Dune’s Free plan is now view-only: its credits documentation lists 0 monthly credits, no query execution and no API, where free accounts used to get 2,500 credits a month, according to Crypto Briefing. From 3 November 2026, Etherscan blocks API calls at a plan’s daily limit unless a paid account has turned overage on. Free tiers move, and a routine built on them can stop working on a date you did not plan for.
That is why a list of the best DeFi tools is only useful with a date on it. This lesson sorts the tools by the job you need done, gives what is free and what is paid as of 2 November 2026, sets one concrete task for each and names the limit of each. Prices come from the official pricing pages, which you should reopen before paying anything.
It follows the step-by-step path for starting in DeFi, where you made your first small transactions. Now you need instruments to see what those transactions did. Nothing here is a recommendation to use a protocol or buy a token, and no link on this page is an affiliate link.
How to choose the best DeFi tools: five tests before any brand name
“Best” means nothing without a job. A tool that is excellent for comparing protocols can be useless for checking a signature. So the tools below are judged on five tests, in this order.
- Does it work with a public address alone? A tool that only reads needs nothing else from you.
- Who holds your money while you use it? For most tools here the answer is nobody. For a yield aggregator, a vault contract does.
- What exactly is free today, according to the vendor’s own page and not a two-year-old review?
- Can you check its figures? Open source code, visible SQL and on-chain links all count.
- What happens if it disappears tomorrow? A dashboard costs you a bookmark. A vault you have deposited into needs a working way out.
The jobs fall into six groups: read the market, ask your own questions, see what happened on-chain, track what you own, check before you sign, and manage yields and loans. The first five only inform you. Only the sixth can put your funds inside someone else’s contract.
DefiLlama and Token Terminal read the market for you
DefiLlama: free to read, paid to automate
DefiLlama is the reference dashboard for total value locked, fees and revenue, token prices and yields. On 2 November 2026 its public API listed 8,903 protocols and 420 chains, its home page ranking counted 6,904 protocols, and it showed $85.32 billion of total value locked across DeFi. The site opens with no account and no wallet. If staking or liquidity, measured at current market prices. It is the main size metric in DeFi.">TVL is new to you, our guide to measuring TVL explains what the number includes and why protocol figures must not be added together: the same dollar can be counted twice.
The official plans page has three public levels as of 2 November 2026. Open is free and covers TVL, fees and revenue, prices and the LlamaFeed news stream. Pro costs $49 a month or $490 a year and adds LlamaAI, Pro dashboards, CSV downloads and Google Sheets. The API plan costs $300 a month or $3,000 a year, with 1,000 requests a minute and 1 million calls a month. API access is not part of Pro.
One thing to watch if you can code: the public endpoints still answered without a key on 2 November 2026, yet the plans page places API access in the paid tier. The Yields page also warns that the yields API moves to new endpoints on 13 November 2026. Check the terms before you build anything you depend on.
DefiLlama reports what protocols and adapters expose. A large TVL says how much money sits in a contract. It says nothing about whether that contract is safe.
Token Terminal: protocols read like companies
Token Terminal presents protocols through financial statements: fees, revenue and expenses, per protocol, over time. Its home page claims more than 100 chains and 1,600 applications, a vendor figure. On its pricing page as of 2 November 2026, the Free plan costs $0 and includes 3 custom dashboards. Pro is listed at $350, with a monthly or annual switch that advertises 15% off on annual billing, and a trial. API and Datashare are custom-priced.
Watch the definitions. “Revenue” here is the vendor’s standardised reading, and it can differ from DefiLlama’s for the same protocol. Coverage is curated too, so a small protocol may simply be absent. Beginners rarely need more than the free view.
A five-minute task: compare two lending protocols
Take TVL and 30-day fees for two lending protocols, then divide one by the other. That ratio shows how much activity each dollar deposited produces, which raw TVL hides. With DefiLlama figures read on 2 November 2026:
| Protocol | TVL | Fees, last 30 days | Fees as share of TVL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aave V3 | $15.40 billion | $36.8 million | about 0.24% |
| Compound V3 | $1.31 billion | $2.62 million | about 0.20% |
Aave V3 is almost twelve times larger by TVL, yet the two earn fees at a close rate on the money deposited. That is the kind of finding a dashboard gives you in minutes. It does not tell you which is safer, and “fees” here means what users paid, which is not the same as what the protocol keeps.
