chucknorris.io vs Imgflip

chucknorris.io is a free, keyless JSON API serving hand-curated Chuck Norris jokes, either fully random or filtered across 16 categories (career, dev, movie, political, sport, and more). It also supports free-text search over the joke corpus and returns each joke with a permalink and an icon-URL field for quick embedding. There's no rate limit, no signup, and no paid tier — it's run as a hobby project on Heroku behind Cloudflare.

Imgflip's API exposes the site's meme template library and captioning engine to third-party apps and bots: get_memes returns the current top templates for free with no key, while caption_image (and GIF/AI captioning) needs an Imgflip username and password. Making static memes stays free indefinitely; a $9.99/month Premium add-on unlocks GIF captioning, full template search, AI-assisted captions, and watermark removal, billed per request beyond an included Premium quota. It's one of the oldest meme-generator APIs still running, predating most of the newer AI meme tools in this category.