- Free and commercial: IPinfo Lite (country and ASN, daily, CC BY-SA 4.0) and DB-IP Lite (country, city and ASN, monthly, CC BY 4.0), both with a credit to the provider.
- Free APIs: IPinfo Lite is unlimited at country level, IP2Location.io gives 50,000 city-level queries a month with a visible credit, and ip-api.com is non-commercial only.
- MaxMind charges by the query ($0.0001 country, $0.0003 City Plus, $0.002 Insights) and says its free GeoLite City is not recommended for commercial use.
- No accuracy figures are comparable: MaxMind’s own tool put 60% of US addresses within 50 km of the true location, and IP2Location states 80% city accuracy for its commercial data.
- Geolocation places the address, not the person: a VPN shows its server’s location, so a signup or login check needs evidence from the visit itself.
On this page
MaxMind, IPinfo and IP2Location are the three names that come up first when you need to turn an IP address into a country or a city, with DB-IP, ipgeolocation.io and ip-api.com close behind. This compares the six from their own pages, read on 18 October 2026: what each gives away free, under which licence, how often the data changes, what the first paid plan costs, and what each says about its own accuracy. Maskbreak is not in the tables: it is a fraud check, not a geolocation provider, and the last section says when that is the tool you need instead.
The short answer
- Free database you may use commercially: IPinfo Lite (country and ASN, updated daily, CC BY-SA 4.0) or DB-IP Lite (country, city and ASN, updated monthly, CC BY 4.0). Both need a credit to the provider.
- Free API: IPinfo Lite answers at country level with no request limit; IP2Location.io’s free plan answers at city level for 50,000 queries a month, with a visible credit; ip-api.com is free only for non-commercial use.
- City-level data on your own servers: MaxMind’s paid GeoIP City or IP2Location’s commercial databases. MaxMind says its free GeoLite City is “not recommended for commercial use cases”.
- Pay per lookup: MaxMind’s web services, from $0.0001 a query for country and $0.0003 for city. The cheapest flat plans are DB-IP’s from €8.29 a month, ip-api Pro at €13.3 a month on a yearly term and ipgeolocation.io’s from $19 a month.
- Accuracy: nobody publishes figures you can compare. Test the shortlist against the known locations of your own users.
Free IP geolocation: databases and APIs
| Provider | Free option | Data | Limits and terms | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPinfo | Lite: database download and API (IPinfo Lite) | Country, continent, ASN, AS name and domain | Unlimited requests; CC BY-SA 4.0, commercial use allowed with a credit to IPinfo | “Every 24 hours” |
| MaxMind | GeoLite Country, City and ASN databases, GeoLite Country and City web services (MaxMind) | Country, city, ASN | Account and licence key required; web services 1,000 lookups a day per service, 30 downloads a day; GeoLite licence with attribution; old databases deleted within 30 days of a new release | City and Country on Tuesdays and Fridays (MaxMind, 2025); ASN daily since June 2024 (MaxMind, 2024) |
| IP2Location | LITE databases (IP2Location LITE); IP2Location.io free API plan (IP2Location.io) | API: 11 fields, including country, region, city, ZIP code, coordinates, time zone and ASN | LITE “free for personal or commercial use with attribution required”; API 50,000 queries a month with a visible, prominent credit, and the service stops when they run out | LITE semi-monthly (edition comparison) |
| DB-IP | Lite databases: country, city, ASN, as CSV or MMDB (DB-IP Lite) | Country, city, ASN | CC BY 4.0 with a credit to DB-IP.com, and a link back on web pages that use the results; a free API over plain HTTP only, with a daily quota its documentation does not state (DB-IP docs) | Monthly |
| ipgeolocation.io | Free API plan (ipgeolocation.io) | Location, country details, currency, basic ASN, time zone | 1,000 credits a day, described as for “evaluation, testing, and prototypes”; no security data | Not stated |
| ip-api.com | Free API (ip-api terms) | Location by address | 45 requests a minute; “strictly limited for a non-commercial purpose and in a non-commercial environment” | Not stated |
Three details decide more than the headline numbers. A free database runs on your own servers, so it has no request limit but you must download it again on schedule; a free API is one HTTP call away but stops at its quota. IPinfo Lite’s free API answers only at country level, while its city data starts on a paid plan. And “free” rarely means “no strings”: every free option above either asks for a credit, limits you to non-commercial use or is meant for testing.
