Public IP API Comparison

The table

All endpoint behaviour below was checked against the live services on 4 September 2026. Anything we could not verify from a primary source is marked as unverified rather than guessed.

Corrections to two widely repeated claims

ifconfig.me is not run by Cloudflare. Its responses carry via: 1.1 google and no cf-ray or Cloudflare server header, and its A record resolves into Google Cloud. Its whois is behind a privacy proxy, so the actual operator is unverified and we do not name one. The site serves an IPinfo advertisement tagged utm_campaign=upsell_sister_sites, which points somewhere without proving anything.

ipify is not owned by Kasada. We found no acquisition announcement from either party and no primary source. Primary sources still name Randall Degges as creator and maintainer, and the API is open source. Until something authoritative appears, the claim should not be repeated.

ip.me and ident.me are not the same service. They are often listed as aliases. ip.me is registered to and maintained by Proton AG in Geneva. ident.me is run independently by Pierre Carrier. They differ in CORS support, in JSON support, and in what they return.

Notes on individual services

ifconfig.me. The /all.json response is an echo of your request headers, not address metadata: ip_addr, user_agent, port, mime, via, forwarded. That is genuinely useful for debugging a proxy, and it is not a geolocation API. Paths for /ip, /ua, and /all make it pleasant interactively.

icanhazip.com. The most minimal of the set and the fastest to type. It has no JSON at all; ?format=json is ignored and you get the bare address anyway, which surprises people. The ipv4. and ipv6. split hostnames are the right design for family testing. Cloudflare has run it since 2021 and it serves HTTP/3.

api.ipify.org. JSON via ?format=json, and JSONP with a callback for the rare case that still needs it. The IPv6 story needs care: api.ipify.org has no AAAA record and is IPv4-only, api6.ipify.org is IPv6-only, and api64.ipify.org is the dual-stack one. Using the plain hostname and wondering why you never see an IPv6 address is a common mistake. It is the only service here that explicitly states no limit, and it serves around 30 billion requests a month.

ip.me. Run by Proton, which is a meaningful trust signal if their privacy policy matters to you. Two practical limits: no JSON, and no CORS header at all, so it cannot be called from a web page. It is also HTTP/1.1 only on nginx 1.18.

ident.me. The most feature-rich of the plain endpoints. The JSON response includes ASN, AS organisation, connection type, continent, country, city, coordinates, timezone, and even weather. It publishes an actual limit, which almost nobody does: use it freely, and email first above 500 requests per second. It also answers over DNS, SSH, telnet, and STUN, which is either delightful or unnecessary depending on your temperament.

checkip.amazonaws.com. Plain, dependable, and backed by AWS, which is the reason to choose it. No JSON, no geo. AWS documentation now points at https://checkip.global.api.aws/ as the current endpoint; both return identical plaintext, so the older hostname still works.

Where whatsmyip.fyi is weaker

This is the section that makes the rest of the page worth reading.

• We are new. icanhazip has run since 2010, ipify since 2016, and checkip.amazonaws.com has Amazon behind it. They have a track record measured in years. We do not. If your requirement is “this endpoint will answer in 2031”, pick one of them.
• We publish a rate limit and they mostly do not. 1,000 per day and 60 per minute is a real ceiling that a busy client will hit. ipify explicitly states no limit and serves 30 billion requests a month. For high-volume use, ipify is the better choice and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
• ident.me returns more geolocation data than we do on the free plaintext path, and states a far higher limit.
• We are a single operator. So are ifconfig.me and ident.me, but Cloudflare and Amazon are not, and for infrastructure that matters.
• Our uptime record is short. We publish measured latency and uptime per region at /status rather than claiming a number. Check it before you depend on us, and compare it against a service that has been running for a decade before deciding.

Where we are stronger

• Split IPv4-only and IPv6-only hostnames plus geo and ASN in one response, which no other service in the table combines.
• A stated, documented rate limit with Retry-After on 429, so a client can behave correctly instead of guessing.
• A Markdown endpoint at /ip.md for agents and language models.
• A published status page with per-region latency, rather than an uptime claim in prose.

Verify any of this yourself

# CORS header present?
curl -sI https://ip.me | grep -i access-control

# does ipify's plain hostname have IPv6?
dig +short AAAA api.ipify.org        # empty
dig +short AAAA api64.ipify.org      # answers

# does icanhazip honour format=json?
curl -s 'https://icanhazip.com/?format=json'   # bare IP, not JSON

# who serves ifconfig.me?
curl -sI https://ifconfig.me | grep -iE 'server|via|cf-ray'

If any row here is wrong, write to us and it gets corrected with the date changed. A comparison table that never changes is a table nobody rechecks.