API-Football is the most established football API there is, and for a lot of projects it is the right answer. If you are looking past it, it is usually for one of three reasons: the free tier restricts which seasons you can reach, you want more requests per dollar at the entry tier, or you would rather not depend on a single upstream data supplier. Here is the honest shortlist, with numbers from each provider's own pricing page.
| API | Free tier | Entry paid | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| KickoffAPI | 100 req/day, real-time, never expires | $19 — 20,000 req/day | 900+ leagues on every plan |
| API-Football | 100 req/day, seasons limited | $19 — 7,500 req/day | All competitions on every plan |
| Sportmonks | 14-day trial, no card | €29 — 5 leagues | 5 → 30 → 120; 2,300 on Enterprise |
| football-data.org | €0 — 12 comps, 10 req/min | €12 — 12 comps | 12 → 100 comps by tier |
| TheSportsDB | $0 — 30 req/min, limited queries | $9 — 100 req/min | Many sports, shallower football |
| SoccersAPI | 7-day trial | Not published | Check their pricing page |
Every figure above is from that provider's own public pricing page, read on 25 September 2026. Where a provider does not publish a number we have left it blank rather than guessed. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Spotted something stale? Tell us and we will fix it.
Stay on API-Football if your volume sits around $39 a month. Their Mega plan is 150,000 requests a day at that price, which is more than our Pro plan gives you, and they have the largest community and the most tutorials. We would rather tell you that than have you switch and find out.
Sportmonks is the pick if you follow a handful of specific competitions and would rather pay strictly for those. The per-league model is cheaper than a flat plan at small scale and much more expensive at large scale.
football-data.org is the honest answer for a hobby project or a dissertation. A permanently free tier covering 12 competitions is hard to argue with, and the paid steps stay cheap.
TheSportsDB if your app is multi-sport. $9 a month for football plus the big US leagues is good value, with a two-minute live-score delay as the trade.
KickoffAPI — us — if you want 2.7× the requests at the $19 entry tier, a free tier you can genuinely prototype on, and data that comes from our own reconciled store rather than a single supplier, with a source field on every row so you can see it. We are not the cheapest and we are not the biggest; we are the one that owns its history.
It depends what you mean by best. football-data.org's free plan costs nothing permanently but covers 12 competitions at 10 requests a minute. TheSportsDB's free plan is 30 requests a minute across many sports with most queries limited. API-Football and KickoffAPI both give 100 requests a day; the difference is that API-Football states its free plans are limited in available seasons, while KickoffAPI's free key returns real-time scores across the full season range. Sportmonks offers a 14-day trial rather than a free tier.
TheSportsDB at $9 a month, if several sports and a two-minute live-score delay suit you. Among football-specialist APIs, football-data.org starts at €12 for 12 competitions, and API-Football and KickoffAPI both start at $19 — with 7,500 and 20,000 requests a day respectively.
With Sportmonks, yes — the plan determines how many leagues you may select, from 5 up to 120, with everything on Enterprise. football-data.org works similarly by competition count. API-Football and KickoffAPI both include their whole catalogue on every plan, with no selection step.
Write the two or three requests your product genuinely depends on, then run them against each free tier before paying anything. Coverage claims and request counts are easy to compare on paper and tell you very little about whether the response contains the field you need for the competition you care about.
100 requests a day, real-time, no card. The fastest way to settle a comparison is to run both.