Octav vs DeBank vs Zerion: Portfolio APIs

These three finished at the top of our nine-provider benchmark: DeBank 85, Octav 82, Zerion 79. They are close on the overall number and very different in what they are good at.

Disclosure: Octav is one of the three. We built the benchmark harness and publish the methodology, the weights and the results where we lose.

The short version

Read that as three different bets:

• DeBank — the most balanced. Full EVM DeFi coverage without paying a latency or price penalty for it.
• Octav — the widest sector coverage. Options, perps and Solana DeFi in the same call, at the cost of speed and price.
• Zerion — the fastest and cheapest. Excellent if your wallets are simple; its coverage score of 48 is the caveat.

Where the coverage difference shows up

Coverage only matters when a wallet holds something unusual. On a plain token wallet all three agree to within a fraction of a percent. The gaps appear by sector:

The options line is the starkest: on the Derive book, full decoding reports $1.33M where collateral-only reads report about $401.6k. That is not a rounding difference, it is a different answer to "what do I own".

Where Octav loses

Two dimensions, and they are real:

Cost — 54 vs Zerion's 99. Octav is credit-based at roughly $0.020–$0.025 per credit, with most endpoints costing one credit. Zerion is materially cheaper per call. If you are polling thousands of simple wallets on a loop, that difference compounds fast and Zerion is the rational choice.

Performance — 40 vs Zerion's 92. Decoding positions across many protocols costs time. If you need sub-second responses in a user-facing hot path, budget for caching or pick a faster provider. Portfolio responses cache for one minute; transactions for ten.

We would rather publish that than have you discover it in week two of an integration.

Where Octav wins

Developer experience — 90, the highest measured. One call, Bearer-key auth, tokens and every decoded DeFi position returned in a single predictable shape, across 19 endpoints. See the endpoint reference.

Tooling — 82 vs DeBank's 40. An MCP server, a Rust CLI and x402, a no-code widget builder, daily snapshots and public transparency dashboards.

Sector completeness. Options, perps and Solana DeFi from one integration rather than three providers stitched together.

Which one should you pick

There is no universally correct answer here, which is why we published the weights rather than a single ranking. Re-weight the scorecard for what you actually care about and the order changes.