Best Yelp APIs, 2026Every main way to get Yelp data.Yelp’s Places, AI and Insights APIs and the main Yelp data APIs, compared on what they return, how they charge and how you connect.
An editorial comparison of what each vendor publishes, checked 25 Sept 2026. Monocrawl is ours and listed first. How we compared
What are you building?
Business lists by keyword and area, with phone numbers and addressesA data API that searches by keyword and area and returns contact details. Yelp licenses listing data for sales use through its Insights API.
New reviews and owner replies for the businesses you trackAn option that pages through a business’s reviews; most return owner replies too. Yelp’s Places API returns up to 7 excerpts per business.
Ratings, categories and reviews across an area or a competitor setA data API that reads any public listing. For licensed internal analysis, Yelp’s own Insights API, priced per location.
An AI agent that looks up local businesses and reviewsAn option with an MCP server, so the agent can call it directly. Yelp’s own MCP server is for its conversational AI API.
Yelp ratings, reviews and photos shown in your consumer app or siteYelp’s Places API, licensed for display with Yelp’s logo and links back. For a chat assistant, its AI API.
10options compared
5with an MCP server
8free to start
39sources, checked 25 Sept 2026
Four routes
Yelp’s Places API licenses its content for display in consumer apps, and its AI API powers chat assistants. Internal analysis needs its Insights API, sold by contract. Data APIs read public Yelp pages with an API key.
Yelp Places API
Yelp AI API
Yelp Insights API
Monocrawl and the vendors below
What they return
What each option lists on its own pages, and how you connect.
| Yelp data | Connect | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Option | Business search | Business details | Reviews | Owner replies | Photos | Categories | Contact details | Menus | REST API | MCP server | Sources |
| MonocrawlOur product | Our API | ||||||||||
| Yelp Places APIOfficial, Yelp | – | – | 12345 | ||||||||
| Yelp AI APIOfficial, conversational | – | – | 678910 | ||||||||
| Yelp Insights APIOfficial, B2B licence | – | 11121314 | |||||||||
| ApifyYelp Scraper actors | – | 1516171819 | |||||||||
| Bright DataYelp Scraper API | – | 202122 | |||||||||
| HasDataYelp APIs | – | 2324252627 | |||||||||
| ReefAPIData API catalogue | 28293031 | ||||||||||
| ScraperAPIWeb scraping API | – | – | – | 32333435 | |||||||
| UnwrangleReviews and listings API | – | 36373839 | |||||||||
Pricing
A request, a result, a record and a unit are not the same size, and allowances reset on different schedules. Price your own workload with each vendor.
One key and one response format across 70+ platforms, with monitors for alerts.
Monthly plans
$229 a month on Base, including 30,000 calls
Then $5.91 per 1,000. Review excerpts and photos need Enhanced, $299, or Premium, $643.
Worth knowingReturns review excerpts of about 160 characters, not full reviews, and its terms cap caching at 24 hours.
5,000 calls in a 30-day trial
$25 per 1,000 calls
Minimum 1,000 calls a day. Places API plans include early access at 100 calls a day.
Worth knowingYelp publishes its own MCP server for it, so agents can ask about local businesses in plain language.
Free trial, started by creating a Places API app
$0.04 per unique location, starting price on Base
Priced over a rolling 12 months. Enhanced starts at $0.06 and Premium, with full review text, at $0.08.
Worth knowingBilled by the number of unique businesses you access, not per call, and it carries no rights to display the data.
Free trial on request
$5 per 1,000 businesses on the free plan
From $1.50 on higher plans. Reviews come from a second actor, from $1 per 1,000. Starter plan $19 a month.
Worth knowingTwo actors maintained by Apify, one for businesses and one for reviews; photos beyond the first 20 per business cost extra.
$5 of usage a month
$1.50 per 1,000 records, pay as you go
$499 a month includes 384,000 records, then $1.30 per 1,000.
Worth knowingDiscovers businesses by location and category through a bounding box it splits to get past Yelp’s 240-result limit.
5,000 records a month
$59 a month for 200,000 credits, billed monthly
A Yelp call costs 10 credits. $49 a month billed yearly. Unused credits do not roll over.
Worth knowingSeparate 10-credit calls for search, business details and a review feed of up to 49 reviews a page.
