Business · head-to-head
Gmail vs Pick an Agency
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.
Pick an Agency runs a free, no-signup REST + MCP API over its directory of 47,000+ verified marketing agencies. It has `/search`, `/agencies/{slug}`, and `/match` endpoints for shortlisting agencies by service, location, and rating, plus a machine-readable OpenAPI spec at `/api/v1/openapi.json`. A live GET this run against `/search` and against `/match` both returned real agency records with `access-control-allow-origin: *` and no auth challenge. This confirms the stored 'None' auth and open CORS policy with real JSON payloads.
| Gmail | Pick an Agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | OAuth | None |
| Pricing | free | free |
| Formats | JSON | JSON |
| CORS | yes | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
Pick an Agency needs no API key, while Gmail requires OAuth — pick Pick an Agency to start without signup.