See it on your own connection: the free live check on the homepage shows the network reading, the browser check and a decision for your visit, with every reason listed.
Open the live checkPaid plans: where city data and higher volumes start
| Provider | Entry plans | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| MaxMind | Web services: Country $0.0001, City Plus $0.0003, Insights $0.002 a query (MaxMind) | City Plus adds postal-code level location and the ISP or organisation; Insights adds proxy detection, anonymiser data and confidence factors. Volume discounts above an estimated $2,500 a month. |
| IPinfo | Core $310 a year, Max $1,960 a year (IPinfo) | Core: 150,000 requests a month, city-level location, ASN and VPN, Tor, proxy and relay flags. Max: 250,000 requests, residential proxies with service names, carrier data. Full database downloads start at $1,000 a month. |
| IP2Location | IP2Location.io Starter $49, Plus $249, Security $499 a month (IP2Location.io); commercial databases from $99 (edition comparison) | Starter: 150,000 queries and 20 fields, including the ISP. Plus: 300,000 queries, 59 fields and proxy types including VPN, Tor and residential. |
| DB-IP | Basic API Starter €8.29, Premium €99.90, Enterprise €499.90 a month (DB-IP) | Starter: 2,000 to 50,000 requests a day. The commercial databases have better accuracy, more records and daily updates than Lite, by DB-IP’s own account, and need no credit. |
| ipgeolocation.io | Starter $19, Plus $49, Pro $79 a month (ipgeolocation.io) | 150,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000 credits a month. A standard lookup costs one credit and the security add-on two more. |
| ip-api.com | Pro €13.3 a month, on a 12-month term (ip-api Pro) | Unlimited requests, HTTPS and commercial use. |
The pricing models differ more than the prices. MaxMind charges by the query, so a site that looks up only its signups pays for its signups; IPinfo, IP2Location.io and ipgeolocation.io sell monthly allowances; DB-IP sells daily ones; ip-api sells unlimited use on a yearly term. Work out your monthly lookups first, then read the tables.
How accurate is IP geolocation? What the providers publish
Every provider says its data is accurate, few say how they measured it, and no two measure it the same way. What the six published on 18 October 2026:
- MaxMind publishes a per-country accuracy tool for its paid GeoIP City data, measured against “known web user IP address and location pairs”. For the United States, across all connection types and both IPv4 and IPv6, it showed 60% of addresses placed within 50 km of the true location, 33% placed in a city further away and 7% with no city at all; for Canada 74% within 50 km, for Finland 35%, for Hong Kong 29%. MaxMind adds that it “cannot guarantee any specific future accuracy level”, and its GeoLite page says the free GeoLite City is “considerably less accurate than the paid GeoIP City data” (MaxMind).
- IP2Location states 99.5% country and 80% city accuracy for its commercial databases and 98% and 60% for LITE (edition comparison), without a method beside the figures.
- DB-IP says its Lite databases are “subsets of the commercial databases with reduced coverage and accuracy” (DB-IP Lite).
- IPinfo calls Lite “the most accurate free IP geolocation API & database” in its page title (IPinfo Lite), which is a claim, not a measurement you can check.
The pattern across them is clear even if the figures are not comparable: the country is the dependable part, the city is right far less often, and mobile and IPv6 addresses are the least measured (MaxMind shows fewer countries for them because it has less test data). If your use depends on the city, measure it: take a sample of users whose location you know, such as delivery addresses with their consent, look their addresses up in each candidate, and count how often each lands within the distance you need.
MaxMind vs IPinfo vs IP2Location: how they differ
- MaxMind is the database-first choice. Its GeoIP City and GeoLite databases run inside your own stack, the paid City and Country databases are now released every weekday, and its web services charge by the query. Its free tier needs an account, and MaxMind does not recommend GeoLite City for commercial use.
- IPinfo is the API-first choice. Its free Lite tier has no request limit for country and ASN data, is updated daily and allows commercial use with a credit, and its paid plans add city-level location and VPN, proxy, Tor and relay flags by request volume; full database downloads are an enterprise purchase.
