Best On-Chain Analytics Tools in 2026

Nansen costs about $99 a month and has the best wallet labels in the industry. Arkham costs nothing and has the best entity graph. Those two sentences are both true, and resolving them is what this article is for.

Three different jobs hiding behind one label

"On-chain analytics" covers tools that barely overlap. Deciding which job you are doing removes most of the choice.

• Who is this address? Entity resolution. Linking a hex string to an exchange, a fund, a protocol treasury or a named individual. Arkham is the best at this and it is free.
• What does this address hold and do? Portfolio and position tracking across chains and protocols. DeBank, Zerion and Zapper, all free, differing mainly in coverage and interface.
• What is happening across a protocol or a market? Aggregate analysis. Dune, if you write SQL or can find a dashboard someone else built. Nansen, if you want the answer pre-packaged with labelled flows attached.

Most people asking "which analytics tool should I buy" are actually doing job one or two, both of which are solved for free. The paid tier is for job three, done frequently.

What Nansen actually costs you per decision

The full comparison

Arkham

Free, and the entity graph is the best available at any price. Where other tools tell you an address interacted with Uniswap, Arkham tells you the address belongs to a specific fund, shows you its other wallets, and maps the relationships between them. For research into who is doing something rather than what is being done, nothing else is close.

Two things to hold in mind. The entity attributions are inferences, sometimes very confident ones, and they are occasionally wrong; treat a label as a strong hypothesis rather than a fact. And the Intel Exchange bolted onto it, a marketplace for buying and selling deanonymisation work, raises questions about the surveillance economy it creates that are worth thinking about even if you find the core product useful.

DeBank

The broadest DeFi protocol coverage of anything free, across more than 50 EVM chains. If a wallet has a position in an obscure lending market or a farm nobody has heard of, DeBank is the tool most likely to surface it rather than showing an unlabelled token balance. It also has a functioning social layer, which is more useful than it sounds for following specific addresses.

The limitation is a hard one: EVM only. No Solana. If the wallets you follow are Solana-native, DeBank simply cannot see them, and you need Zerion or a Solana-specific tool alongside it.

Dune

The only tool here that can answer a question nobody has thought of yet. Dune indexes raw chain data and lets you query it in SQL, so if you want to know how many wallets that used protocol X also used protocol Y within thirty days, you can find out. Nothing pre-packaged does that.

The free tier includes 2,500 credits a month, with Analyst around $75 a month for more. Crucially, thousands of public dashboards built by other people are free to read, which means Dune is valuable even if you never write a query: someone has usually already asked your question. Treat it as a library first and a query engine second.

Nansen

The labelled address database is genuinely the best in the industry, covering hundreds of millions of addresses, and Smart Money flow tracking, which surfaces what consistently profitable wallets are buying, is a real product that free tools have not replicated. Years of labelling work sit behind it and it shows.

At around $99 a month for Standard, the question is not whether it is good but whether you use it. The pattern to avoid is subscribing, checking it enthusiastically for three weeks, and then paying for a tab you no longer open. Set a reminder at the end of your first month and ask what you did differently because of it. If the answer is nothing, cancel and use Arkham.

Zerion and Zapper

Both free, both portfolio-focused, and worth taking together because the choice between them is one of taste. Zerion has the cleanest interface of anything here, covers 50-plus chains including non-EVM, and doubles as a competent wallet, so it is the natural pick for watching your own positions rather than researching someone else's.

Zapper's underrated feature is its transaction feed, which describes what a wallet did in readable English rather than as a list of contract calls. For following one specific address and understanding its behaviour over time, that translation layer saves real effort, and no paid tool does it better.

Following smart money is harder than it looks

The pitch for these tools is that you can see what successful wallets do and copy them. It is a good pitch and it works less often than it should, for reasons worth understanding before you spend money chasing it.

You see the entry, not the thesis. A wallet buying a token might be opening a position, hedging one you cannot see, market making, or moving between its own addresses. You also see it late: on-chain data appears after the transaction confirms, and anything liquid enough to matter has already moved. And survivorship bias runs through every "smart money" label, because the wallets identified as smart are the ones that already worked out, which is not the same as the ones that will.

Where wallet-following genuinely earns its keep is in research rather than signals: understanding how a specific strategy is constructed, checking whether a project's team is selling, or confirming that a protocol's TVL is real rather than one wallet cycling. That is a slower, more useful use of these tools. Our on-chain analysis primer covers the method, and the leaderboard research guide covers why copying a profitable trader is harder than identifying one.

For Hyperliquid perpetuals specifically, none of the six tools here goes deep, because perp positions are not token balances. LabelYX covers that gap free: positions, realised PnL, win rate, drawdown and full trade history for any address. Our comparison of Hyperliquid wallet trackers covers that narrower category, including the competitors.

What we could not verify

• Pricing tiers move. Nansen and Dune have both restructured pricing more than once, and reported figures for Nansen vary between sources. The numbers above are the published rates on the verification date.
• Label accuracy. Both Nansen and Arkham label addresses by inference. We have no way to measure how often either is wrong, and neither publishes an error rate.
• Free-tier limits. DeBank, Zerion and Zapper offer their core products free today. Free products in this category have historically become paid ones, so treat the current state as current rather than permanent.

Choosing, in one paragraph

Start with Arkham for identity, DeBank for EVM positions and Zerion if Solana matters, all free. Add Dune when you have a question nobody has answered, and read other people's dashboards before writing your own. Pay for Nansen only after you can point to a decision better labels would have changed, and set a calendar reminder to re-examine that in a month. For Hyperliquid perps, none of these is the right tool, and ours is free.