Head to head · Shipping rates · October 2026 research run
Easyship vs ShipBob
Easyship scores 68.8 (B) on agent readiness against ShipBob's 60.8 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. ShipBob leads on transparency & trust. Both do shipping rates.
Which one, for what
Easyship B
Good for An agent that ships parcels for a small or mid-sized merchant, mostly cross-border, and wants rates, labels, duties and pickups from one account without carrier contracts.
Ahead on
- Agent ergonomics, 73 against 56
- Security & auth, 61 against 55
- Payments & pricing, 40 against 20
- Maintenance & community, 56 against 41
Also in its favour
- Runs on your own machine
Watch for
No idempotency keys in the 132-operation spec, and no Retry-After or backoff guidance for 429
ShipBob C
Good for An agent working for a merchant that already stores stock with ShipBob, to create and track orders, check inventory, book inbound stock and handle returns.
Ahead on
- Transparency & trust, 77 against 71
Watch for
No public price. Receiving, storage and pick, pack and ship fees come only in a quote from sales
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Easyship | ShipBob | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 80 | 77 | Easyship +3 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 87 | 85 | Easyship +2 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 73 | 56 | Easyship +17 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 61 | 55 | Easyship +6 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 40 | 20 | Easyship +20 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 56 | 41 | Easyship +15 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 71 | 77 | ShipBob +6 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 68.8 · B | 60.8 · C |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Easyship | ShipBob |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Easyship Inc. | ShipBob, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | https://public-api.easyship.com | https://api.shipbob.com |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Paid |
| Price for shipping rates | $0.01 per call | not published |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Easyship's terms of service. The easyship-mcp server on PyPI and the plugin repository are MIT | Proprietary service under ShipBob's Terms of Service. The MCP tutorials repository on GitHub has no licence file |
| Tools exposed | 25 | 73 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | com.easyship/mcp | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-08-21 | 2026-07-31 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-07-28 | 2026-05-22 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-07-28 | 2024-03-29 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | yes |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 0 stars, 79 PyPI/wk | none |
Verdicts
Easyship
Per-resource read and write scopes, separate sandbox tokens, a 132-operation OpenAPI contract and a 25-tool hosted MCP server with read-only and destructive annotations on every tool. No idempotency keys or Retry-After were found, the MCP server has no test mode, and the API changelog's last entry is dated 30 October 2025.
ShipBob
OAuth with PKCE and read and write scopes per domain, a free sandbox, a public OpenAPI spec per version and a 24-month support window for each API version are documented. Fulfilment prices are by quote only, the status page has no API component, no official SDK was found, and Personal Access Tokens never expire and carry full account access.
Before you call either
Easyship
- Use a sand_ token against https://public-api-sandbox.easyship.com for API tests. Production rejects sandbox tokens, and sandbox allows 6 requests a minute
- The MCP server calls production only. Create the shipment without buy_label first, then call create_label once the user confirms the courier and price
- Don't retry a timed-out label purchase blindly. There's no idempotency key, so read the shipment's label_state first
- Give every item a category or an hs_code. The API rejects shipments and rates requests that have neither
- Stay under 60 requests a minute and 10 a second, and wait for the next window on 429
ShipBob
- Call
GET /2026-07/channelfirst and send the ID of the channel with_writescopes in theshipbob_channel_idheader on every write - Build against
https://sandbox-api.shipbob.comwith a sandbox account. Sandbox and production accounts, tokens and data are separate - Set a stable
reference_idon each order, product and return. A duplicate returns 422, which is the only guard against a double create - Stay under 150 requests a minute per user and application, and wait the seconds given in
x-retry-afterafter a 429 - Over MCP, writes work only on records in the channel created at consent. A 403 or 404 on a cancel usually means the record belongs to another channel
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Easyship or ShipBob?
Easyship scores 68.8 (B) on agent readiness against ShipBob's 60.8 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. ShipBob leads on transparency & trust.
Do Easyship and ShipBob need an API key?
Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.
Can an agent call Easyship and ShipBob without installing anything?
Yes. Easyship has a hosted endpoint at https://public-api.easyship.com and ShipBob at https://api.shipbob.com.
Other comparisons with Easyship or ShipBob
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/easyship-vs-shipbob.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/easyship.json·/api/v1/tools/shipbob.json - From a terminal
anchor compare easyship shipbob(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "easyship", "b": "shipbob"}at/mcp, no key