The recent shift to web-based, cloud-native applications has influenced the development of interconnected apps. As you are likely aware, cloud-native apps differ from standalone desktop applications. As interconnected applications, they offer end-users much more convenience and functionality. Their design allows them to interact either with applications from simple e-commerce websites or complex data analytics engines.
In most cases, developers prefer to use an Application Programming Interface (API) to interact with multiple services and build interconnected apps. When it comes to APIs, Apilayer and Abstractapi both provide services that can be easily integrated with any application. You can use their APIs to get the functionality you need. Both offer a multitude of services, from checking geolocations to verifying a phone number or vat verification.
In this blog post, we will compare these two services based on criteria such as features, ease of use, documentation, and pricing.
Table of Contents
Features
Both Apilayer and Abstractapi provide a wide range of APIs that offer different functionality. While some APIs are common for both services, some are unique to a specific service. The following table shows a thorough comparison of APIs offered by the two services for different use cases.
| Use | apilayer (API Name) | abstractapi (API Name) |
| IP address and geolocation lookup | Ipstack (Lookup) | IP Geolocation |
| IP address location and Reverse IP lookup | ipapi (Lookup) | – |
| User-Agent lookup and device detection | userstack (Lookup) | – |
| Language detection | languagelayer (Lookup) | – |
| Geocoding & Maps | positionstack (Lookup) | – |
| Email validation and verification | mailboxlayer (Verification) | Email Verification |
| Phone number validation | numverify (Verification) | Phone Validation |
| EU VAT number validation and VAT rate lookup | vatlayer (Verification) | VAT Validation & Rates |
| Currency conversion | currencylayer (Data) | Exchange Rates & Currencies |
| Foreign exchange rate | Fixer (Data) | – |
| Cryptocurrency exchange rates and conversion | coinlayer (Data) | – |
| Real-time Weather data and forecasts | weatherstack (Data) | Weather |
| Real-time and historical flight tracking and status | aviationstack (Data) | – |
| Real-time, intraday, and historical stock data | marketstack (Data) | – |
| Live News, Headlines, and Blog | meadiastack (Data) | – |
| Screenshot creation | screenshotlayer (Conversion) | Website Screenshot |
| PDF conversion | pdflayer (Conversion) | – |
| Real-time proxy and web scraping | scrapestack (Conversion) | Web Scraping |
| Real-time google search and SERP | serpstack (Conversion) | – |
| User avatar creation | – | User Avatar |
| Get public holidays | – | Public Holidays |
| Image processing (compressing and optimization) | – | Image Processing |
| Get and covert dates and times | – | Time, Date and Timzeone API |
| IBAN validation | – | IBAN Validation |
| Get domain or company data | – | Company Enrichment |
| Shorten URLs | – | Link Shortener |
Feature analysis
As you can see, abstractapi focuses more on generalized services, while Apilayer provides much more in-depth and dedicated APIs under the Lookup, Verification, Data, and Conversion categories. One of the major factors that differentiates these two services is that Apilayer offers real-time and historical data collection capabilities, while Abstract API doesn’t.
For instance, Apilayer provides API services for weather, aviation, stock market, and media that can be easily integrated into an application and reduce the workload to be processed in the backend.
apilayer
abstractapi
Ease of Use
It’s easy to get started with both services. Both offer a simple and straightforward user experience. Users can simply sign up and get an API key to use the free version, and they can upgrade to a paid plan with a few clicks. As with any REST-based API, users can access the API functionality with the endpoint URL, API Key, and the required parameters without any additional requirements. However, when considering documentation as a part of usability, Apilayer wins over Abstractapi with its more comprehensive documentation with multiple code samples in different languages.
apilayer
abstractapi
Pricing
Both services offer a limited free basic/starter tier with comparable prices that can be afforded by anyone. However, there are some variations in pricing between the two services when it comes to professional and professional plus tiers. Some professional plans of Apilayer are cheaper than Abstractapi, while professional plus plans are usually much cheaper across all services with Apilayer. Moreover, both services offer custom pricing options for enterprise plans.
apilayer
abstractapi
Documentation
For documentation, Apilayer has a dedicated section for each available API. It provides comprehensive information about that API. It also includes general usage guidelines, error codes, endpoints with all the available parameters, sample requests and responses, and other options such as response formats and response fields. Furthermore, Apilayer provides code samples in multiple programming languages to offer developers a reference point. This makes it easier to implement the API in their preferred programming language.
In contrast, the documentation of Abstractapi is limited to general guidelines, endpoint information with parameters, error codes, and some sample requests and responses across all the APIs. Unfortunately, Abstractapi does not provide code samples in different programming languages like Apilayer does.
apilayer
abstractapi
Overall, both Apilayer and Abstractapi provide robust and easy-to-use web APIs for different use cases. However, Apilayer has the lead over Abstractapi with its extensive, in-depth, and targeted feature set, extensive documentation, and affordable pricing. For this reason, Apilayer is the better choice if you want an excellent, stable and scalable API service. Moreover, apilayer is trusted by over a million customers worldwide, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Head over and start integrating apilayer APIs into your solutions today!
