FXMacroData vs Open Exchange Rates: FX Rates API vs FX Macro Data API

This comparison is for developers, product teams, and FX traders who are deciding between Open Exchange Rates and FXMacroData, or wondering whether they need both. The two products both return currency data as JSON, so they often appear in the same search results, but they solve different problems. Open Exchange Rates answers "what is this currency worth right now in that one?" FXMacroData answers "what moved this currency pair, and what is scheduled to move it next?"

The short finding: if your job is pure currency conversion for an app, a shopping cart, or an accounting system across 200+ currencies, Open Exchange Rates is the simpler and cheaper choice, and FXMacroData is not trying to replace it. If your job is trading, research, or automation around the macro drivers of FX (policy rates, inflation, payrolls, release timing, positioning) FXMacroData is the better fit, and its daily FX spot rates for supported pairs sit alongside that macro data in one API.

Decision snapshot

Choose Open Exchange Rates when

You need conversion rates for 200+ currencies in an app, store, invoice, or reporting system, refreshed hourly or faster, at a low monthly price.

Choose FXMacroData when

You need the macro drivers of FX: official-source releases with second-level timestamps, release calendars, central-bank context, COT, yields, and FX spot rates for supported pairs.

Use both when

Your product converts prices for customers and also gives traders or analysts macro context. The two APIs overlap only lightly.

Takeaway: the first question is not "which FX API is better" but "do I need conversion rates, macro drivers, or both?"

Pricing And Plans

Open Exchange Rates publishes a simple, transparent ladder. The free plan gives up to 1,000 requests per month with hourly updates and USD as the only base currency. Developer is $12/month for 10,000 requests with hourly updates and any base currency. Enterprise is $47/month for 100,000 requests, 30-minute updates, and access to the time-series endpoint. Unlimited is $97/month for unlimited requests, 5-minute updates, and the currency conversion endpoint. VIP service levels add updates up to every second, bid-ask prices, OHLC data, and an uptime SLA on custom pricing. Paying annually gives two months free.

FXMacroData has a free tier for USD macro data (no key, 100 requests/day, USD announcements delayed 15 minutes). FX spot rates and non-USD currencies need a key. The Individual plan is $50/month or $500/year with a 14-day trial and 1,000,000 requests/month. Business is $250/month or $2,500/year for companies and teams of up to 10 people, with the same request allowance and priority support. Enterprise is by custom agreement.

Open Exchange Rates entry

$12/month*

Developer: 10,000 requests/month, hourly updates, any base currency. Free plan: 1,000 requests/month, USD base.

Open Exchange Rates top self-serve

$97/month*

Unlimited: unlimited requests, 5-minute updates, /convert. VIP (1-second updates, bid-ask) is custom priced.

FXMacroData Individual

$50/month

22 currencies, 700+ macro series, FX spot rates, calendar, COT, yields, MCP. 1,000,000 requests/month, 14-day trial.

Takeaway: for conversion rates alone, Open Exchange Rates is cheaper. FXMacroData's price buys a different product: macro releases, timing, and FX context rather than a broader list of conversion currencies.

Monthly list price, USD

FXMacroData in mint; Open Exchange Rates plans in cyan. Hover a bar for the exact price.

Takeaway: Open Exchange Rates is the cheaper conversion feed; FXMacroData's $50 buys the macro drivers of FX rather than 200-currency conversion.

Side-By-Side Comparison

* Competitor pricing retrieved from their public pricing page in October 2026. Update frequency, history, and endpoint details retrieved from their public API documentation in October 2026.

Takeaway: the products overlap on one row (exchange rates), and even there Open Exchange Rates covers far more currencies while FXMacroData adds source provenance and macro context.

Conversion Rates Versus Macro Drivers

An exchange rate is an outcome. When EUR/USD moves half a percent in a minute, the cause is usually a scheduled event: a US CPI print, a Non-Farm Payrolls surprise, or a policy statement from the Federal Reserve or the ECB. A conversion API tells you the new price. A macro API tells you why it changed and when the next catalyst lands.