Dune answers your own questions, but its Free plan is now view-only
What changed in 2026
Dune lets people write SQL against decoded blockchain tables and publish the results as dashboards. For years it was the free laboratory of on-chain analysts. Crypto Briefing reported on 27 August 2026 that accounts created before 21 July 2026 would lose query execution from 10 September 2026 unless they upgraded, after an automatic 14-day Plus trial. The outlet gave rising compute costs as Dune’s reason. That date has passed. Dune’s own pages give no cut-off date, but neither lists any exception for older accounts.
The pricing page and the documentation, both read on 2 November 2026, set out the position today. Free is “View-only access to all of Dune”: you can view and copy any dashboard or query and your saved work stays, but there are no monthly credits, no query execution and no API. New accounts start with a trial of up to 14 days with Plus features and 2,500 credits in total, which ends sooner if the credits run out. After that, Analyst costs $75 a month ($65 a month billed annually) for 4,000 credits, and Plus costs $399 a month ($349 billed annually) for 25,000 credits. “Free accounts and free trials cannot buy extra credits,” the documentation says.
What a free reader can still do with a dashboard
Plenty, as a reader. Search for a protocol, open a community dashboard and read its charts. The task: find a dashboard on a token you hold and look at how its number of holders or its volume moved over a year.
Everything depends on the author. A dashboard is only as good as the query behind it, and nobody audits it for you. Open the query, check which tables it uses and which addresses it filters on, and look at when it last ran. An abandoned dashboard can show a stale picture while looking perfectly live. Two dashboards on the same metric can also disagree, and without knowing SQL you may not be able to tell which is right.
DefiLlama, Token Terminal and Dune all answer “what is going on?” with data other people have prepared. To see the raw record, you need an explorer.
Block explorers show what actually happened on-chain
Etherscan: the receipt for every transaction
An explorer is the public ledger made readable. On Etherscan you paste a transaction hash, or a public address, and see what the chain recorded. The website needs no account for browsing and no wallet at all, which makes it the first tool to learn.
The task: open one of your own transactions from the previous lesson and read five things. Status says whether it succeeded or failed. From and To say who called what. Token transfers show what really moved, which can differ from what the interface promised. The fee shows what you paid. Finally, on the contract page, check whether the source code is verified, meaning anyone can read it.
An explorer shows facts, without judging them. A verified contract can still be malicious, and a “success” status only means the code ran, not that the outcome was good for you.
Most beginners can ignore the API. For those who script, the free key on Etherscan’s API gives 3 calls a second and up to 100,000 calls a day on selected chains only, with paid plans from $49 a month. Its documentation says: “Effective November 3, 2026, requests are blocked once you reach your plan’s daily limit, unless overage is turned on.” Only paid plans can turn it on, at $3 per 100,000 calls. Check the supported-chains list before relying on a given chain.
Blockscout and the explorers of other networks
Etherscan is a company’s product. Blockscout is an open-source explorer, which its documentation says covers more than 1,000 chains and rollups, so anyone can read the code or run an instance. Many smaller networks use it as their main explorer.
The practical rule: use the explorer linked from the network’s own documentation. An explorer is a website like any other, with look-alikes, and each chain has its own. A transaction on Base will not appear on the Ethereum explorer, a common first panic for new users.
Track what you own: DeBank, rotki and the limits of a tracker
The reminder from our lesson on building and tracking a DeFi portfolio: a tracker gives you the picture across chains, while your position log records why you did each thing. The first does not replace the second.