- IP2Location sits between them: free LITE databases and a free API with city-level fields under an attribution requirement, commercial databases from $99, and up to 79 fields on its Security API plan.
For “ipinfo vs maxmind” specifically, the question is usually where the data lives. If you want a file on your own servers and pay per use, MaxMind fits; if you want an HTTP call and a monthly plan, IPinfo fits. For “ip2location vs maxmind”, IP2Location.io’s free API returns city-level fields for 50,000 queries a month with a credit attached, while MaxMind’s free GeoLite City web service allows 1,000 lookups a day and is not recommended for commercial use.
Geolocation is not fraud detection
An IP geolocation answer says where an address is registered and routed, not where the person using it is. A visitor on a VPN shows the VPN server’s location (how websites tell you are on a VPN), a residential proxy shows someone else’s home, and a company gateway shows a data centre. Several providers sell privacy flags to help with that, mostly on paid tiers: IPinfo from Core, MaxMind on Insights, IP2Location.io from Plus (its free plan flags open proxies only). They answer from what is known about the address you send; the proxy detection API comparison sets out which plans flag which kinds of proxy.
If the question behind the lookup is whether a signup, a login or a checkout comes from a real person on their own connection, that is a different check. Maskbreak’s /v1/evaluate runs on the visit itself: it returns a decision (allow, review or block), the country of the address, flags for a VPN, a proxy, Tor or a cloud server, and a check of the browser, with every reason listed. It does not return a city. The Free plan includes 10,000 checks a month.
Questions people ask
- MaxMind vs IPinfo: which is better?
- It depends on where you want the data. MaxMind is database-first: its GeoIP and GeoLite databases run on your own servers, and its web services charge by the query, from $0.0001 for country and $0.0003 for City Plus. IPinfo is API-first: its free Lite tier answers country and ASN questions with no request limit, and city-level data, VPN and proxy flags come with its paid plans, Core at $310 a year for 150,000 requests a month. Both were read on their own pages on 18 October 2026.
- Is there a free IP geolocation API?
- Yes. IPinfo Lite is free and unlimited at country level, with commercial use allowed if you credit IPinfo; IP2Location.io’s free plan answers 50,000 city-level queries a month with a visible credit; ipgeolocation.io gives 1,000 credits a day for testing and prototypes; ip-api.com allows 45 requests a minute for non-commercial use only; MaxMind’s GeoLite web services allow 1,000 lookups a day per service with an account.
- Is MaxMind GeoLite free for commercial use?
- GeoLite is free with a MaxMind account and licence key, under MaxMind’s GeoLite licence, which asks for attribution and for old databases to be deleted within 30 days of a new release. MaxMind itself says the GeoLite City database is not recommended for commercial use cases and is considerably less accurate than its paid GeoIP City data, so read the licence for your use and test the paid data if the city matters.
- What is the most accurate IP geolocation database?
- No one can say from published figures, because each provider measures accuracy its own way, if at all. MaxMind publishes a per-country tool for its own data (60% of US addresses within 50 km on 18 October 2026), IP2Location states 99.5% country and 80% city accuracy for its commercial data without a method, and IPinfo calls Lite the most accurate free option. Test the candidates on users whose location you know.
- How accurate is IP geolocation?
- At country level it is dependable for most addresses; at city level it is right far less often, and mobile and IPv6 addresses are the least measured. MaxMind’s own accuracy tool showed 60% of US addresses placed within 50 km of the true location, 33% placed in a city further away and 7% with no city at all.
- Can an IP geolocation API detect a VPN?
- It locates the VPN server, not the person, so on its own it cannot. Some providers sell privacy flags on paid plans, such as IPinfo from Core, MaxMind on Insights and IP2Location.io from Plus; they answer from what is known about the address. A check on the visit itself, such as Maskbreak’s /v1/evaluate, adds evidence from the connection and the browser.
Compare on your requests, not ours
A free key returns the decision, the network classification and the device fields for every visit, so two vendors can be judged on the same traffic. Free plan: 10,000 checks a month, no card. Or check any address now with the free IP lookup and the IP reputation API.
