GBIF vs World Bank

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is a keyless REST API for searching species, occurrence, and dataset records aggregated from natural history collections, herbaria, and citizen-science platforms worldwide — its occurrence index alone reports a live count past 3.9 billion records. It's operated by an intergovernmental nonprofit funded by member governments, so querying the API is free; registration is only needed to publish new datasets, not to read existing ones.

The World Bank's Indicators API gives free, keyless REST access to the World Development Indicators dataset — thousands of economic, social, and environmental indicators across nearly 300 countries and regions, spanning six decades. Responses are paginated JSON or XML, covering countries, regions, income levels, lending types, topics, sources, and the indicator series themselves.