Animals · head-to-head

AdoptAPet vs HTTP Dog

AdoptAPet

AdoptAPet's free Pet List API lets a registered shelter or rescue pull its own current adoptable-pet listings — name, photo, breed, and a link back to the pet's page — for display on its own website; it doesn't cover other shelters' animals or expose network-wide search. Access needs a per-shelter API key passed as a key query parameter to endpoints like api.adoptapet.com/search/pets_at_shelter, confirmed live by a real GET that returns a JSON invalid_key error rather than a redirect or outage, with a separate OPTIONS preflight and that same GET both echoing access-control-allow-origin: * back for a test Origin header. The official documentation page now sits behind a shelter-account login (a live probe returns 401 with a Basic-auth challenge, a change from when it was openly readable), but the API endpoint itself remains fully live and free, returning JSON or XML depending on the output parameter.

HTTP Dog

http.dog serves a themed dog photo for most standard HTTP status codes (e.g. GET /200, /404, /451), following the same status-code-as-image idea as http.cat. A .json variant returns direct links to the same image in JPEG, WebP, AVIF, and JXL instead of the image itself. It's a static Cloudflare-fronted site with no server-side application logic, so there's no API key, authentication, or rate limit of any kind.

AdoptAPetHTTP Dog
AuthenticationAPI KeyNone
Pricingfreefree
FormatsJSON, XMLJSON, JPEG, WEBP, AVIF
CORSyesno
HTTPSYesYes

HTTP Dog needs no API key, while AdoptAPet requires API Key — pick HTTP Dog to start without signup.

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