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author https://github.com/breck7 Breck Yunits
date 2017.11.22 12:00:00 -8000
groups All
title How Many Web APIs are there in the World?

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Last week I explored the question "how many programming languages are there in the world?"
 link how-many-programming-languages-are-there-in-the-world.html question
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My current estimate is between 5,000 and 25,000 active computer languages.

But perhaps the number is higher, if you include all active external web APIs.

First, what do other people say?

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# Programmable Web - 18,409
The site Programmable Web lists 18,409 web APIs. But figuring out which ones are used most is a work in progress.
 https://www.programmableweb.com/category/all/apis 18,409
 https://www.programmableweb.com/news/which-are-developers-favorite-apis/research/2017/09/01 most

# RapidAPI - 7,500
RapidAPI lists over 500 APIs, but that should expand as it completes its acquisition of the Mashape Marketplace, which listed over 7,500 APIs.
 https://rapidapi.com 500 APIs
 https://blog.rapidapi.com/2017/05/23/rapidapi-and-mashape-api-marketplace-join-forces/ acquisition
 https://market.mashape.com/explore 7,500 APIs

# Zapier - 750+
Zapier lists over 750 APIs.
 https://zapier.com/zapbook 750 APIs

# Other Lists
On GitHub user abhishekbanthia maintains a popular list of about 300 apis. Wikipedia has a small list of about 30 APIs.
 https://github.com/abhishekbanthia/Public-APIs 300 apis
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_APIs 30 APIs

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# What do I say?
My estimate is: *between 2,000 and 25,000 active public facing web APIs*.

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# Reproducibility Notes:
My ad hoc estimates are based on checking the PLDB database, the datasets listed above, and additional web sources.

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