Science & Math · head-to-head
USGS Water Services vs World Bank
USGS Water Services is a keyless REST API serving real-time and historical streamflow, groundwater, and water-quality readings from thousands of USGS monitoring sites across the US, in WaterML XML, JSON, or the legacy tab-delimited RDB format. The agency has announced it will decommission this API family in early 2027 in favor of its new Water Data APIs (api.waterdata.usgs.gov), with no degradation planned before August 2026 — new integrations should target the successor service.
The World Bank's Indicators API gives free, keyless REST access to the World Development Indicators dataset — thousands of economic, social, and environmental indicators across nearly 300 countries and regions, spanning six decades. Responses are paginated JSON or XML, covering countries, regions, income levels, lending types, topics, sources, and the indicator series themselves.
| USGS Water Services | World Bank | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | None | None |
| Pricing | free | free |
| Formats | JSON, XML, RDB | JSON, XML |
| CORS | yes | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
USGS Water Services supports 3 response formats, while World Bank offers fewer — pick USGS Water Services for more integration flexibility.