The developer-first Iframely
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Iframely Business is $49/month for 25,000 "hits". Microlink is $45/month for 46,000 API requests. On a per-request basis that is about $0.98/1,000 for Microlink versus $1.96/1,000 hits for Iframely's first tier.

The honest caveat: Iframely defines a "hit" as roughly an hour of URL activity that can map to 1-4 API calls. If your traffic re-views the same URLs heavily inside the same hour, the gap narrows. If your traffic is mostly unique URLs, Microlink is materially cheaper.

From Iframely's own pricing page, a hit represents an hour of URL activity on their service and typically covers 1-4 API calls or 5-15 iframe views per hit, depending on caching and reuse.

This is a useful model if your audience re-views the same URLs in short bursts, but it makes pre-purchase forecasting harder because the same workload can cost different amounts depending on how often users return to the same content. Microlink's per-request billing is easier to reason about up front.

Yes. Iframely's API license documents a 50 req/s ceiling across all standard plans, with higher throughput available only on custom arrangements. For most apps that is plenty; for spiky workloads — email blast triggers, viral threads, bulk re-indexing — it forces a conversation with sales.

Microlink does not apply a per-second or per-minute cap on paid plans. You pay for the requests you make and the API scales without a separate contract.

For oEmbed providers, yes. Pass the URL to Microlink's embed API and the response includes the provider's iframe HTML along with the normalized title, description, image, logo, and color palette — ready to paste or render through the SDK.

What differs is publisher coverage breadth: Iframely advertises 1,900+ publishers with proprietary discovery on top of oEmbed. Microlink covers 280+ oEmbed providers plus a universal Open Graph and Twitter Card fallback for anything else.

Two reasons. First, Microlink gives you the same embed flow plus screenshots, PDFs, Lighthouse audits, MQL extraction, and remote JS from one API — you do not pay a second vendor when the workflow widens beyond cards.

Second, Microlink ships with antibot detection across 9 providers, a built-in rotating residential proxy, and CAPTCHA handling — all included on the Pro plan. Iframely's pipeline is optimized for cooperative publisher endpoints; Microlink is optimized for arbitrary URLs, including ones that fight back.

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

and the supported list — Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai, PerimeterX, Kasada, Imperva, AWS WAF, Vercel Attack Mode, Shape Security — plus the CAPTCHA coverage are documented on the proxy feature page. Every proxied response carries x-fetch-mode: fetch-proxy so you can audit usage server-side.

For the data shape, it is short. Iframely returns title, description, thumbnail, oEmbed-style media, and links. Microlink returns the same normalized fields plus image palettes, logos, and color metadata. Most card components require a thin adapter and not a rewrite.

For the iframe.ly/api/iframely endpoint, swap to

api.microlink.io

with the same url parameter and add a Microlink API key if you need higher limits. The embed guide walks through the full mapping.

When your buying profile is editorial CMS work — WordPress, CKEditor, AMP, Shadow DOM widgets — Iframely's out-of-the-box integrations remove real work. Microlink does not ship those integrations as first-class plugins.

When you depend on a specific long-tail publisher that Iframely curates and Microlink does not yet cover, the catalog gap is a real reason to stay. And when four-nines uptime is contractually required, Iframely's 99.99% number is one tick above Microlink's 99.9% SLA.

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. Iframely's pipeline is fully proprietary today.