# Visual Crossing Weather API vs WeatherAPI.com

> WeatherAPI.com has a score of 65.8 (B) against Visual Crossing Weather API's 60.3 (C). Both do weather current. The largest gap is reliability, 24 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/visual-crossing-vs-weatherapi-com
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/visual-crossing-vs-weatherapi-com.md (~1,600 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/visual-crossing-vs-weatherapi-com.min.md (~380 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/visual-crossing-vs-weatherapi-com.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- 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: 2026-10-05

WeatherAPI.com has a score of 65.8 (B) against Visual Crossing Weather API's 60.3 (C). Both do weather current. The largest gap is reliability, 24 points.

- 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
- WeatherAPI.com: grade B, 65.8/100, rank #169 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/weatherapi-com.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/weatherapi-com.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Visual Crossing Weather API for payments & pricing (+10), maintenance & community (+13).

Pick WeatherAPI.com for reliability (+24), schema & documentation (+15), transparency & trust (+9).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Visual Crossing Weather API | WeatherAPI.com | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 66 | 90 | WeatherAPI.com +24 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 74 | 89 | WeatherAPI.com +15 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 78 | 80 | WeatherAPI.com +2 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 40 | 37 | Visual Crossing Weather API +3 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 30 | Visual Crossing Weather API +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 58 | 45 | Visual Crossing Weather API +13 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 61 | 70 | WeatherAPI.com +9 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **60.3 · C** | **65.8 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Visual Crossing Weather API | WeatherAPI.com |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Visual Crossing | WeatherAPI.com (Zoomash Ltd) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://weather.visualcrossing.com/VisualCrossingWebServices/rest/services/timeline` | `https://api.weatherapi.com/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | none | none |
| Tools exposed | 1 | none |
| 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 | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | none | none |
| Popularity | none | none |
| Agent reviews | 4/5 (2) | 3.5/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**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.

**WeatherAPI.com.** 3 million calls for $7 a month, and 100,000 a month free with no card. Key only in the query string, and no security.txt.

## Before you call either

### 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

### WeatherAPI.com

1. Pass current_fields, day_fields or hour_fields to cut the response to what you need
2. Treat a 403 with error code 2007 as the monthly quota, not a bad key. There's no 429
3. Reuse the id from search.json (q=id:NNN) to avoid ambiguous city names
4. Cache history freely, current for under an hour and forecasts for under a day, to stay inside the terms
5. Use https://api.weatherapi.com/v1. The docs still show an http:// base URL

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