The Best RestCountries Alternative in 2026

RestCountries has been the go-to API for country data since 2013. It's free, open source, and covers the basics well. But as your app grows, you'll likely run into its limitations.

What RestCountries Does Well

RestCountries excels at basic country information: names, ISO codes, capitals, regions, flags, and population data. It's completely free, requires no API key, and has great community support. For simple country pickers or data enrichment, it's still a solid choice.

Where RestCountries Falls Short

• No cities data. If you need city-level data — for autocomplete, store locators, or shipping forms — RestCountries can't help. You'd need a separate API.
• No exchange rates. RestCountries doesn't include live or even static exchange rate data.
• No IP geolocation. You can't detect a user's country from their IP address.
• No SLA or uptime guarantee. RestCountries runs on community infrastructure. If it goes down, there's no support channel.
• No rate limiting per key. Since there are no API keys, you can't control usage per application.

ApogeoAPI: The Alternative That Does More

ApogeoAPI covers everything RestCountries does — and adds cities, exchange rates, IP geolocation, webhooks, and a paid SLA. One API subscription instead of 3-5 separate services.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	RestCountries	ApogeoAPI
Countries (250+)	✅	✅
States / Provinces	✅	✅
Cities (150K+)	❌	✅
Exchange Rates (161 currencies)	❌	✅
IP Geolocation	❌	✅
Free tier	✅ Always free	✅ Free + 14-day trial
SLA / Uptime guarantee	❌	✅ 99% (Basic+)
Support	Community only	Email support (paid)

How to Migrate from RestCountries

Migration is straightforward. Both APIs return JSON with similar field names. The main differences are:

• ApogeoAPI requires an X-API-Key header (get your free key at apogeoapi.com)
• The base URL changes from restcountries.com/v3.1/ to api.apogeoapi.com/v1/
• Response shape is similar: name, iso2, capital, region, flag_url

Conclusion

RestCountries is still excellent for simple, free use cases. But if you're building a production app that needs cities, exchange rates, or IP geolocation — ApogeoAPI gives you all of that under one roof, with a reliable free tier and a 14-day full-access trial.