Edamam recipes API vs TheMealDB API

Two free Food & Drink APIs compared on access, reliability and developer ratings, using data from our daily health checks.

The verdict

Choose Edamam recipes API for its data: API developer portal for Nutrition Analysis, Food Database Lookup, Recipe Search API and others.
Choose TheMealDB API if you want to call it from browser JavaScript.

	Edamam recipes API	TheMealDB API
What it does	API developer portal for Nutrition Analysis, Food Database Lookup, Recipe Search API and others.	TheMealDB is a free database and JSON API of recipes that is easy to use and quick to get started.
Provider	Edamam	TheMealDB.com
API key	Required	Required
HTTPS	Yes	Yes
CORS (browser calls)	Unknown	Yes
Status today	Online · 1136 ms	Online · 1573 ms
Uptime (30 days)	Up	Up
Developer rating	Not rated yet	Not rated yet
Price	Free / free tier	Free / free tier

API developer portal for Nutrition Analysis, Food Database Lookup, Recipe Search API and others.

API developer portal for Nutrition Analysis, Food Database Lookup, Recipe Search API and others. Choose the API license you need.

Strengths

TheMealDB is a free database and JSON API of recipes that is easy to use and quick to get started.

Strengths

Prototyping or a tutorial? Pick the one that needs no API key (neither does, so compare their free tiers).
Calling from a web page? You need CORS. Otherwise route requests through your own server or a serverless function.
Going to production? Favour HTTPS, a strong uptime record and a provider with clear rate limits and terms. Check each API's docs before you commit.
Still unsure? Both are free to try: send one request to each and compare the data you get back.

Both require authentication (apiKey and apiKey).

TheMealDB API supports CORS, so front-end JavaScript can call it directly. Call the other from a server.