Every figure checked on 12 August 2026
Visa requirements APIs, compared honestly
Six providers, six axes, prices read off their own pages on 12 August 2026. We win four axes and lose four. Both lists are below, and the losing one comes first.
Short answer: four cases where you should buy a competitor
We sell one thing well and several things not at all. Here is the split, so you can stop reading early if we are the wrong tool.
- Sherpa° — You need an audited feed that moves continuously (they log around 55 requirement changes an hour) and you have the budget for it — from $1,500 a month.
- IATA Timatic — You are an airline, or anything that has to agree with the agent at the boarding gate. Timatic is pre-integrated in departure control systems and is the document-check authority there. We are not, and no amount of engineering on our side changes that.
- Travel Buddy — You want the lowest unit price at volume. At 30,000 requests a month they charge $14.99; our published tier at the same volume is $49 — they are roughly 3.3× cheaper.
- VisaHQ or iVisa — You do not actually want structured data. You want a free widget on a page (VisaHQ), or a commission when a reader files an application (iVisa, up to 20%).
Take us if you want to try it without talking to anyone, in 15 languages, from REST or from an MCP client, on a published price that starts at $49 a month.
The table
| Provider | Published price | Self-serve signup | Docs without an account | Languages | MCP server | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Oriznus Self-serve REST + MCP | $49/mo entry plan | Yes, card-free | Yes | 15 | Yes | 49,750 pairs, 250 destinations |
Sherpa° Audited feed for airlines and OTAs | $1,500–5,000/mo | No — “contact us” | Yes | 30 | No | 200+ countries, ~55 changes/hour |
IATA Timatic The reference at the boarding gate | API not public; $180/yr/seat for the web UI | No | No | Not published | No | ~200 changes/day, pre-integrated in DCS |
Travel Buddy Cheapest per request | $4.99 / 3,000 req · $14.99 / 30,000 | Yes | Yes | 1 (English) | No | 200 × 211 |
VisaHQ Free widgets, application business | Widgets free | Partial | No (403/404) | Not published | No | 200+ countries |
iVisa Affiliate model, not a data API | Commission up to 20% | Not applicable | No | Not published | Yes — one tool, a sales link | 190+ nationalities |
Prices read from each provider's public pages on 12 August 2026; Sherpa° and Timatic quote on request, so their figures come from published tiers and seat pricing rather than a quote we hold. Our own price grid is being revised — the pricing page is authoritative, this table is a snapshot. Competitors change their offers; if a cell is wrong, tell us and we will fix it here.
Where Orizn loses
Four axes where a competitor is straightforwardly better. None of these are on the roadmap as of 12 August 2026.
Update speed
Sherpa° tracks changes continuously and audits them. We refresh in campaigns, not in a stream. If your product breaks when a rule changes the same week, we are not the safe choice.
Authority at the border
Timatic is what the airline checks against. Our answer is informational — good enough to build a product on, not a substitute for the carrier's own check or the destination's consulate.
Unit price at volume
Travel Buddy is about 3.3× cheaper at 30,000 requests a month. We are cheaper to start with and cheaper to try; we are not the cheapest per call.
Per-field citations
CanIEnter attaches a government URL and a date to 827 individual rules. We publish sources at the dataset level, not on every field. Their citation layer is genuinely ahead of ours.
Where Orizn wins
The only one that is priced, open and self-serve at once
As of 12 August 2026, Orizn is the only provider in this table combining a published price, an account you can open yourself, documentation readable without an account, and an MCP server. Sherpa° has the docs but not the price or the signup; Travel Buddy has the price and the signup but one language and no MCP.
The only multilingual API you can buy without a salesperson
696,500 translated strings across 15 languages, returned by the API itself. Sherpa° covers 30 languages — more than us — but behind a sales conversation and a four-figure monthly minimum.
First-class MCP
Our MCP server is the most-installed visa server on npm (~270 downloads a week on 12 August 2026). An agent can call the visa check directly, with five tools rather than one affiliate link.
Coverage that does not come from the public dataset
250 destinations rather than the 191 of the public passport-index matrix — New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis-and-Futuna among them — and 10 requirement values, four of which exist nowhere else: partial_restrictions, admission_refused, special, not_applicable.
Where the data comes from
Most free and low-cost visa matrices on the market are the same matrix. The open ilyankou/passport-index-dataset covers 191 destinations and is the backbone of several products. CanIEnter, for instance, derives its matrix from it — the pair sets match to within the 199 self-pairs, and the stay durations agree 99.84% of the time. They are upfront about it: their own documentation labels it an aggregated secondary matrix.
Ours is not that dataset. 250 destinations instead of 191 — New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis-and-Futuna are in ours and absent from the public matrix — and 10 requirement values, four of which we have not found anywhere else: partial_restrictions, admission_refused, special and not_applicable. That matters if you sell to travellers whose route touches an overseas territory, and it matters if a boolean visa/no-visa flag is too coarse for your product.
The reverse is also true and worth saying plainly: CanIEnter attaches a government source URL and a date to 827 individual rules. We do not do that per field yet. If your compliance story needs a citation attached to each value, they are ahead of us today.
Axes we left out of the table, and why
- Uptime. We do not run a measured availability figure, so we will not print one. A percentage nobody instruments is a marketing number.
- Freshness in hours. Competitors publish one; we would have to invent ours. Sherpa's number is real and it beats us — that is in the losses above.
- Response latency. Not measured across providers under comparable conditions, so any figure here would be a benchmark of our network, not of their API.
Questions
Which visa API should I actually pick?
Sherpa° if you need an audited, continuously updated feed and have a four-figure monthly budget. IATA Timatic if you need to agree with the departure control system at the gate. Travel Buddy if you want the lowest price per request at volume. Orizn if you want to start without talking to anyone, in 15 languages, over REST or MCP, from $49 a month.
What does Orizn cover exactly?
49,750 passport-destination pairs across 250 destinations, in 15 languages. A response carries the requirement, allowed days, required documents, the process, visa types, extension rules and embassy contacts — not just a status code.
Is Orizn's data just the public passport-index dataset?
No. The public ilyankou/passport-index-dataset matrix covers 191 destinations; ours covers 202, including New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis-and-Futuna, and uses 10 requirement values where the public matrix has fewer. CanIEnter, by contrast, derives its matrix from that public dataset — and says so openly in its own documentation.
How fresh is the data?
We do not publish a freshness figure, because we do not currently measure one we would stand behind. Requirements are refreshed in campaigns rather than continuously. If sub-day freshness is a hard requirement, Sherpa° is the honest answer. Last review of this page: 12 August 2026.
Can I try it without talking to sales?
Yes. Sign in, get a key, run a call. No card, no demo call, no quote. That is the single thing this product is built around, and it is why the table above has a self-serve column.
Still the right tool for you?
Then find out in two minutes instead of two meetings. Key, docs and a live call, no card and no sales conversation.
Get an API key →Page last reviewed on 12 August 2026.