Helius LaserStream vs Yellowstone gRPC: What Actually Differs in 2026

Let us start with a correction to our own pages. Until recently several Subglow comparisons claimed that Helius LaserStream was a proprietary protocol requiring the Helius SDK, and that migrating away meant rewriting your client. That was wrong. Helius documents LaserStream gRPC as fully compatible with the Yellowstone gRPC library, and a standard @triton-one/yellowstone-grpc or yellowstone-grpc-client connects to it directly. We have corrected those pages. If you made an infrastructure decision based on the earlier claim, it was based on a false premise.

With that out of the way, the comparison is more interesting than "compatible or not", because the two products differ in ways that actually bind.

What "wire-compatible" means in practice

Both endpoints speak the same SubscribeRequest and return the same SubscribeUpdate protobuf messages. Your filter definitions, your commitment level, and your message handling all carry over. Switching between them is an endpoint URL and an API key — not a rewrite.

// Same client library, same subscription, different endpoint.
const client = new Client(ENDPOINT, API_KEY, {});
const stream = await client.subscribe();
stream.write({
  transactions: { pumpfun: { accountInclude: [PUMP_FUN_PROGRAM] } },
  commitment: CommitmentLevel.PROCESSED,
});

The one thing that does not carry over is anything you relied on the Helius SDK to do for you. Its automatic reconnect-with-replay is SDK-side behaviour; point a plain Yellowstone client at either endpoint and reconnect logic is yours to write. See auto-reconnect for what that involves.

Where the products genuinely diverge

Sort this by whichever column is your binding constraint:

Three differences do real work:

• Historical replay. Helius keeps roughly 216,000 slots — about 24 hours — and will serve them after a disconnect, with automatic failover between ingest nodes. Subglow keeps none. If a gap in your data is permanent loss rather than an inconvenience, this decides it, and it decides it against us.
• Regional coverage. Nine published Helius endpoints against our four. Wire latency is dominated by distance, so if your workers run in Tokyo, Helius will very likely beat us on the wire regardless of anything else either of us does.
• How the bill is computed. LaserStream on mainnet requires the Business plan at $499/mo and consumes credits as you stream, so an active market raises both your throughput and your invoice. Subglow is $99/mo flat and unmetered, so the invoice does not move.

The payload difference, measured rather than asserted

Helius sends standard Yellowstone protobuf, which means instruction data arrives Borsh-encoded and your client decodes it. Subglow decodes server-side and sends structured JSON. We used to describe that gap in vague terms; now we measure it:

The honest reading undercuts our own marketing. Protobuf plus Borsh decoding is faster than parsing equivalent JSON. What makes the raw path expensive is base58-encoding pubkeys into strings — the majority of client-side decode cost in every language we tested. So if your client keeps pubkeys as byte arrays and never renders them, pre-parsed JSON saves you very little. If it stringifies pubkeys constantly, which most bots and every dashboard do, the saving is real. Methodology on the decode cost benchmark.

Choose Helius when

• A gap after a disconnect is unacceptable and you want replay rather than a backfill job
• Your workers sit in a region we do not serve
• You already use their wider Solana API surface — DAS, webhooks, enhanced transactions — and want one vendor
• You want automatic multi-node failover without writing it

Choose Subglow when

• A predictable flat bill matters more than replay, at $99/mo against $499/mo plus metering
• Your consumers render pubkeys as strings, so server-side parsing removes real work
• You are early enough that a $400/mo difference is a meaningful share of your infrastructure budget

Related

• Subglow vs Helius — full feature comparison
• Helius alternatives — including reasons to stay
• Provider matrix — every cell labelled by provenance