Anti-Malware · head-to-head
AlienVault Open Threat Exchange (OTX) vs MalDatabase
Open Threat Exchange is AT&T Cybersecurity's community threat-intelligence platform, now operated under the LevelBlue brand, where contributors publish "pulses" of malicious IPs, domains, hashes, and URLs that anyone can query. A live, unauthenticated GET against its IPv4 general-info endpoint returned a full 200 JSON response, and both that call and its OPTIONS preflight echoed the request's Origin in Access-Control-Allow-Origin, resolving cors to yes; an OTX-API-KEY is still needed for higher rate limits and pulse subscriptions. Signup, the API key, and the community feed itself are all free.
MalDatabase distributes daily-refreshed malware datasets and threat-intelligence feeds — file hashes, behavioral sandbox data, and contacted-domain lists — for use in research and machine-learning training sets. A live call to its real download host, api.maldatabase.com/download, with an Authorization header returned a plain-text 400 error rather than a CORS-enabled response, reconfirming API-key auth over HTTPS and resolving cors to no. Its published plans run from a free 50-samples/day researcher tier up to a $49.99/month Unlimited plan covering 2,000–2,500 samples/day.
| AlienVault Open Threat Exchange (OTX) | MalDatabase | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | API Key | API Key |
| Pricing | free | freemium |
| Formats | JSON | JSON, CSV |
| CORS | yes | no |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
AlienVault Open Threat Exchange (OTX) supports CORS, while MalDatabase doesn't — pick AlienVault Open Threat Exchange (OTX) for direct browser calls.