Evidence & transparency
How we know
233 providers, last refreshed 2026-11-04.
Where providers come from
Brand-search research, open lists of public APIs, marketplace listings and our own research. Every candidate is checked against its website; dead sites, consumer apps and tipsters are rejected.
Pricing, coverage and terms
Read from the provider's own homepage, pricing, documentation, coverage and terms pages. Each fact keeps the URL it came from and the date we read it. Prices stay in the currency the provider shows.
Usage rights
Taken from public terms of service. Many enterprise feeds set rights per contract and their public terms only cover the website; we label those as contract-based rather than guessing.
What developers say
Public Reddit, Hacker News and Stack Overflow threads, GitHub issues and repositories, and YouTube videos that name the provider in a developer context. We link to them and write our own short summary; vendor posts are not counted as user opinion and unrelated matches are removed.
GitHub adoption
The number of public repositories whose README or description mentions the provider: a rough signal that the API is used in real projects.
The SportDex Score
Every provider gets four 0-100 scores. Popularity: brand search demand and independent sources, developer discussions, GitHub repositories and videos. Community & reliability: the tone of public discussions, liked versus criticised points, and reported outages, delays or wrong data; only rated with at least three relevant discussions, and pulled towards neutral when there are few. Transparency: public prices, pricing page, docs, stated usage rights and coverage, a free tier or trial, and prices with a source. Developer experience: free access, docs, SDKs, an OpenAPI spec, sandbox or demo, realtime delivery and the open-source ecosystem. Overall = 35% popularity, 25% community, 20% transparency, 20% developer experience; without community data its weight is spread over the other three. Uptime and latency are not measured yet. Enterprise feeds sold by contract score lower on transparency by design: that reflects what a buyer can check, not data quality.
Best-of lists
Each list is a fixed rule over the data (for example: a free plan stated on the provider's site), ordered by the SportDex Score. Sport lists lift providers that name the sport, the more so the fewer sports they cover, so specialists rank ahead of generic multi-sport feeds. Some lists use a plainer order, such as cheapest first; each list says which.
Empty fields
An empty field means the provider does not say, not that the feature is missing. Latency figures are provider claims until we measure them ourselves.
Independence
Order is never influenced by affiliate commission. Ratings markup is only used for reviews written on this site, never for imported discussions.