Jikan vs MangaDex

Jikan is a free, keyless wrapper around MyAnimeList's public web data, confirmed live at api.jikan.moe/v4 with a real anime lookup and a wide-open Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header. It has no official affiliation with MAL and can lag behind it after a MAL outage, but it remains the most widely used way to query MAL data without OAuth.

MangaDex's API was reconfirmed live at api.mangadex.org with a real manga listing, but a direct cross-origin GET and an OPTIONS preflight both came back without an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, so browser-based CORS calls fail — corrected to no. Authentication was also corrected from a bare API key to MangaDex's real scheme: OAuth 2 personal clients using a password grant tied to a user's account, since MangaDex has no API-key concept — public reads need no auth at all. The API and its manga remain entirely free, funded by the site rather than gated behind the API.