# What to use instead of CryptoCompare

CryptoCompare is CoinDesk Data now, its free API tier was retired on 21 May 2026, and no plan carries a published price. Where the old endpoints go.

*https://cryptomarkets.tools/alternatives/cryptocompare*

## The subject

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Product | CryptoCompare |
| Status | restricted |
| Website | https://www.cryptocompare.com/ |
| Category | Crypto Market Data APIs |

The aggregated crypto price and OHLCV API that a decade of tutorials still call `min-api.cryptocompare.com` — now sold as CoinDesk Data, key-only, with no published price.

## Replacements

*Ordered by how much of the original’s job each one covers, closest first. Paid placement does not affect this order.*

1. [CoinDesk Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coindesk-data.md) — The same endpoints under a new name. If what you need is the CCCAGG archive specifically, the short path is a paid plan, not a rewrite.
2. [Coin Metrics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coin-metrics.md) — A citable reference rate in place of CCCAGG, plus 68 venues of market data and network metrics — and a free tier that needs no key at all.
3. [CoinGecko API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coingecko-api.md) — Replaces what most free CryptoCompare keys were actually used for — current prices and daily history for thousands of coins, from a free Demo plan.
4. [Binance Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/binance-api.md) — If you only ever pulled one venue's candles, you never needed an aggregator: the public endpoints are free, unkeyed and the venue's own tape.
5. [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari.md) — Takes the news and asset-profile half of the old key, which no price API replaces.

## The product

CryptoCompare was the aggregated crypto price API that everybody's first script used. One
unauthenticated URL returned a price for a list of symbols; `histoday`, `histohour` and
`histominute` returned OHLCV going back years; there was a per-exchange tape underneath the
aggregate, a news feed, and social and sentiment history that nothing else was publishing for
free. It is in a decade of tutorials, StackOverflow answers and half-finished side projects,
and for most of that decade you could run those examples by pasting them into a terminal.

Three things happened, in this order.

**16 October 2024 — the acquisition.** CoinDesk announced it had bought CCData and
CryptoCompare. The CCData brand has since been retired: `ccdata.io` returns a 301 to
`data.coindesk.com`. The retail site at cryptocompare.com is still up and now carries a
"Powered By CoinDesk Data" line; the API documentation moved to the CoinDesk developer portal.

**The key requirement.** Keyless access to `min-api.cryptocompare.com` is gone. As of
19 September 2026 the price endpoint answers `401` with `API key required, please refer to the
documentation at https://developers.coindesk.com/`. That is a live host refusing an
unauthenticated caller — not a 404, not a redirect to a successor. `streamer.cryptocompare.com`
still answers 200. No sunset date for either host has been published on any vendor page, and the
vendor's own documentation describes the Min API as frozen since November 2023 rather than as
ending.

**17 April 2026 — the free tier.** The vendor published an announcement dated 17 April 2026:
"As of May 21, 2026, we will be retiring our free API tier and accounts without a subscription
will no longer have API access", and for an account without an active subscription, "your
current access will stop returning data." That date has passed.

What is left is three plans with no numbers on them. Personal is applied for, non-commercial,
licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and capped at a lifetime call count the page does not state. Start-Up
and Enterprise both say Contact. The old self-service pricing page at the CryptoCompare address
does not exist either: it 301s to the legacy API host, which answers 401. Whatever you were
paying before, there is now nothing published to compare it against.

That is the whole shape of this page. The product did not die. It stopped being something you
could evaluate, budget for or start using without talking to somebody.

## What to use instead

**Start by asking whether you need an aggregate at all.** CryptoCompare sold three separable
things under one key: a consolidated print across venues, a symbol-mapping scheme, and an
archive. Exchange-native APIs give you the third venue's own tape for free — if your script
pulled BTC-USD candles and never cared which book they came from, an aggregator was doing work
you were not using. [Binance's public endpoints](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/binance-api) are free and unkeyed;
[CCXT](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/ccxt) normalises a hundred of them behind one interface if you want several venues
without buying a feed.

**If what you had was `price` and `histoday`, and you want to stay free.**
[CoinGecko's API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coingecko-api) is the nearest thing in shape: coin-level current prices
and daily history across thousands of assets, keyed, metered in credits, with a free Demo plan
you can sign up for without a sales call. It is coin-level rather than venue-level, so a
per-exchange OHLCV call does not port across; see the migration notes.

**If what you had was CCCAGG, and the number has to be defensible.** This is the case where free
replacements do not apply. A valuation, a tax basis or an audit trail needs a rate with a written
methodology behind it, not a mean of whatever was trading. [Coin Metrics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coin-metrics) is
the closest match in this catalogue — reference rates with published methodology, per-exchange
market data across 68 venues and network metrics on the same key, and a free tier that does not
require a key at all — but it is a different rate, not a continuation of CCCAGG. Splicing one
series onto the other produces a discontinuity on the join date, and it will be your
discontinuity to explain.

**If what you had was the news, social or sentiment feed.** No price API replaces it.
[Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari) covers the news and asset-profile side.