DeBank presents itself as a portfolio tracker for Ethereum and EVM chains. Third-party reviews describe a free core with paid extras on top, and say it does not hold your assets or your keys. They disagree on prices and on how far coverage goes beyond EVM chains, Solana included, so no price is quoted here and a Solana or Bitcoin holding may sit outside the picture. Trackers of this kind usually read a public address. Test that on DeBank before anything else, and if it insists on a wallet connection, the read-only rule at the end of this lesson applies.
rotki takes the opposite approach. It is an open-source, local-first portfolio tracker and tax tool that keeps its database on your own computer, so your list of addresses does not sit on someone else’s server. Its pricing page, read on 2 November 2026, shows a free Starter plan that displays your 1,000 most recent events and limits the dashboard graph to the last week or two. Paid plans cost €9, €25 and €45 a month with monthly billing, with a cheaper yearly option, and raise that limit to 3,000, 30,000 and 100,000 events. Free and Supporter plans do not track ETH validators. The price of privacy is set-up time, which is more than pasting an address.
Every tracker has the same blind spots. It does not know your exchange balances unless you connect them, it can miss a new protocol, and it can misprice a thin token. Treat a total as an estimate, then check any figure that matters on the protocol itself or on the explorer.
A free combination that needs no signature: a tracker with your public address, the explorer of each chain for the detail, and DefiLlama for the protocol side.
Before you sign: Tenderly simulation and Revoke.cash
Our DeFi security routine sets the habit: simulate what you do not understand, and clean up old approvals. Here is what the two reference tools offer and where they stop.
Tenderly: a rehearsal of a transaction
Tenderly’s Simulator runs a transaction against live chain state “without broadcasting anything”. You get decoded output, gas used, events, state changes and token transfers. Bundles can chain up to five steps, each seeing the previous one’s changes. According to the pricing page, the Free plan is free indefinitely, needs no card, and covers the debugger, single-transaction simulation in the browser and an explorer limited to one chain at a time. There is “No API access on Free”, and paid plans are quoted by the sales team, with no public price.
The tool is built for developers. You must supply the contract, the function and its parameters, or a raw hex payload, so a beginner can be stuck at the first field. In practice, the task for you is modest: take a past transaction of yours and read how its token movements are displayed, to learn what a state change looks like.
A simulation only shows what would happen on the state at that moment. The chain can change before your transaction lands. It reports the effects of the code, not the intentions of whoever wrote it. If your wallet shows a preview of balance changes before you sign, read that too, and refuse anything you cannot explain.
Revoke.cash: see and cancel your token approvals
Each time you use a DeFi app you usually give a contract permission to move a token from your wallet. These approvals stay after you leave, sometimes for an unlimited amount. If that contract is later exploited, the permission can be used against you. Revoke.cash lists them.
Reading needs nothing: the address page at revoke.cash/address/ followed by a public address shows the approvals of that address, with no connection. Connecting is only needed to revoke, because revoking is a real transaction that you sign and pay gas for. That is the one moment this tool touches your wallet, and it never needs a seed phrase.
On its pricing page as of 2 November 2026, Free covers 80+ networks one chain at a time, approval history, an exploit checker and batch revoking at $1.50 per batch. Premium costs $99 a year for 10 wallets, adding a multichain dashboard and no batch fees. Ultimate costs $199 a year for 10 wallets, adding continuous monitoring and automated revoking with a $5 monthly gas budget. For one or two wallets, the free version does the job, one transaction at a time.
Revoke.cash removes permissions, nothing more. It cannot get back anything already taken, and a revoke does nothing against a signature you are tricked into giving tomorrow. The site’s claims of more than 2 million users and $140 million protected are its own marketing figures.
Yields: a dashboard shows rates, an aggregator holds your money
DefiLlama Yields is a thermometer
DefiLlama’s yield data listed 16,028 pools on 2 November 2026. You deposit nothing there, and the page says DefiLlama “doesn’t audit nor endorse any of the protocols listed”. It displays rates, and the data separates base yield, paid from real activity, from reward yield, paid in incentive tokens that can end. Our guide to APR and APY explains how to read the headline number.
