalents elsewhere and need to be rebuilt against whatever platform you migrate to.
