API Atlas vs public-apis

Where public-apis is the better choice

• + Enormous recognition — it is the default answer to "where do I find free APIs" and is linked from thousands of tutorials.
• + CC0 licensed, so the data can be reused without attribution.
• + Low friction: one Markdown file, trivially scraped, diffed and version-controlled.

Where it has limits

• − It is a document, not an application: there is no structured search, no filtering by authentication model or CORS support.
• − It covers general-purpose APIs only — no Model Context Protocol servers at all.
• − Maintenance depends on volunteer pull requests, so entries age unevenly and dead links accumulate.

Side by side

Cells reading “varies” or “not verified” mean we did not check it, and we would rather say so than guess. Check public-apis’s own documentation for its current capabilities. We publish no figures for a competitor’s traffic, index size or revenue.

Which should you use?

• → Choose public-apis if its strengths above match your task — enormous recognition — it is the default answer to "where do I find free APIs" and is linked from thousands of tutorials.
• → Choose API Atlas if you need to search APIs and MCP servers in one place, filter by what a record actually requires (authentication, CORS, free tier), and land on the provider’s own documentation — across 53 topics and 10,161 records.
• → Use both. Most of these tools are complementary; the catalogue is public and links out to everything it lists. There is no reason to pick one exclusively.