The lower-cost Embedly
alternative

Embedly's API plan starts at $119/month for 10,000 Embed URLs, which works out to about $$11.90/1,000. Microlink is $45/month for 46,000 requests, or roughly $$0.98/1,000. On a per-URL basis Microlink is roughly 12× cheaper at the entry tier.

The gap is not just about the headline rate. Embedly bills Embed, Extract, and Display as three separate buckets — if your workload uses two of them, your effective price per useful URL is higher again. Microlink uses one shared bucket across every endpoint.

Cards is the $14/month JavaScript widget plan: you drop the embedly.js script on a publisher site and Embedly handles rendering in the browser. There is no documented server-side quota and you cannot call the API directly.

The API plan at $119/month gives you the Embed, Extract, and Display REST APIs with metered URL quotas and overage pricing. That is the plan to compare against Microlink, since Microlink is API-first.

Yes. Embedly's documentation states every paid API plan is rate- limited to 50 URLs per second across Embed, Extract, and Display combined. Custom throughput requires contacting their sales team.

Microlink does not apply a per-second or per-minute cap on paid plans, so spike traffic does not need a separate negotiation.

Embed and Extract — yes. Microlink's metadata endpoint returns the same normalized fields Extract does (title, description, image, author, publisher, oEmbed-style media) and the same iframe HTML payload Embed returns for supported providers. Pass any URL to the embed API and the response covers both jobs.

Display — partial. Embedly Display is an on-the-fly image transform API (resize, crop, format conversion). Microlink does not provide equivalent image-transform capabilities. If image optimization is a load-bearing part of your stack, pair Microlink with a dedicated image CDN (Cloudinary, Imgix, ImageKit) rather than expecting Microlink to cover it.

Yes — on the Pro plan. Microlink auto-detects when a target site is blocking the request, routes the call through a rotating residential IP pool, and adapts to the specific antibot or CAPTCHA provider in the way. That replaces three usual line items on your bill: a residential proxy contract, an antibot detection tool, and a CAPTCHA solver subscription.

The detection logic is open source as

is-antibot

. Supported antibot providers: Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai, PerimeterX, Kasada, Imperva, AWS WAF, Vercel Attack Mode, Shape Security. The full breakdown lives on the proxy feature page. Embedly does not advertise any equivalent capability.

The data shapes are close enough that most card components only need a thin adapter, not a rewrite. Embedly returns title, description, thumbnail, oEmbed-style media, and provider info; Microlink returns the same fields plus color palette, logo URL, and dominant color metadata.

At the network layer, swap i.embed.ly/1/oembed?url=...&key=... for api.microlink.io?url=... and add a Microlink API key if you need to go beyond the free 50/day. The embed guide walks through the full mapping.

When you depend on a long-tail publisher in Embedly's 1,000+ catalog that Microlink does not yet cover, the catalog gap is a real reason to stay. Embedly has been curating their provider list since 2009.

When image transformation is in your critical path — resizing, cropping, or format converting — Embedly Display ships that as a first-class API while Microlink does not. And if you only need the drop-in Cards widget for a publisher site with no server-side API usage, the $14 Cards plan is genuinely the lower-priced entry.

The core is. Metascraper (metadata extraction), MQL (the query language), and Browserless (the headless browser layer) are all published on GitHub under the MIT license, so you can audit, fork, or self-host the underlying pipeline.

The hosted API at microlink.io bundles those components with managed proxies, antibot tooling, edge caching, and a 99.9% SLA. Embedly's pipeline is fully proprietary today.