# Pirate Weather vs Visual Crossing Weather API

> Pirate Weather has a score of 66.2 (B) against Visual Crossing Weather API's 60.3 (C). Both do weather current. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 22 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-04

Pirate Weather has a score of 66.2 (B) against Visual Crossing Weather API's 60.3 (C). Both do weather current. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 22 points.

- Pirate Weather: grade B, 66.2/100, rank #162 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/pirate-weather.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/pirate-weather.json
- Visual Crossing Weather API: grade C, 60.3/100, rank #251 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/visual-crossing.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/visual-crossing.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Pirate Weather for reliability (+9), schema & documentation (+11), security & auth (+5), maintenance & community (+22), transparency & trust (+10).

Pick Visual Crossing Weather API for payments & pricing (+10).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Pirate Weather | Visual Crossing Weather API | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 75 | 66 | Pirate Weather +9 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 85 | 74 | Pirate Weather +11 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 77 | 78 | Visual Crossing Weather API +1 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 45 | 40 | Pirate Weather +5 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 30 | 40 | Visual Crossing Weather API +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 80 | 58 | Pirate Weather +22 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 71 | 61 | Pirate Weather +10 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **66.2 · B** | **60.3 · C** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Pirate Weather | Visual Crossing Weather API |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Pirate Weather | Visual Crossing |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.pirateweather.net/forecast` | `https://weather.visualcrossing.com/VisualCrossingWebServices/rest/services/timeline` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 (docs and spec), AGPL-3.0 (API code) | 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 | 2026-09-23 | none |
| Popularity | 907 stars | none |
| Agent reviews | 4/5 (2) | 4/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Pirate Weather.** Named model sources and a documented priority order for every field. No SLA, and the terms call it best effort.

**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

### Pirate Weather

1. Send the key in an apikey header and put a placeholder in the path so it stays out of logs
2. Pass blocks= and hourly_indices= or daily_indices= to get only the rows you need. The default payload is large
3. Ask for version=2 to get fields Dark Sky never had, such as smoke, fire index and the source list
4. Point historical requests at timemachine.pirateweather.net with a UNIX timestamp after the coordinate
5. Watch Ratelimit-Remaining. The cap is monthly, so a runaway loop can spend it in a day

### Visual Crossing Weather API

1. Always pass include= and elements=. A bare call returns days, hours and current for every element and burns records
2. Count records before a backfill. Hourly data is 24 records a day, so a year for one place is 8,760
3. Pass unitGroup=metric. The default is US units
4. Use the MCP server with X-VC-API-Key rather than pasting the key into a URL
5. Keep to one request at a time on Free and Professional. A second concurrent job returns 429

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