Open Exchange Rates is built around the outcome. Its documentation lists use cases such as shopping carts, overseas campaigns, accounting departments, and apps. Rates are collected from multiple providers and blended algorithmically into a single midpoint per currency. That is what a checkout page or invoice generator wants: one consistent number per currency, refreshed on a predictable schedule.

FXMacroData is built around the drivers. Every release row carries the official value, the prior, the source, and a second-level announcement_datetime. The release calendar shows what is scheduled, and pair dashboards such as USD/JPY join policy rates, inflation, yields and positioning to the price. FX spot rates are part of the product, but they serve the macro analysis rather than the other way round.

Two layers of an FX data stack

1. Driver (FXMacroData)

Scheduled release on the calendar, official value with announcement_datetime, central-bank statement, COT positioning, yields.

2. Market reaction

Traders reprice rate expectations; the pair moves within seconds or minutes of publication.

3. Outcome (Open Exchange Rates)

The blended rate for 200+ currencies updates on the next refresh cycle and flows into prices, invoices, and reports.

Takeaway: Open Exchange Rates sits at the end of the chain where prices are converted; FXMacroData sits at the start where the move is caused. Teams that analyse or trade FX need the start of the chain.

FX Rate Coverage And Update Frequency

On breadth of exchange rates, Open Exchange Rates is clearly ahead. Its pricing page states live and historical rates for over 200 currencies, and an optional parameter adds alternative and digital currency prices. Update frequency scales with plan: hourly on Free and Developer, every 30 minutes on Enterprise, every 5 minutes on Unlimited, and up to every second on VIP. End-of-day history goes back to 1 January 1999. Bid-ask and OHLC data are reserved for the VIP Platinum tier.

FXMacroData's /v1/forex/{base}/{quote} endpoint returns daily FX spot rates built from official central-bank and BIS reference rates for pairs where both currencies are among the 22 it covers, such as GBP/USD or AUD/USD. Crosses that a publisher does not quote directly are derived from USD legs and labelled as derived. Each row carries source metadata (provider, frequency, derivation method), and the endpoint can compute technical indicators such as moving averages and RSI on request. Alongside that daily series, /v1/fx/reference-rates/{base}/{quote} returns timestamped official fixings by source (ECB, Federal Reserve H.10, Norges Bank, Riksbank, Danmarks Nationalbank, Magyar Nemzeti Bank and others), subscribers can pull intraday reference-rate observations as each authority publishes them, and /v1/fx/sources documents which source publishes which pair. These are research-grade official fixings, not a conversion feed refreshed every few minutes, and it does not try to cover 200 currencies.

That difference matters in practice. A store selling in Kenyan shillings or Vietnamese dong needs Open Exchange Rates. A model that asks how AUD/USD behaved in the week after each RBA decision needs daily rates with clear provenance next to the policy-rate history, which is what FXMacroData provides.

Release Timing And Delivery

Open Exchange Rates is a pull API. Its documentation states that it does not support websockets, webhooks, or other push-style connections; you request fresh data when you want it, and the freshest data you can get depends on your plan's update interval. For conversion that is a reasonable design, since a price that is five minutes or an hour old is fine for most carts and invoices.

For macro events, the timing problem is different. A payrolls number is worth most in the seconds after publication. FXMacroData stamps every release with the official announcement time to the second, typically has the value available within seconds of publication, and offers SSE streaming for release events so systems do not have to poll. It targets one second from publication and publishes a measured record at /release-speed, showing by source the share of releases available within one second and listing every release that took longer.

US payrolls day: what each API sees

Before 12:30 UTC

FXMacroData calendar lists the release, prior value, and optional forecast.

12:30:00 UTC

Official publication. FXMacroData records the value with a second-level timestamp and streams the event.

Seconds to minutes later

EUR/USD and USD/JPY reprice in the market.

