Webz.io
Editor's pick #1Open-web data feed with a news archive back to 2008
What is Webz.io?
Webz.io started in 2014 as Webhose.io, later rebranded, and is headquartered in the Tel Aviv area under co-founder and CEO Ran Geva. Its News API claims 3.5 million new articles a day from 350,000+ sources in 170+ languages (per company website; independently unverifiable), and the same company sells blog, forum, review and dark-web feeds. Queries use a field syntax such as title:, language: and sentiment:, and anything older than 30 days goes through a separate archive that reaches back to 2008. Every account receives $5 of free credit a month, with pay-as-you-go and custom high-volume contracts above that.
Typical uses: Risk & compliance, Media monitoring, AI & LLM apps, Research & academia. What sets it apart: Largest claimed source count on this list and history going back to 2008.
What does the Webz.io API include?
| Capability |
|---|
| Full article text |
| Historical archive |
| NLP enrichment |
| Streaming/webhooks |
Webz.io pricing
Short answer: the pricing model is usage-based credits; pay-as-you-go or subscription. Entry price: Pay-as-you-go.
| Access model | What it means |
|---|---|
| Free tier | Permanent free allowance, usually with request, history or commercial-use limits |
| Pay-as-you-go | Billed per request or credit, with no monthly minimum |
| Enterprise contract | Negotiated licence covering volume, rights and SLA |
Webz.io pros and cons
| Advantages | Things to consider |
|---|---|
| +The 2008 archive is the longest history among the web-crawled commercial APIs reviewed here | -Default rate limit is one request per second per token |
| +Each article carries trust flags for satire, bias and fake news, which helps filtering | -Vendr reports a median annual spend of about $237,500 across Webz.io products, so serious contracts are expensive |
| +The same account can pull forums, reviews and blogs if a project grows past news | -The field-based query syntax takes longer to learn than plain keyword search |
| +A $5 monthly credit lets you test real queries without a card |
Webz.io vs alternatives
How Webz.io compares to the other top News APIs.
| API | Best for | Key difference | Rating | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NewsCatcher | AI products and monitoring tools needing enriched, deduplicated... | Articles arrive already summarised, clustered and geotagged, so there is less post-processing on your side | 4.7 | Full comparison |
| Perigon | Startups wanting enriched news with transparent tiers. | Published plans from $25 with enrichment and saved-query monitors included | 4.5 | Full comparison |
| Dow Jones Factiva | Enterprises needing licensed premium news for AI or... | Publisher-cleared rights to use paywalled premium content in generative-AI products | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| NewsData.io | Small teams wanting wide country coverage on a... | Daily free credits plus filters for 206 countries and 89 languages | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry) | Multilingual event tracking for analysts and research teams. | Merges articles about the same real-world event across languages into one event record | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| LexisNexis Nexis Data+ | Legal, compliance and research teams needing licensed news... | Licensed news, legal filings, patents and sanctions data under one contract | 4.2 | Full comparison |
| Opoint | Monitoring platforms and AML teams needing non-English coverage. | Built as a wholesale feed with heavy non-English and local coverage | 4.2 | Full comparison |
| GNews | Indie developers needing affordable commercial news access. | Two simple endpoints with commercial rights from €49.99 a month | 4.1 | Full comparison |
| GDELT Project | Researchers and data scientists with no budget. | Free global coverage with 15-minute updates and BigQuery access | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| Exa | RAG and agent builders needing semantic news retrieval. | Meaning-based search finds relevant pages even when the keywords differ | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| Tavily | Agent developers wanting news results in one tool... | Prompt-ready extracted content, with integrations for LangChain and LlamaIndex | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| NewsAPI.org | Developers who want the most documented, familiar news... | More tutorials and community libraries than any other news API, which shortens learning time | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| World News API | Small apps wanting sentiment and geo filters at... | Location-radius and sentiment filters from the $39 plan up | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| Quantexa News API (Aylien) | Existing Aylien users and Quantexa platform customers. | Mature entity, category and sentiment tagging inherited from Aylien's NLP work | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Brave Search API | Teams wanting an independent, non-Google news search index. | Its own crawler and index, independent of Google and Bing | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| AP Media API | Publishers and platforms licensing AP journalism. | Primary-source wire content with publishing rights from AP itself | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| RavenPack (Bigdata.com) | Quant funds and financial AI products. | Two decades of entity-level news sentiment built for trading signals | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| SerpApi Google News | Developers who specifically want Google News rankings. | Mirrors Google News results and story groupings as JSON | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Reuters Connect | Media companies licensing Reuters wire content. | Reuters' own global reporting with publishing rights | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Mediastack | Hobby projects and low-volume apps on a tight... | Paid plans from $24.99 with commercial use and historical data | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Guardian Open Platform | Students, researchers and non-commercial apps. | Free full article text with editorial tags from a major publisher | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Diffbot | Teams building custom news collection from chosen sites. | Turns any article URL into clean structured data linked to a Knowledge Graph | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Benzinga | Brokerages and trading apps needing fast market headlines. | Original market newswire plus ratings and earnings events in one feed | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| Marketaux | Fintech side projects needing ticker-tagged news cheaply. | Per-entity sentiment scores on every article, even on the free plan | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| Finnhub | Developers who need market data and news from... | Company news bundled with quotes, fundamentals and estimates | 3.6 | Full comparison |
| TheNewsAPI | Personal projects that need a cheap general feed. | Possibly the cheapest paid tier among general news APIs, if third-party pricing is current | 3.6 | Full comparison |
| NYT Developer APIs | Historians and students researching Times coverage. | Searchable metadata for the full Times archive since 1851 | 3.5 | Full comparison |
| APITube | Developers willing to trial a newer, feature-rich API. | Entity and sentiment filters offered on lower tiers | 3.5 | Full comparison |
| Currents API | Students and hobbyists testing news features for free. | A free tier that developer roundups often single out as generous | 3.4 | Full comparison |
Webz.io FAQ
What is Webz.io?
Open-web data feed with a news archive back to 2008
How much does Webz.io charge?
Pricing model: usage-based credits; pay-as-you-go or subscription. The cheapest paid access listed is Pay-as-you-go. Free access: yes, with limits.
Which formats and SDKs does Webz.io support?
Webz.io offers REST API, JSON, Python SDK, Node.js SDK, Java SDK, S3/bulk delivery.
Is Webz.io right for enterprise?
Yes, Webz.io sells enterprise contracts. Main caveat: Default rate limit is one request per second per token.
What are the best Webz.io alternatives?
The best alternatives to Webz.io depend on your use case. Top options are:
- NewsCatcher: articles arrive already summarised, clustered and geotagged, so there is less post-processing on your side
- Perigon: published plans from $25 with enrichment and saved-query monitors included
- Dow Jones Factiva: publisher-cleared rights to use paywalled premium content in generative-ai products
Compare Webz.io with other News APIs
Verify all details directly with Webz.io before making a decision.