The task: look up USDC on Aave V3 on Ethereum. On 2 November 2026 the same token on the same protocol and chain appeared on four rows, from about 3.2% to about 6.6%. One row showed a 3.79% base rate alone, another the same base plus 1.78% in rewards, 5.57% in all. Before comparing rates, read which market each row describes, how much of the rate is reward and how much money sits in the smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">pool. The smallest of those rows held about $246,000, against about $145 million for the 3.79% row.
The same data shows 479 pools above 100% APY that day. Treat such a figure as a question. A very high rate usually means thin liquidity, a temporary reward or a risk you have not found yet.
Yearn and Beefy: you hand your deposit to a vault
A yield aggregator does something different from all the tools above. You deposit into a vault contract, you receive a receipt token, and the vault’s strategy moves the funds and compounds the rewards. It saves effort and gas. Our lesson on yield aggregators and vaults explains the mechanics. For this catalogue, one point counts: an aggregator is a tool that holds your funds, and a dashboard is not.
Each one has two different TVL readings as of 2 November 2026, so never mix sources. Yearn’s own page showed about $199 million deposited, against about $153.9 million for Yearn Finance on DefiLlama. Beefy’s site showed about $139 million on 23 chains, against about $99.1 million on DefiLlama.
Fees are in the small print. Yearn’s documentation lists two possible charges: a performance fee on yield at each harvest and a management fee on deposits, with a fee structure that varies by vault. Single-asset vaults generally have no management fee, and the site shows yield as net APY, meaning after fees. Beefy’s fee page describes a performance fee on harvest rewards of up to 9.5% since its BIP:45 vote, already built into the displayed APY, plus a 0.05% fee on its Zap tool and a withdrawal fee of up to 0.1% on the rare vaults that do not harvest on deposit. Those Beefy documents are old in places, so read the fee line of the vault itself.
The catch is risk stacking. You take the risk of the vault, of each protocol its strategy touches and of the token, plus the fees. A vault can lose money, and an APY displayed today is no promise about tomorrow. Before any deposit, read where the strategy puts the money.
Liquidation alerts and bots: one warns you, the other acts
If you borrow, the number that matters is your health factor and liquidation price. Two kinds of tool watch it, and they should not be confused. An alert sends you a message and leaves the decision to you. An automation executes a transaction on your position, using your collateral, under rules you set in advance.
DeFi Saver: Notify and Liquidation Protection
Notify is the alert side. You set a ratio and receive a notification when it is reached or when an automated adjustment runs. It is available for Aave, Liquity, Maker and Compound positions, whether or not they sit on a DeFi Saver Smart Wallet, and it can be used without any automation.
Liquidation Protection is the acting side. When the Safety Ratio falls below the minimum threshold, it repays enough debt to lift the ratio by 5%. Thresholds listed on 2 November 2026 include 105% on Aave v3, 110% on Aave v4, 105% on Compound v3 and 155% on Maker. Not every account qualifies: DeFi Saver’s help centre has a separate page on requirements, so read it before counting on this.
There is no subscription. DeFi Saver says that simply enabling a strategy carries no service fee. Each triggered automation costs 0.05%, swaps inside it cost 0.25% for uncorrelated assets, 0.1% for correlated assets and 0.01% for stablecoin pairs, and gas is charged to the position, not to your wallet.
The weak points are listed on its own risk page. It names smart contract risk, technical risk such as network congestion or an unavailable data provider, upgrades controlled by team multisigs, and markets that move too fast for the automation to react. An automation can fail exactly when the network is busiest, which is when you need it. And when it works, it sells part of your position in a falling market.
A simple routine that needs no bot
Pick a warning level well above 1, say 1.5 as an example and not as a recommendation, because the right level depends on how volatile your collateral is. Set an alert at that level. Check the position on the protocol’s own interface when it fires. Decide in advance what you will do: repay, add collateral or close.
