Jikan vs Waifu.im

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.

Waifu.im serves a curated, moderator-reviewed archive of over 4,000 anime-style illustrations through a REST API, with AND/OR tag filtering across dozens of character and franchise tags (confirmed live via a plain GET against api.waifu.im/tags), NSFW toggling, and artist attribution on every image. Basic browsing needs no authentication; an X-Api-Key or JWT unlocks per-user favorites, albums, and reports.