AnimeNewsNetwork vs Waifu.im

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.

Waifu.im serves a curated, moderator-reviewed archive of over 4,000 anime-style illustrations through a REST API, with AND/OR tag filtering across dozens of character and franchise tags (confirmed live via a plain GET against api.waifu.im/tags), NSFW toggling, and artist attribution on every image. Basic browsing needs no authentication; an X-Api-Key or JWT unlocks per-user favorites, albums, and reports.