The Muse vs Upwork

The Muse's public API returns its job listings and company profiles — culture content, photos, and open roles per employer — the same data powering its own site and widgets. Anyone can call it for light testing; registering a free app key raises the rate limit and is required for production use.

Upwork's public API is now a single GraphQL endpoint covering the freelance marketplace it once exposed as separate REST resources — job postings, proposals, contracts, time tracking, and messaging — authenticated via OAuth 2.0 (Authorization Code Grant with PKCE). A live probe confirmed the stored docs URL still redirects to the current GraphQL reference and that the gateway itself returns a genuine 401 challenge to unauthenticated calls, with no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header on either that request or a follow-up preflight. Registering an application is free, gated only by Upwork's own review and a 300-request-per-minute-per-IP rate limit.