KickoffAPI vs TheSportsDB
These two are not really competitors, and saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise. TheSportsDB is a cheap, community-maintained, many-sport database. KickoffAPI is a commercial football-only API. This page is about which of those you actually need.
Side by side
| Feature | KickoffAPI | TheSportsDB |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Commercial football API | Community-maintained, many sports |
| Free tier | 100 req/day, real-time, never expires | $0 — 30 req/minute, most queries limited |
| Entry paid plan | $9 / mo — 7,500 req per day | $9 / mo — 100 req/minute |
| Quota model | Per day, so a matchday burst is free | Per minute |
| Live scores | Real-time on every plan | 2-minute livescore on paid tiers |
| Sport focus | Football only, and deeper for it | Football plus NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and more |
| Data sourcing | Own reconciled store, origin on every row | Community contributions |
Comparison based on TheSportsDB's public pricing page, 25 September 2026. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners. If anything here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
What you parse
The fastest way to judge an API is to read one response. This is a real, unedited KickoffAPI call — Liverpool v Bournemouth, Premier League, matchday one of 2025.
$ curl -G "https://api.kickoffapi.com/api/v2/fixtures" \ -d "league=39&season=2025&limit=1" -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" { "data": [{ "id": "fx_j3AR8hjl9tRa", "date": "2025-08-15T20:00:00.000Z", "status": { "long": "Match Finished", "short": "FT" }, "league": { "id": "lg_49706223160bbba4", "name": "Premier League" }, "home": { "id": "tm_8d1cf3beebe33484", "name": "Liverpool FC" }, "away": { "id": "tm_3b1b1f15d2ccae5e", "name": "AFC Bournemouth" }, "score": { "home": 4, "away": 2, "halftime": { "home": 1, "away": 0 } }, "source": "owned" }], "meta": { "count": 1, "nextCursor": "1", "source": "owned" } }
Three things worth noticing, because they are what you live with for the next two years:
- One envelope, everywhere. Every endpoint returns
{ data, meta }. Pagination is a cursor in the same place on every resource, so one client handles all of them. - Prefixed, stable identifiers.
fx_,lg_,tm_,pl_. An id tells you what it points at, and it does not change under you. "source": "owned". Every row says where it came from. That field is the whole point of the section below.
Rate limiting is on the response too, not buried in a dashboard — x-ratelimit-limit, x-ratelimit-remaining and x-ratelimit-reset come back on every authenticated call, so your client can back off on its own. Live matches come from the same endpoint with ?live=all.
The honest verdict
Football is the product, not a feature
You need real-time rather than two-minute-old scores. You want per-day quotas, so a matchday burst does not throttle you. You need lineups, events, per-player statistics, xG and match projections, and coverage that reaches below the top divisions. And you want to know where a number came from — every row names its source.
You need several sports, cheaply
At $9 a month covering football alongside NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL, it is genuinely good value. If your app is multi-sport, or it is a side project where multi-sport coverage at $9 matters and two-minute scores are fine, they are the better buy and we would rather say so.
Frequently asked questions
Is TheSportsDB cheaper than KickoffAPI?
Yes. TheSportsDB's paid tiers are $9 and $20 a month against our $9, $29 and $49, and it covers several sports for that. At $9 we match TheSportsDB on price. The real differences are live-score latency, the quota model and football depth.
What is the difference in rate limits?
TheSportsDB meters per minute: 30 requests a minute on the free plan, 100 on the $9 plan. KickoffAPI meters per day: 100 a day free, 7,500 a day at $9. A per-day quota suits football, where traffic arrives in matchday bursts rather than evenly through the hour.
How current are the live scores?
KickoffAPI serves real-time scores on every plan, including the free one. TheSportsDB documents a two-minute livescore on its paid tiers. For a live-score product that two minutes is usually the deciding factor.
Which has better football coverage?
KickoffAPI, because football is the only sport we do: 1,245 leagues in 171 countries including lower divisions, with lineups, events, per-player statistics, a queryable xG model and match projections. TheSportsDB is broader across sports and shallower within football.
Try it against your own use case
100 requests a day, real-time, no card. The fastest way to settle a comparison is to run both.