ABSTRACT A total of 3350 objects from the Sixth Catalog of Orbits of Visual Binary Stars (ORB6) are investigated to validate Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) parallaxes and provide mass estimates for the systems. We show that two-thirds of binaries with a separation of 0.2–0.5 arcsec are left without a parallax solution in EDR3. Special attention is paid to 521 pairs with the parallax known separately for each component. We find 16 entries that are deemed to be chance alignments of unrelated stars. First we show examples of high-confidence binary systems with significant differences in the reported parallaxes of their components. Next we conclude that the reported Gaia EDR3 parallax errors are underestimated, by at least a factor of 3, for sources with a large renormalized unit-weight error (RUWE). Parallaxes are needed to estimate stellar masses. Because nearly 30 per cent of ORB6 entries lack a 5- or 6-parameter solution in EDR3, we attempt to enrich the astrometric data. Distant companions of ORB6 entries are revealed in EDR3 by the analysis of stellar proper motions and Hipparcos parallaxes. Notably, in 28 cases, intrinsic EDR3 parallaxes of the binary components appear to be less reliable than the parallax of the outer companions. Gaia DR2, The Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS) and Hipparcos parallaxes are used when EDR3 data are unavailable. A synthetic mass–luminosity relationship in the G band for main-sequence stars is obtained to provide mass estimates along with dynamical masses calculated via Kepler’s third law.