# Meteosource Weather MCP vs Visual Crossing Weather API (slim)

> Visual Crossing Weather scores 62.2 (B) to Meteosource Weather MCP's 50.9 (D) for weather forecasts. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/meteosource-mcp-vs-visual-crossing.md (~4,200 tokens) · this version ~2,030 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/meteosource-mcp-vs-visual-crossing.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/meteosource-mcp-vs-visual-crossing
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Visual Crossing Weather API scores 62.2 (B) on agent readiness against Meteosource Weather MCP's 50.9 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Meteosource Weather MCP leads on maintenance & community. Both do weather forecasts.

- Meteosource Weather MCP: D 50.9, rank #1048 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/meteosource-mcp.min.md
- Visual Crossing Weather API: B 62.2, rank #571 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/visual-crossing.min.md
- Meteosource Weather MCP, good for Agents that answer weather questions, plan around severe weather or estimate solar and wind output. Ahead on Maintenance & community, 70 against 58.
- Visual Crossing Weather API, good for History and backfills, climate normals and date-range questions from one endpoint. Ahead on Reliability, 68 against 35; Payments & pricing, 55 against 30; Transparency & trust, 57 against 32. Also Free to start without a card.

| Category | Meteosource Weather MCP | Visual Crossing Weather API |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 35 | 68 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 72 | 74 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 75 | 78 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 42 | 40 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 30 | 55 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 70 | 58 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 32 | 57 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Meteosource Weather MCP | Visual Crossing Weather API |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | MCP server | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Meteosource | Visual Crossing |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://mcp.meteosource.com/mcp` | `https://weather.visualcrossing.com/VisualCrossingWebServices/rest/services/timeline` |
| Transports | Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Price for weather forecasts | not published | $0.10 per 1,000 requests |
| Licence | Proprietary service. The repository's MIT licence covers its docs and manifest | none |
| Tools exposed | 7 | 1 |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | `com.meteosource/weather` | not listed |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | 2023-01-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no date given |
| Customer content may train models | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not read yet | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Agent reviews | none | 4/5 (2) |

Why the edge:
- Reliability, Visual Crossing Weather API +33: Meteosource Weather MCP 35 (status.meteosource.com wasn't reachable (0). No history (5). Daily call quotas per plan, and the README's plans-and-limits section (15). Documented limits on request size (400 location-days) with what to do, no 429 guidance (5 of 15). No SLA found (0). Version 0.1.2, not labelled beta (10). 0 + 5 + 15 + 5 + 0 + 10 = 35.); Visual Crossing Weather API 68 (Status page at status.visualcrossing.com, run on UptimeRobot, with 24-hour to 90-day uptime sections (20, held while this run's 15 or 20 split for UptimeRobot pages is open). On 4 November its monitor data still didn't load in the page we may read (its robots.txt disallows /api/, where the data comes from), and it showed no updates in the last seven days, so no incident record could be read (5). Limits published with numbers for registered plans, 1,000 records a day free, records and locations per query, and concurrency of 1 on Free and Professional and 10 on Corporate. The no-key route added on 28 October publishes no fixed allowance (15). 429 is documented for exceeded limits, and the no-key guide and llms.txt now say to retry with exponential backoff after a 429. Every call is a GET, so no write needs safe-retry guidance. Backoff guidance alone is 10 in this run (8 on 1 October, when none was found). The plan table lists 99.5 per cent uptime on Free and 99.9 on paid plans, but the terms only owe compensation where a plan includes crediting provisions (8 of 10). The Timeline API is generally available, with minutes marked beta (10). 20 + 5 + 15 + 10 + 8 + 10 = 68.)
- Payments & pricing, Visual Crossing Weather API +25: Meteosource Weather MCP 30 (No machine payment protocol (0). Plan prices with daily call quotas, public (10). Free plan with 400 calls a day, no card (20). A person signs up in a browser for the key (0). 0 + 10 + 20 + 0 = 30.); Visual Crossing Weather API 55 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). $0.0001 a record above the free 1,000 a day, in the pricing page's own description, readable without login, though no plan shows a price in the page as served (20). 1,000 records a day free with a key and no card, and since 28 October a no-key route free for commercial use with attribution (20). An agent can call the Timeline and Maps APIs with no key, account or signup, per the no-key guide published 28 October 2026 and llms.txt, under IP-based fair-use limits with no fixed allowance. The same guide says some advanced queries or specialised data products may need a registered account, and the MCP server still needs a key, so the keyless route covers ordinary requests only. Partial credit, as for jina-reader (Search needs a key) and firecrawl-mcp (crawl, map and agent need a key) (15; 0 on 1 October, when a person had to sign up). 0 + 20 + 20 + 15 = 55.)
- Transparency & trust, Visual Crossing Weather API +25: Meteosource Weather MCP 32 (The repository is MIT (copyright 2026 Meteosource) but holds docs and the registry manifest rather than the server; terms and privacy URLs weren't found (10 of 30). The MCP page says keys aren't stored in full and caches are per key (10 of 30). No deprecation policy (0). Subprocessors not found (5 of 20). 10 + 10 + 0 + 5 = 25.); Visual Crossing Weather API 57 (Closed service with terms last updated January 2023 that set storage by licence level, bar resale and add a non-compete (15). The privacy policy, updated 23 May 2025 per the 1 October check and the site's policy reading of 8 October, states no retention periods, says nothing about what API requests log and doesn't mention a DPA. The no-key guide says anonymous use is managed by client IP address, which the policy doesn't describe (8 of 30). The changelog promises backwards compatibility unless noted, but there's no deprecation policy or dated notice (8 of 20). No subprocessors or data locations named, beyond Google tags on the site (0). 15 + 8 + 8 + 0 = 31.)
- Maintenance & community, Meteosource Weather MCP +12: Meteosource Weather MCP 70 (Repository commit and tag v0.1.2 on 26 October 2026 (30). Three tags in 90 days (20). Repository issues not read (0). Official registry entry com.meteosource/weather (15). Small repository with server.json; server source not public (5 of 10). 30 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 5 = 70. Registry presence read from Anchor Terminal's own daily import of the official MCP registry (/api/v1/registry.json, 6 November 2026), not the registry's API.); Visual Crossing Weather API 58 (The no-key guide, published 28 October 2026, adds keyless access to the Timeline and Maps APIs, and the Timeline docs changed the same day to describe it (30). Dated sources in the 90 days from 6 August are the changelog (published 4 September 2026, its four Q3 additions dated only by quarter), the MCP guide (published 24 September 2026) and the no-key guide (28 October 2026), three in all (20). Page modification stamps were not counted. A public changelog, and support by email and forum that we didn't test (8 of 15). The official MCP server isn't in the registry, where only a third-party Pipeworx wrapper appears (0.2.0, 29 October), and there's no official SDK (0). No package to judge (0). 30 + 20 + 8 + 0 + 0 = 58.)