Weather · head-to-head
RainViewer vs wttr.in
RainViewer aggregates and re-tiles third-party radar imagery from over 1,200 radar stations across 150+ countries, refreshed every 5 minutes, and exposes it as XYZ PNG tile pyramids plus a JSON timeline endpoint listing available past and short-term nowcast frames. Coverage isn't guaranteed to be permanent since individual source radar owners can request their feed be pulled, and the service is explicitly licensed for personal, educational, and small-scale community projects only.
wttr.in returns weather reports as ASCII art directly to curl, wget, or a plain browser request, so there's no client UI to build. It's a standalone open-source Go service with plain-text, colorized ANSI, PNG, and JSON output modes, and needs no signup or API key.
| RainViewer | wttr.in | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | None | None |
| Pricing | free | free |
| Formats | JSON, PNG | plain text, ANSI, PNG, JSON |
| CORS | yes | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
wttr.in supports 4 response formats, while RainViewer offers fewer — pick wttr.in for more integration flexibility.