**If you want to stay.** [CoinDesk Data](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coindesk-data) is the same endpoints, and it is
first on the list above because the ordering rule is coverage and nothing else covers as much of
the original. That is not a recommendation to stay — it is what staying costs: a subscription on
a price you have to ask for, on a product whose own pages currently disagree about whether the
Personal plan still issues a working key.

## What you give up

**The keyless URL, and everything built on it.** Not just your code — every tutorial, notebook
and Gist you might want to lean on. Anything you find online that pastes a `min-api` URL into a
browser is now describing something that returns 401. There is no replacement for this anywhere;
the keyless call is rare enough now that Coin Metrics advertises it as a feature.

**A price you can look up.** The old self-service pricing page is gone and none of the three
current plans shows a figure. A tool nobody can quote cannot be compared on cost, budgeted for by
somebody without purchasing authority, or picked in an afternoon. This is the actual loss, and it
is larger than the free tier: the free tier ended on a date, but the published rate card ended
without one.

**CCCAGG as a continuous series.** Every replacement here computes a different number from a
different venue set with a different methodology. If you have history stamped with CryptoCompare's
aggregate and you move, you own a seam.

**Social and sentiment history.** CryptoCompare published per-coin social metrics going back
years, free, and that is not a normal thing for a price API to do. Nothing in this catalogue
continues that series. [Santiment](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/santiment) and Messari sell adjacent data; neither is a backfill of it.

**Depth of archive, possibly.** The vendor's own pages claim the history two different ways —
"dating back to 2010" on the data site, "since January 2013" in the API introduction — so what
you gave up is not a number anybody has stated consistently. Ask for the oldest timestamp you
need, at the granularity you need it, before you plan around either figure.

## Migration notes

**Expect to rewrite the client layer, not change a base URL.** None of the replacements here
returns CryptoCompare's response envelope.

- **The response shape.** CryptoCompare wrapped everything in `{"Response": ..., "Data": ...,
  "Err": ...}` and signalled failure inside a 200 as often as with a status code. CoinGecko, the
  exchange APIs and Coin Metrics all return plain JSON and use HTTP status codes. Any error
  handling that reads `Response == "Error"` silently stops catching anything.
- **Timestamps.** CryptoCompare's `time` fields are Unix **seconds**. Exchange APIs are mostly
  milliseconds — Binance's klines certainly are — and Coin Metrics uses RFC 3339 strings. A
  seconds value read as milliseconds lands in January 1970 and sorts to the front of your series
  rather than throwing.
- **Symbols.** `fsym`/`tsym` is a pair of tickers. CoinGecko keys on its own coin IDs, which you
  have to look up and cache; exchanges use their own market strings with their own separators and
  their own names for the same asset. Building the mapping table is most of the work, and it is
  the part that fails quietly when a vendor relists a ticker.
- **Aggregate versus venue.** A CryptoCompare call without an exchange parameter returned CCCAGG.
  The equivalent on the new host is a market parameter naming an index such as `cadli` or `ccix`,
  and on the exchange APIs there is no equivalent at all — you get that venue's book. Two of
  those three numbers will differ for the same minute, and the difference is not a bug.
- **Rate limits are per account, not per key.** On the current CoinDesk portal every key on an
  account shares one quota, so issuing a second key to isolate staging from production does not
  work; the vendor's own advice is a second account. Limits are counted in calls rather than
  credits, which is the opposite of how CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap meter.
- **The `cryptocompare` package on PyPI is not the vendor's.** It is published by an individual
  and no first-party SDK is named anywhere in the current documentation. If your migration plan is
  "pin the library and wait", there is nobody contractually on the other end of that.
- **The old documentation URL is dead, but the spec is not.** `min-api.cryptocompare.com/documentation`
  returns the API's own 401 rather than a page. The Min API reference is republished on the new
  developer portal under `/documentation/legacy`, which is where to check what your old calls were
  supposed to return before you replace them.

The rest of the field is in [Crypto Market Data APIs](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/market-data-apis).

## FAQ

### Did CryptoCompare shut down?

No. cryptocompare.com is still serving pages and the legacy API host still routes. What ended is free access: the vendor announced on 17 April 2026 that as of 21 May 2026 it was retiring the free API tier, and that accounts without a subscription would stop returning data. The product is alive; the terms a reader remembers are not.

### Do the old min-api.cryptocompare.com calls still work?

The host answers, but not without a key. A request to the price endpoint returns HTTP 401 with the message 'API key required, please refer to the documentation at https://developers.coindesk.com/' — not a 404 and not a redirect, so the route exists and is gated. No shutdown date for that host has been published anywhere, and the vendor's docs describe the Min API as frozen since November 2023 rather than as ending on a date.

### What does a CryptoCompare plan cost now?

There is no published figure. The developer portal lists three plans — Personal, Start-Up and Enterprise — and the first is applied for while the other two say Contact. The old self-service pricing page at the CryptoCompare address is gone: it now redirects to the legacy API host, which answers 401. Checked 19 September 2026.

### Is CoinDesk Data the same company?

Same product, different owner. CoinDesk announced on 16 October 2024 that it had acquired CCData and CryptoCompare. The CCData brand has since been retired — ccdata.io redirects to the CoinDesk Data site — while cryptocompare.com continues as a retail site carrying a 'Powered By CoinDesk Data' line.