Every other tool in this category asks you to trust a number. Dune shows you the query that produced it, running against decoded on-chain data, and lets you fork and fix it. For anyone doing serious research that is a categorical difference, not a feature.
What you can do with it
Query decoded contract events across Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin and dozens of other chains; build dashboards; schedule refreshes; export via API. The public library contains tens of thousands of dashboards covering protocols, NFT collections, bridges, stablecoins and wallet cohorts, which means most questions have a starting point somebody else has already built.
The trap in community dashboards
A widely shared dashboard can be wrong for months. A join that double-counts, a filter that silently drops a contract after a migration, a hardcoded address that changed — these are common, and the social proof of a high view count is not verification. The correct workflow is to read the query before citing the chart, which is possible here and impossible everywhere else.
Cost and limits
The free tier allows querying with limited execution performance and private dashboard restrictions; paid plans from roughly $49 a month raise those limits and add API credits. For occasional research the free tier is usually enough; for anything scheduled or programmatic it is not.
Who should use it
Analysts, researchers and anyone who needs a number that does not exist in a vendor's dashboard. Casual users are better served by DefiLlama, which answers most standard questions without requiring SQL.