Ipinfo (ipinfo.io) has been founded in 2013 by a former Facebook engineer named Ben Dowling. As of 2020, ipinfo claims to serve more than 20 billion API requests per month.
Ipinfo is a well-known service and some of our existing customers were also using it before discovering Ipregistry. Do you know why companies switched to Ipregistry from Ipinfo? Let's see where ipinfo.io fails and ipregistry beats.
Ipinfo vs Ipregistry
| Features | Ipinfo.io | Ipregistry |
|---|---|---|
| IP Geolocation |  | |
| IPv4 and IPv6 support | Partial (can analyze a given IPv6 address but cannot discover the IPv6 address of a user). | |
| Dashboard | Usage monitoring | Usage monitoring, multiple API keys, advanced settings (origin filtering, rate limitings, etc.) |
| Bulk Lookups | Support only 100 IP addresses per request call. | Up to 256 IP addresses per request call. |
| Average Response Time | 299ms | 24ms |
| Best Response Time | 97ms | 10ms |
| Output Format | JSON only. | JSON or XML. |
| Response Filtering | Limited per field (you cannot return 2 unrelated fields A and B in a same request). | Powerful filtering with full capabilities. |
| Client Libraries | | Libraries with caching support and bots exclusion (available in Java, JavaScript, Python and more). |
| JSONP (deprecated) | |  |
| Hostname Lookup | Require at least a $49/month subscription. Results are outdated with IPv4 due to caching. IPv6 is not supported. | |
| Domain and IP Whitelisting | | |
| Multiple API keys | | |
| Throttling / Rate limiting | | You can enable rate limiting per API key or per Client IP (hourly time window). |
| Usage Reports by Email | | |
| User-Agent Data | | |
| Country Borders and Population | | |
| Country Flags | | SVG and PNG files you can hotlink (4 different flavors). |
| Carrier Data | Requires a $999/month subscription. | |
| Company Name and Domain | Requires a $999/month subscription. | |
| IP address Type (business, education, hosting, isp) | Requires a $249/month subscription. | |
| Threat Data | Requires a $299/month subscription. | |
| Distinction between Tor relay nodes and exit nodes | | |
| Pricing Model | Subscription based Paid plans starting at $49/month. | Pay-as-you-go Recharge starting from $5. |
Why companies use Ipregistry instead of IpInfo
Low Response Time
Building a highly available and fast global API requires a lot of expertise. At Ipregistry, our team has more than 15 years of experience building highly available and scalable services. We rely on the best technology stack and implementation to ensure a global low latency. On average, the Ipregistry API is one order of magnitude (~10 times) faster than Ipinfo.
Besides the fact that we provide one of the fastest geolocation and threat data API available on the market, Ipregistry infrastructure scales automatically on-demand but also serves fresh and accurate IP address data from memory while being refreshed continuously.
Inexpensive but Fast and Reliable
IpInfo pricing model is based on subscriptions. You have to pay monthly, even if you use only 50% of your quota. However, usage patterns are rarely constant. For instance, an e-commerce website will see big spikes on Black Fridays every year.
With Ipregistry, you pay only for what you use, request by request. Every feature is included with no additional charges. Payment methods include Credit Cards, Paypal, and Cryptocurrencies.
Do you need to identify the company or IP usage type for whoever is browsing your pages? Do you want to find out the carrier name, mobile country code, and mobile network code details? In contrary to ipinfo.io which requires paying up to $999 per month to access all data fields, Ipregistry provides all fields for an affordable price per request. This way, you save money and we help you to do what you do best—focusing on your business.
Ipregistry also offers free lookups credits on your first registration. You can use your free credits to get all data. Ipinfo has a free plan that returns very limited data with slow response times.
At Ipregistry we think that IP geolocation and threat data must be accurate, reliable but also fairly priced. Customers trust Ipregistry for these values. However, that's not enough to stay a leader in the market. You need to keep innovating. That's why we listen continuously to our users and keep adding new data fields and features.
Accuracy
Through geolocation, you can map IP addresses from your users to the country, region, city, latitude, and longitude. Providing accurate results requires a lot of expertise, time, and experience. Does it mean this information should be expensive? not necessarily. That's what we think at Ipregistry: critical services such as IP geolocation and Threat are essential to many businesses and should be fairly priced.
As an example to compare accuracy, we like to use IPs from well-known Internet Service Providers (ISP). Let's consider for example 37.167.143.96. This IP address is managed by a French ISP named Free to provide a connection on a mobile device. The IP is used in the south of France in the city near Nice. Ipinfo reports a correct country but a completely wrong city and region that is about 1000 kilometers from the correction location. In comparison, Ipregistry reports the correct country and null values for the region and city fields.
You may wonder why some geolocation providers report such a wrong location. That's because when they don't know, they often fall back to the legal office location of the organization that provides the connection. The problem with this approach is that provided data will most of the time be wrong. So why are they doing this? to make people think that their service is more accurate than others.
At Ipregistry when we have a doubt, or when we don't know something that's for a reason, and we do not "cheat" on data we provide.
Comprehensive IP and Threat Data
Ipregistry provides more than 65 data points, in a single request! No need to perform different requests to get the data you need. Another strong benefit of using Ipregistry is that you pay for what you use only.
Our data is extensive. A single API request returns all you need (ASN, IP range, company, domain, security/privacy, and geolocation data). Fields are organized by category in a hierarchy that makes usage and understanding a breeze.
Advanced Dashboard Actions
Usage Monitoring
Ipinfo displays your API usage for different periods. It is also possible to get the number of calls per day. Ipregistry goes further by allowing to see your hourly usage for the current day and per API key.
Actionable Options
One important concept in software architecture is the separation of concerns. In a Software-as-a-Service API this can materialize by supporting multiple API keys per account. This allows you to use one key per isolated concern you might have and thus improving overall security. Ipinfo supports only one key per account while Ipregistry does support multiple API keys per account.
The benefit of having more than 1 API key per account is that you can set different settings for different needs. Ipregistry supports domain and IP whitelisting per API key: you can restrict what IP or domain is allowed to use a given API key. In addition, throttling is also supported.