The best DeFi tools compared: job, free tier, wallet connection
All data below is as of 2 November 2026, from the official pages linked above, except the DeBank row. “Wallet” means whether you must connect one for the main task.
| Tool | Job | Free today | Wallet connection | Main limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DefiLlama | Compare protocols and chains | Website, TVL, fees, prices | No | Says nothing on safety |
| Token Terminal | Protocol financials | 3 custom dashboards | No | Vendor definitions, curated list |
| Dune | Community dashboards, SQL | View-only; queries need a trial or paid plan | No | Depends on each author |
| Etherscan | Read a transaction or contract | Website; API with quotas | No | Facts without judgement |
| Blockscout | Same, on many other chains | Open-source explorer | No | Coverage varies by chain |
| DeBank | Portfolio view across EVM chains | Basic view, per third-party reviews | Should not be needed to read; test it | Coverage beyond EVM chains unclear |
| rotki | Local portfolio and accounting | Starter plan, 1,000 recent events | No | Set-up time |
| Tenderly | Simulate a transaction | Single simulation in browser | No | Built for developers |
| Revoke.cash | List and cancel approvals | Yes, one chain at a time | To revoke only | Cannot undo a theft |
| Yearn, Beefy | Vaults that farm for you | No subscription; fees on yield | Yes, and it holds your funds | Contract and strategy risk |
| DeFi Saver | Alerts and automated repayment | Notify; automation at 0.05% per trigger | Yes, for automation | Can fail under congestion |
What the paid plans cost
| Tool | Paid plans, as of 2 November 2026 |
|---|---|
| DefiLlama | Pro $49/month or $490/year; API $300/month or $3,000/year; Enterprise custom |
| Dune | Analyst $75/month ($65 billed annually); Plus $399/month ($349 billed annually); Enterprise custom |
| Token Terminal | Pro $350; API and Datashare custom |
| Etherscan API | From $49/month (Lite) to $899 (Pro Plus) |
| rotki | €9, €25 or €45/month, billed monthly |
| Revoke.cash | Premium $99/year; Ultimate $199/year |
| Tenderly | Custom, through sales |
Fake tools and fake ads are the first risk on this list
The first decision about any tool is the address you type. On 20 February 2026, Protos reported that a Polymarket trader lost a six-figure sum, hundreds of thousands of dollars, after clicking a sponsored Google result at the top of a search for Uniswap. The site was a look-alike. The victim connected a wallet and signed a malicious transaction that let the attacker drain it. Protos named the drainer kit as AngelFerno, sold as a service, and said such URLs can use Cyrillic characters to look almost identical to the real domain.
Nothing makes the tools in this lesson immune. Their names are exactly what a beginner types into a search bar, and a revoke site is an obvious trap: the victim arrives worried and ready to sign. Our guide to avoiding crypto scams covers the wider picture. For tools, a few rules cover most of it.
- Reach each tool from a bookmark you saved once from its official documentation, and never from a sponsored search result. DefiLlama’s LlamaSearch, on its home page, exists to find official links to projects.
- Read-only work needs a public address. If a dashboard asks you to connect a wallet just to show you data, close it.
- No tool in this lesson ever needs your seed phrase or private key. A page that asks for either one is a theft in progress.
- A “connect” is not the same as a signature. An approval, a permit or a transaction you sign can move your funds, so read it first.
- Try anything experimental from a separate address that holds little.
A last point on privacy. Addresses are public by design, but looking one up tells the site’s operator that someone at your connection cares about that address. The tool can link the two. If that matters to you, a local tool such as rotki reduces what you hand over.
What to open first, job by job
- To understand a protocol or a sector, open DefiLlama, then the protocol’s own documentation.
- To see what one of your transactions really did, open the explorer of that chain.
- To see everything you own at once, use a tracker with a public address, and rotki if you want it local.
- To clean up, open Revoke.cash by address once a month as a habit, and connect only to revoke.
- To follow a loan, set an alert first, and think about automation only when you understand what it will sell.
- To compare yields, read them on a dashboard long before you hand anything to a vault.
None of these exports does your tax return. US and UK readers answer to the IRS and HMRC, and a tracker’s report is a memory aid at best: our crypto tax basics explain what to keep. Save your position log and your transaction history before a free plan’s limit hides them.
Then reopen the pricing pages every few months. Two dates are already on the calendar: Etherscan’s daily block on 3 November 2026 and the move of DefiLlama’s yields API on 13 November 2026.
