What API Ninjas is
API Ninjas is a collection of small APIs under one key. This page is about its Recipe API, which lists over 125,000 recipes. Searching by ingredient, paging and scaling servings need a paid plan.
At a glance
| Feature | Tiny Plates | API Ninjas |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Tiny Plates: A free plan with no credit card. Personal is $5 a month and Business $20, with extra requests at $1 per 1,000. | API Ninjas: Free for evaluation, then $59, $199 and $499 a month. Enterprise on request. |
| Free allowance | Tiny Plates: Free: 50 requests a day and 300 a week. Personal includes 5,000 requests a month and Business 20,000. Enterprise on request. | API Ninjas: 3,000 calls a month and 100 an hour. No commercial use and no storing data. |
| Recipes | Tiny Plates: Thousands, gathered from public recipe pages. | API Ninjas: Over 125,000. |
| Ingredients | Tiny Plates: Quantity, unit, name and preparation in separate fields, with canonical ingredient ids shared across languages. | API Ninjas: Name, quantity and unit in separate fields. |
| Search | Tiny Plates: By meaning as well as wording. | API Ninjas: By title on every plan. By ingredient or nutrition on paid plans. |
| Allergens | Tiny Plates: True or false for each of the EU’s 14 regulated allergens, plus the US definitions of wheat and tree nuts. Informational only. | API Ninjas: None listed. |
What is different
What the free plan is for
The API Ninjas free plan is for evaluation and demos. It does not allow commercial use or storing data. Tiny Plates has a free plan you can use in a public app, within the daily allowance.
What is behind a paid plan
On API Ninjas, searching by ingredient, nutrition filters, paging and scaling servings are for paid plans. On its free plan you search by title and get up to five results.
Allergens
Tiny Plates answers true or false for each of the EU’s 14 regulated allergens and the US definitions of wheat and tree nuts, and leaves out recipes that contain any you list. The API Ninjas Recipe API does not list allergen fields or filters.
Size and nutrition
API Ninjas has far more recipes, over 125,000 against our thousands, and returns calories, protein and other nutrition figures on every plan. If those numbers matter most, that decides it.
Moving from API Ninjas
The same tasks as requests to each API. The documentation has every parameter.
| Task | API Ninjas | Tiny Plates |
|---|---|---|
| Search by name | API Ninjas: GET /v3/recipe?title=pasta | Tiny Plates: GET /search?query=pasta |
| Cook from what you have (paid plans on API Ninjas) | API Ninjas: GET /v3/recipe?ingredients=chicken,rice | Tiny Plates: GET /pantry?ingredients=chicken,rice |
| Authenticate | API Ninjas: X-Api-Key header | Tiny Plates: Authorization: Bearer header |
Pick API Ninjas when
- You need nutrition figures with every recipe.
- You want a large corpus. Its site lists over 125,000 recipes.
- You already use its other APIs and want one key for all of them.
Pick Tiny Plates when
- You want to use a free plan in a public app.
- You filter on the EU’s 14 allergens.
- You need recipes in Spanish or Swedish.
- You want to cache the recipes your users open.
- You want paid plans from $5 a month, not $59.
Questions
Is the API Ninjas Recipe API free?
Its free plan is for evaluation and demos, with 3,000 calls a month and 100 an hour. It does not allow commercial use.
Is there a free alternative to API Ninjas for recipes?
Tiny Plates has a free plan, with 50 requests a day and 300 a week, that a public app can use, and paid plans from $5 a month.
Can I search API Ninjas recipes by ingredient for free?
Not on the free plan. The ingredients parameter is for paid plans, and it takes up to five ingredients.
Do I need an API key for Tiny Plates?
Yes. Create a free account, make a key in the dashboard and send it as a bearer token.
Try it
Create a free account and follow the quickstart to get a response in a couple of minutes. The terms say what you may cache and how to credit a recipe, and the overview lists the other recipe APIs.