Business · head-to-head
Charity Search vs Gmail
CharityAPI (rebranded from OrgHunter) looks up US nonprofits by EIN across basic profile, financial, geolocation, and NTEE-classification datasets, sourced from IRS filings and pitched at donation platforms and vetting tools. Its real backend at `data.orghunter.com` trades a query-string `user_key` for JSON responses and rejects unauthenticated calls with a 403, and offers free development-phase API keys with production usage gated behind paid or affiliate-only plans.
The Gmail API gives OAuth-scoped programmatic access to a user's mailbox: reading, searching, sending, and organizing messages, threads, labels, and drafts, with message bodies transported as base64url-encoded MIME inside JSON. It requires a Google OAuth 2.0 bearer token, confirmed live via a `WWW-Authenticate: Bearer realm="https://accounts.google.com/"` challenge on an unauthenticated request, and unlike most server-side email APIs it explicitly supports cross-origin browser calls, echoing the request Origin on both a GET and an OPTIONS preflight.
| Charity Search | Gmail | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | API Key | OAuth |
| Pricing | freemium | free |
| Formats | JSON | JSON |
| CORS | no | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
Gmail supports CORS, while Charity Search doesn't — pick Gmail for direct browser calls.