Etherscan Alternatives for Exploring Ethereum and Its APIs

Etherscan is the default block explorer for Ethereum and it is still running. People look for an alternative for three reasons: a second opinion on a transaction, a deeper trace than the Etherscan page shows, or an API that costs less or covers other chains. The API side changed most. Etherscan says its V1 API was fully deprecated by August 15, 2025, and V2 serves more than 50 EVM chains under one key.

The API plans page lists a free tier at 3 calls per second and up to 100,000 calls a day, but only on "selected chains (90% coverage)". Lite costs $49 a month for all supported chains, Standard $199 and Professional $399. The supported chains page adds that HyperEVM community endpoints are free only until November 30, 2026, after which they need Lite or above.

The picks below are explorers and data APIs, not trading tools. Nothing here is investment advice. If your interest is dapp usage stats rather than raw chain data, see our DappRadar alternatives.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Blockscout

Blockscout is an open source explorer that many L2s and EVM chains run as their official one, so its pages will feel familiar to Etherscan users: blocks, transactions, verified contracts, token transfers. Its plans page counts 117 chains, against 68 for Etherscan, with only 20 in common.

For developers the main draw is the API. The migration guide says the APIs are "structurally almost identical", with the same modules and actions. Moving over means changing the host to api.blockscout.com/v2/api, and swapping the key for one with the proapi_ prefix. The chainid parameter stays the same.

Best for: Developers who call the Etherscan API and want a cheaper or wider-coverage drop-in.

Pricing:

• Free: 100K credits per day, 5 requests per second
• Builder: $49/month, 100M credits, 15 req/s, $0.50 per extra 1M
• Pro: $199/month, 500M credits, 30 req/s, $0.40 per extra 1M
• Business: $999/month, 3B credits, 50 req/s, $0.32 per extra 1M

Watch out for:

• Action coverage differs. The guide lists Etherscan actions with no Blockscout match, such as balancehistory, tokenholdercount and the PRO daily* stats.
• The same guide's chain table marks Base Mainnet (8453) as unsupported while its code samples query it, so test any chain you depend on.

Official site: Blockscout.

Blockchair

Blockchair is the pick for people who look up more than Ethereum. One search box covers Bitcoin, Ethereum and a long list of other chains, and the explorer leans on filters and sortable tables rather than single pages. It suits analysts who want, for example, every transaction above a value in a date range.

Its API is priced by call volume instead of fixed tiers. The API plans page offers a one-time key with a set number of calls valid for a year, monthly Specialist and Enterprise subscriptions, a GitHub Student option and custom deals above 100,000 calls a day.

Best for: Analysts who track several blockchains, including Bitcoin, from one interface.

Pricing:

• Free without a key: 1,000 calls per day, 30 requests per minute
• Pay-as-you-go key and monthly plans: price set by call volume on the plans page calculator
• Custom: above 100,000 calls per day, by contact form

Watch out for:

• The plans page contradicts itself on coverage, saying 41 featured blockchains in one place and 18 (16 mainnets, 2 testnets) in the API FAQ.
• Going over the free limit blocks your IP address, and a 5 requests per second soft limit applies to paid plans too under heavy load.

Official site: Blockchair.

Ethplorer

Ethplorer is built around token questions. The site centres on ERC-20 tokens: top-token rankings, recent transfers, a rich list of the top 10,000 wallets and per-address portfolio charts with historical USD balances. Sister sites cover BNB Chain (Binplorer) and Linea (Lineaplorer).

It also has a Watching service that sends email or Telegram alerts when an address moves, plus notes, tags and CSV export. The API wiki documents endpoints such as getTokenInfo, getAddressInfo and getTopTokenHolders.

Best for: Checking token holders, transfers and wallet token balances on Ethereum.

Pricing:

• API: free; the wiki asks users to credit or link Ethplorer
• freekey: 2 requests per second, 1,000 per 24 hours, 3,000 per week
• Personal key: 10 requests per second

Watch out for:

• Ethereum only on the main site, so other chains mean switching to a sister explorer.
• The shared freekey returns at most 100 operations per call and only 30 days of history, and the wiki says it is not meant for production.

Official site: Ethplorer.

Phalcon Explorer

An Etherscan transaction page tells you what happened. BlockSec's Phalcon Explorer shows how. After you paste a hash, the docs list a call-sequence trace, source code, balance changes per address, a money-flow view, gas profiling and state changes, plus a debugger and simulator.

Security researchers use it to read exploits and odd DeFi transactions. Coverage spans 19 mainnets, among them Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Solana and Monad, and the Sepolia and Hoodi testnets.

Best for: Reading a complex DeFi or exploit transaction where the Etherscan logs are not enough.

Pricing:

• No public price in the Phalcon documentation

Watch out for:

• It is a transaction tool, not a full explorer. There are no token rankings or wallet portfolio pages like Etherscan or Ethplorer offer.

Official site: Phalcon Explorer.

Tenderly

Tenderly's free plan covers a narrow Etherscan use case very well: working out why a transaction failed. Its pricing page lists a full debugger with call traces, a gas profiler and full error stacks, a single-chain explorer and single-transaction simulation, all in the browser.

Simulation is the part Etherscan lacks. You can preview the outcome of a transaction before you sign it. Team features such as multichain search, shared projects and address tags sit in the paid Console plan. Our Tenderly alternatives page compares it with other debuggers.

Best for: Developers who open Etherscan to debug their own contracts.

Pricing:

• Tenderly Free: no charge, no trial limit, browser only
• Tenderly Console: Contact Sales, no public price

Watch out for:

• The free plan has no API access, and its explorer searches one chain at a time.

Official site: Tenderly.

Otterscan

Otterscan is for people who would rather not send their lookups to a third party at all. The docs describe it as an open source, fast, local, laptop-friendly Ethereum block explorer. You run it next to your own node, so every address and transaction you check stays on your machine.

Per its GitHub README, it needs only a mainline Erigon execution node plus Otterscan itself, because the Otterscan API is built into Erigon. The explorer is MIT licensed, and the API inside Erigon follows Erigon's LGPL-3 licence.

Best for: Node operators and privacy-minded users who want an explorer with no outside requests.

Pricing:

• Free and open source (MIT)
• You pay for the hardware that runs Erigon

Watch out for:

• It is useless without an Erigon node, and a full Ethereum node needs serious disk space and sync time. There is no public hosted instance listed.

Official site: Otterscan.

Alchemy

Many apps call the Etherscan API just to list an address's transfers. Alchemy covers that over RPC with alchemy_getAssetTransfers, which its support article also suggests for asset-change lookups. You get node access and history from one provider.

Billing is by compute unit. The pricing page gives 30M CUs a month free, then pay-as-you-go at $0.52 per 1M CUs with 300 requests per second included.

Best for: App developers who need address history and RPC from the same API key.

Pricing:

• Free: 30M CUs per month, 300 CU/s, 5 apps
• Pay as You Go: $0.52 per 1M CUs; extra throughput $160 per 5,000 CU/s block per month
• Enterprise: custom

Watch out for:

• No explorer pages and no contract source verification, so it replaces Etherscan's API, not its website. Its simulation methods were also retired on September 30, 2026.

Official site: Alchemy.

How to choose

When to stay with Etherscan

For everyday lookups on Ethereum mainnet, Etherscan is still the reference: contract verification, labels and token pages are where most links on the web point. Its free API is enough for hobby projects on the covered chains at 3 calls per second. Move only the part that hurts, such as the API bill or trace depth, and keep Etherscan open for the rest.

Frequently asked questions