Anime · head-to-head
AnimeNewsNetwork vs MyAnimeList
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.
MyAnimeList's official v2 REST API was reconfirmed live at api.myanimelist.net/v2 — an unauthenticated request returned a 403 from the real gateway rather than a network error, and a preflight OPTIONS carried no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, so cors is corrected to no. It requires a registered OAuth 2 client, the same one the community 'Official MAL API' club (the entry's stored url) walks new developers through, and remains completely free to use.
| AnimeNewsNetwork | MyAnimeList | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | None | OAuth |
| Pricing | free | free |
| Formats | XML | JSON |
| CORS | yes | no |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
AnimeNewsNetwork needs no API key, while MyAnimeList requires OAuth — pick AnimeNewsNetwork to start without signup.