1,000 credits a month
$15 a month for 10,000 credits
Every Yelp call costs 1 credit, and credits never expire. $7.50 a month billed yearly.
Worth knowingOne reviews call takes up to 39 businesses and up to 10,000 reviews each, newest first by default.
1,000 credits, no card
$49 a month for 100,000 API credits
A plain request costs 1 credit; rendering, premium proxies and anti-bot bypass cost more.
Worth knowingReturns Yelp pages as HTML, text or markdown for you to parse, with geotargeting and an async API for large jobs.
7-day trial with 5,000 credits
$99 a month for 100,000 credits
A Yelp reviews or search request costs 1 credit, and a listing details request 10.
Worth knowingIts docs mark Yelp search as under maintenance; a reviews page costs 1 credit and a business’s details 10.
No free plan listed
Try a call
The same request in cURL, TypeScript or Python, and the recorded response for The Old Fashioned in Madison, Wisconsin. No Yelp account and no Yelp developer app.
GET /v1/yelp/businesscurl "https://www.monocrawl.com/v1/yelp/business?id=the-old-fashioned-madison" \
-H "x-api-key: mn_your_key_here"
The Old Fashioned
Madison, WI · American
Selected public fields from the recorded response. Live values will differ.
Business search1 creditBusiness record1 creditTen reviews3 creditsTwenty photos1 creditMenu1 creditRelated businesses1 credit2.1sMedian response in our benchmark. 22 September 2026 catalogue benchmark. Median of recorded endpoint timings across 636 operations with a successful HTTP response. Includes network time; individual requests vary.
Questions
Yelp’s Places API has three monthly plans: Base at $229, Enhanced at $299 and Premium at $643, each including 30,000 calls a month, then $5.91, $6.57 or $14.13 per 1,000 more. Review excerpts and photos need Enhanced or Premium, and above 150,000 calls a month Yelp prices through its sales team. Its AI API costs $25 per 1,000 calls, and its Insights API starts at $0.04 per location.
Not an ongoing one. Yelp’s Places API has a 30-day trial with up to 5,000 free calls, for evaluation only: its terms bar launching your product publicly during the trial. For education, Yelp publishes the Yelp Open Dataset, a subset of 150,346 businesses and 6,990,280 reviews. For public data, Monocrawl gives 1,000 credits every month, Bright Data 5,000 records a month, Apify $5 of usage a month, HasData 1,000 credits a month and ReefAPI 1,000 credits, and ScraperAPI has a 7-day trial with 5,000 credits.
Yelp’s Places API returns up to 3 review excerpts per business on Enhanced and up to 7 on Premium, and none on Base. Yelp says it does not return full review text: each excerpt is about 160 characters. Full review text comes with its Insights API Premium plan, by contract. Monocrawl returns a business’s reviews ten per page, sorted by Yelp’s order or newest first, with any owner reply.
Places API data, only within Yelp’s terms. Its content can be cached for 24 hours at most, apart from business IDs, and the terms bar using it to build your own database of business listings. Commercial analysis needs Yelp’s written consent, and Yelp points analysis to its Insights API, which licenses data for internal B2B use but carries no display rights.
Yelp’s API terms bar submitting Places API content to generative AI models, for example in prompts to ChatGPT, and bar training AI models on it without Yelp’s written approval. Yelp’s own route for assistants is its AI API, at $25 per 1,000 calls, which it connects to agents through its own MCP server. Monocrawl, Apify, HasData and ReefAPI also publish their own MCP servers, so assistants such as Claude or Cursor can call them directly. Bright Data’s and ScraperAPI’s MCP servers have no Yelp tool: their general scraping tool returns the page.
Not with Monocrawl: you send your Monocrawl API key with a Yelp business ID, alias or URL and get public data back, with no Yelp account and no Yelp developer app. Yelp’s Places API needs a Yelp user account to create API credentials, and its trial needs a business email.
Method
What’s includedYelp’s own Places, AI and Insights APIs, plus a selection of Yelp data and scraping APIs that come up across Yelp API searches and comparison lists and publish their pricing or offer a trial.
What we comparedWhat each vendor publishes about its Yelp data, pricing, free allowance and access, read on its own pages. “Best” here means worth comparing, not a ranking from tests: we have not run their APIs.
About MonocrawlMonocrawl is our product and is listed first. Its details come from our live plans and catalogue.
1,000 free credits every month. No card required.
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