IPinfo vs ipto: An Honest Comparison
IPinfo and ipto are both IP data APIs that return location and network details for an address, but they differ in scope, history and what comes in the free tier. IPinfo is an established commercial provider with a broad product range; ipto is a free IP intelligence API and tool site with a deliberately smaller feature set. This page explains what ipto does and does not do, and how to run a comparison yourself instead of relying on marketing claims.
Prices, quotas and product tiers change often, and this article does not quote another company's numbers, because anything printed here would go stale or be wrong. Check the provider's own pricing and terms page for current limits, and read the license terms before using any free tier in a commercial product.
What ipto provides
ipto is free with no signup and allows 1,000 requests per day. A single call to GET https://ipto.to/v1/ip returns country, city and related location fields, the ASN and organization, currency_code, and the flags is_vpn, is_tor, is_abuser and is_datacenter, plus bogon and bogon_type for reserved ranges. There are paid tiers for higher volume and extras such as bulk lookup, support and an SLA; city and postal-code precision is the same on the free tier.
Beyond the main lookup there are standalone tools built on public data: an ASN lookup, an IP whois lookup (which uses RDAP, the structured successor to WHOIS, and covers IP blocks rather than domains), an RPKI route validation check, a company lookup that combines RDAP with ASN ownership into a confidence-scored answer, and a hosted domains lookup based on reverse DNS and certificate transparency.
What ipto does not do
Being clear about gaps is part of a fair comparison. ipto does not detect residential proxies. Its VPN, Tor and abuse flags currently cover IPv4 ranges, so IPv6 addresses return false for them rather than a guess, although IPv6 addresses still get ASN, organization and city-level location where covered. Threat feeds refresh every 6 hours and the IP and ASN datasets refresh daily, which is fast enough for most uses but is not real-time. There is no live carrier or per-subscriber lookup; the carrier lookup works at the network-operator level using MCC and MNC data. And it is not a domain WHOIS service.
Commercial providers with larger teams may offer additional datasets, deeper history, privacy-detection variants, enterprise contracts or different coverage of specific fields. If you need one of those, say so in your evaluation and test it. We make no claim that ipto matches any specific competitor field for field.
How to compare any two IP APIs
A fair comparison uses your own traffic, not a vendor's demo. A workable process:
- Sample real addresses. Take a few hundred from your logs, covering your main countries, mobile users, and known problem sources.
- Define ground truth where you have it. Users who shared a shipping address or billing country give you a rough check on country and city agreement.
- Compare fields you will actually use. If you only branch on country and an
is_vpnflag, ignore the rest. - Measure disagreement, then inspect it. Look at the addresses where providers differ and find out which one was right, using the ASN and whois records as context.
- Check operational terms. Rate limits, caching rules, commercial-use terms, IPv6 handling, uptime history and support.
Expect disagreement on city-level results from any two providers, because the underlying problem is inherently approximate; see why city accuracy is limited. Country-level agreement is typically much higher.
Which fits which job
ipto fits well when you want a free, no-signup API for development, prototypes, small production workloads under the daily cap, and when the extra flags (VPN, Tor, abuse, data center, bogon) matter to your flow. A broader commercial provider may fit better if you need very high volume under contract, specialized datasets, or a vendor relationship that your procurement process requires. Many teams use a free source for low-stakes lookups and a paid one where the cost of an error is high. For a wider survey of options, see best free IP geolocation APIs and MaxMind alternatives.
The quickest way to evaluate is to try it: run curl https://ipto.to/v1/ip or paste addresses into the tools above, and read the API documentation for the full response schema.