Jikan (MyAnimeList)
Unofficial but well-maintained REST wrapper over MyAnimeList, serving anime and manga metadata, rankings, and seasonal charts without the OAuth dance MAL's own API requires.
🟢 Online · 390 ms
100%
No key, 3 requests/second and 60/minute, no credit card
No key required
Free alternatives (live ranking)
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Compare Jikan (MyAnimeList) with…
- Jikan (MyAnimeList) vs TMDB (The Movie Database) — Free key, unlimited for non-commercial use; commercial needs a license
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Jikan (MyAnimeList) require an API key?
No, Jikan (MyAnimeList) is freely accessible without registration or an API key.
What is Jikan (MyAnimeList)'s free tier?
No key, 3 requests/second and 60/minute, no credit card
Is Jikan (MyAnimeList) currently online?
We check Jikan (MyAnimeList) every hour. The current status is shown at the top of this page. You can also see the 30-day uptime history in the chart above.
Implementation notes
When to use Jikan (MyAnimeList)
Jikan is the practical way to read MyAnimeList data without registering a MAL client. It exposes anime and manga entries, scores and rankings, seasonal charts, characters, staff, and recommendations over plain REST with no key and no signup, and the v4 API is well documented and pleasant to work with. Use it for anime trackers, seasonal-chart widgets, recommendation toys, and Discord bots — places where MAL's community scoring is the actual product value and nobody depends on it being correct to the minute. Understand what you are integrating with before you commit: Jikan is an unofficial scraper and cache layer over MyAnimeList, not a partnership, not an official API, and not something MAL has any obligation to keep working. The maintainers have kept it alive for years and deserve credit for that, but the architecture puts a hard ceiling on how much weight you should put on it.
Common pitfalls
- Jikan scrapes MyAnimeList and serves from its own cache. When MAL changes markup or ships anti-bot measures, individual fields start returning null or whole endpoints degrade until the maintainers ship a parser fix. This is not hypothetical — it has happened repeatedly across v3 and v4. Null-check every field you render rather than trusting the documented schema.
- The public instance enforces 3 requests per second and 60 per minute, and it enforces both independently. Bursting past either returns 429. Building a seasonal chart naively (one detail request per title) exhausts the per-minute budget in well under a minute — use /seasons/now and /top/anime, which return full objects, instead of fanning out per ID.
- Freshness is cache freshness, not MAL freshness. Scores, episode counts, and airing status can lag the live MAL page by hours. For a leaderboard nobody notices; for anything where a user has your number and the MAL page open side by side, they will notice and file it as a bug.
- Do not put Jikan on a load-bearing path. It is a free community service on donated infrastructure with no SLA, and outages happen. Cache on your side with a long TTL, serve stale on error, and make sure the page still renders when Jikan returns nothing. If your product genuinely depends on MAL data, register for MAL's official API and keep Jikan as the fallback.
Quick start (bash)
curl -s 'https://api.jikan.moe/v4/seasons/now?limit=5' | jq '.data[] | {title, score, episodes}'
# hard limits: 3 req/s and 60 req/min - sleep between calls in any loop
curl -s 'https://api.jikan.moe/v4/anime/1/full' | jq '.data.title, .data.score'Embed this badge
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Markdown
[](https://freeapi.watch/jikan)HTML
<a href="https://freeapi.watch/jikan"><img src="https://api.freeapi.watch/badge/jikan.svg" alt="Jikan (MyAnimeList) Status"/></a>