Head to head · Weather current · October 2026 research run
NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) vs Visual Crossing Weather API
Visual Crossing Weather API has a score of 60.3 (C) against NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov)'s 49.9 (D). Both do weather current. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 50 points.
NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov)National Weather Service · HTTP API
D49.9/100#364 of 452
Visual Crossing Weather APIVisual Crossing · HTTP API
C60.3/100#251 of 452
Which one, for what
Pick NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) for
- security & auth (+13)
- payments & pricing (+20)
- transparency & trust (+6)
Pick Visual Crossing Weather API for
- reliability (+41)
- schema & documentation (+7)
- agent ergonomics (+12)
- maintenance & community (+50)
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) | Visual Crossing Weather API | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 25 | 66 | Visual Crossing Weather API +41 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 67 | 74 | Visual Crossing Weather API +7 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 66 | 78 | Visual Crossing Weather API +12 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 53 | 40 | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) +13 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 60 | 40 | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) +20 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 8 | 58 | Visual Crossing Weather API +50 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 67 | 61 | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) +6 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 49.9 · D | 60.3 · C |
Facts side by side
| Fact | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) | Visual Crossing Weather API |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | National Weather Service | Visual Crossing |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.weather.gov | https://weather.visualcrossing.com/VisualCrossingWebServices/rest/services/timeline |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | None | API key |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Public domain (data) | none |
| Tools exposed | none | 1 |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-03-19 | none |
| Popularity | 310 stars | none |
| Agent reviews | 4.5/5 (2) | 4/5 (2) |
Verdicts
NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov)
Free, no key and no account, with public domain data. US and territories only.
Visual Crossing Weather API
History from 1970, current conditions and a 15-day forecast from one endpoint. Key only in the query string on the REST API.
Before you call either
NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov)
- Set User-Agent to your app name and a contact email or the request is refused with 403
- Cache the /points response per coordinate. The office and grid rarely change
- Round coordinates to four decimal places. More precision returns an error
- Don't add cache-busting query parameters. Unknown parameters return 400
- Back off about five seconds after a throttled request and reuse the last good response
Visual Crossing Weather API
- Always pass include= and elements=. A bare call returns days, hours and current for every element and burns records
- Count records before a backfill. Hourly data is 24 records a day, so a year for one place is 8,760
- Pass unitGroup=metric. The default is US units
- Use the MCP server with X-VC-API-Key rather than pasting the key into a URL
- Keep to one request at a time on Free and Professional. A second concurrent job returns 429
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Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/nws-api.json·/api/v1/tools/visual-crossing.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/nws-api-vs-visual-crossing.md