AnimeNewsNetwork vs MangaDex

ANN's Encyclopedia API serves anime, manga, person, and company records as XML from cdn.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/api.xml, confirmed live with a real title lookup carrying Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *; the www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/api.php page most integrations bookmark is actually the human-readable documentation front end rather than the data endpoint itself. It's free to use with attribution, capped at one request per second per IP.

MangaDex's API was reconfirmed live at api.mangadex.org with a real manga listing, but a direct cross-origin GET and an OPTIONS preflight both came back without an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, so browser-based CORS calls fail — corrected to no. Authentication was also corrected from a bare API key to MangaDex's real scheme: OAuth 2 personal clients using a password grant tied to a user's account, since MangaDex has no API-key concept — public reads need no auth at all. The API and its manga remain entirely free, funded by the site rather than gated behind the API.