Calendarific has been a go-to holiday API for years, offering solid coverage across 230+ countries. But if you need more than just holiday dates — business day calculations, timezone conversions, astronomy data, or travel information — you'll find yourself stitching together multiple services.

World Data API matches Calendarific's holiday coverage and bundles it with business day calculations, timezone data, astronomy, geographic data, and travel reference data — at a lower price point.

Calendarific focuses exclusively on holiday data. It does one thing and does it well:

• Holiday dates for 230+ countries and 3,300+ regions

• Multiple holiday types (public, local, bank, religious, observances)

• Holiday name translations in 100+ languages

• Historical and future holiday data

If you only need holiday names translated into dozens of languages, Calendarific has an edge here. Their translation coverage is extensive.

World Data API provides holiday data with the same geographic coverage, plus:

• Business day calculations — Determine working days between dates, add/subtract business days, check if a date is a business day. This alone can replace custom logic you'd otherwise build yourself.

• Timezone data — Current times, UTC offsets, DST transitions

• Astronomy data — Sunrise/sunset, moon phases, golden hour, twilight times

• Travel reference data — Power plug types, emergency numbers, driving side, climate averages

• Geographic data — Country details, regions, cities, currencies, calling codes

The trade-off: World Data API has fewer language translations for holiday names. If your application needs holiday names displayed in Tagalog, Swahili, or Hungarian, verify the specific language support before switching.

World Data API's free tier gives you 60 requests per day (roughly 1,800/month) with no attribution requirement. Calendarific's free tier caps at 500 requests per month and requires visible attribution in your application.

For hobby projects or low-traffic tools, World Data API's free tier is more practical.

At the entry level, you're comparing $79/year (World Data API) against $100/year (Calendarific). The $21 difference isn't dramatic, but consider what each includes:

• Calendarific at $100/year: Holiday data only, 10,000 requests/month

• World Data API at $79/year: Holidays plus astronomy, business days, timezones, travel reference data, and geographic data — 15,000 requests/month

If you need business day calculations — a common requirement for payroll systems, scheduling apps, and financial software — Calendarific doesn't offer them at any price. You'd need to build that logic yourself or subscribe to another service.

One area where Calendarific's higher tiers differentiate: data update frequency.

• Calendarific Free/Starter: Quarterly updates

• Calendarific Business ($400/year): Weekly updates

• Calendarific Enterprise ($4,000/year): Daily updates

If your use case demands daily data updates (tracking last-minute government holiday announcements, for example), verify World Data API's update frequency for your tier before committing.

Calendarific remains a solid choice if:

• You need holiday names in many languages (100+ supported)

• Holiday data is your only requirement

• You need daily data updates and can justify the enterprise pricing

• You're already integrated and switching costs outweigh savings

World Data API makes more sense if:

• You need business day calculations (not available from Calendarific)

• You want timezone, astronomy, or travel reference data from the same provider

• You prefer a free tier without attribution requirements

• You want broader functionality at a lower price

• English or major language support is sufficient for your needs

Both APIs return clean JSON. Here's what a typical holiday response looks like:

Calendarific:

{
	"response": {
		"holidays": [
			{
				"name": "New Year's Day",
				"date": {
					"iso": "2026-01-01",
					"datetime": {
						"year": 2026,
						"month": 1,
						"day": 1
					}
				},
				"type": ["National holiday"],
				"country": {
					"id": "us",
					"name": "United States"
				}
			}
		]
	}
}

World Data API:

{
	"holidays": [
		{
			"name": "New Year's Day",
			"date": "2026-01-01",
			"type": "public",
			"country": "US",
			"regions": "all"
		}
	]
}

Both are straightforward to parse. Migration between the two requires minor adjustments to field names and response structure, but nothing architectural.

Calendarific is a focused, reliable holiday API with excellent language support. If holiday translations are critical to your application, it delivers.

But if you need both holiday data and business day calculations — say, for a payroll system that needs to compute "10 business days from invoice date" — Calendarific leaves you to build that logic yourself. World Data API includes it.

The pricing: $100/year for Calendarific (holidays only) versus $79/year for World Data API (holidays, business days, timezones, astronomy, travel reference data, and geographic data).

If holiday translations in 100+ languages are essential, Calendarific is the better fit. If you need holiday data plus any other date/time utilities, World Data API covers more ground.