Next refresh cycle

Open Exchange Rates publishes updated blended rates: 5 minutes to 1 hour later on self-serve plans.

Takeaway: Open Exchange Rates reflects the market after the move; FXMacroData gives you the event that caused it, timestamped, as it happens.

API And AI Access

Both APIs are easy to call. Open Exchange Rates authenticates with an app_id query parameter and returns all rates relative to a base currency in one response. FXMacroData uses an X-API-Key header, publishes an OpenAPI specification in the API reference, and returns one series per request. A payrolls request looks like this:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.fxmacrodata.com/v1/announcements/usd/non_farm_payrolls"

Example response (abridged, values illustrative):

{
  "currency": "USD",
  "indicator": "non_farm_payrolls",
  "data": [
    {
      "date": "2026-08-01",
      "val": 142.0,
      "prior": 118.0,
      "pct_change": 20.34,
      "announcement_datetime": 1788525000
    }
  ]
}

Fields that matter

• announcement_datetime is the official publication time in epoch seconds.
• val and prior support surprise and revision analysis.
• Pair it with /v1/forex/eur/usd to join the release to the daily rate series.

Compared with a conversion response

An Open Exchange Rates response is a timestamp, a base, and a map of currency codes to rates. It is ideal for converting amounts but carries no information about the events behind the rate.

Takeaway: a macro row is built to be joined to price action; a conversion row is built to multiply an amount.

For AI agents, Open Exchange Rates publishes an llms.txt index and Markdown versions of its documentation, which helps coding assistants write integrations. FXMacroData goes a step further with an official MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other clients can query releases, calendars, FX rates, and COT directly during a conversation. That is the basis for the AI trading workflows FXMacroData documents.

Where Open Exchange Rates Is Genuinely Stronger

Open Exchange Rates does its job well, and for many buyers it is the right answer. It is stronger when you need:

• Currency breadth: 200+ currencies, including many emerging and frontier currencies outside FXMacroData's 22.
• Low cost for conversion: a usable free plan and a $12/month Developer plan cover many small apps outright.
• Intraday refresh: 5-minute updates on the $97 Unlimited plan, and up to 1-second updates with bid-ask on VIP.
• Long end-of-day history: daily rates for every day back to 1999, useful for historical invoicing and accounting restatements.
• Plug-in integrations: years of use in shopping carts and libraries such as money.js, so integration code already exists for most stacks.

If your requirement is "show prices in the visitor's currency" or "convert last quarter's invoices at the daily rate", choose Open Exchange Rates. FXMacroData would be the wrong tool for that job.

Where FXMacroData Is Stronger

FXMacroData is stronger when the question is about why currencies move. It covers 700+ official-source indicator series across 22 currencies, including the Fed policy rate, the ECB policy rate, US unemployment, CPI, GDP, PMIs and trade. Around that core it adds a release calendar, central-bank press releases from banks such as the Bank of Japan and Bank of England, CFTC COT positioning, government bond yields, commodities, and FX session timing.

FXMacroData pros

• Official-source macro releases with second-level timestamps.
• Release calendar, COT, yields, press releases, and FX rates in one key.
• SSE streaming, OpenAPI, GraphQL, and an official MCP server.

FXMacroData tradeoffs

• 22 currencies, not 200+.
• FX rates are official central-bank fixings, not live market quotes.
• $50/month entry is more than a pure conversion API.

Open Exchange Rates pros

• 200+ currencies, end-of-day history back to 1999.
• Free plan and $12/month entry.
• Intraday refresh down to 5 minutes self-serve.

Open Exchange Rates tradeoffs

• No macro indicators, calendar, or central-bank data.
• No websockets, webhooks, or push delivery.
• Time-series needs Enterprise or above; bid-ask and OHLC need VIP.

Takeaway: Open Exchange Rates wins on breadth and price for conversion; FXMacroData wins on depth, timing, and context for FX analysis.

Decision Matrix

Takeaway: the split follows the user's job, not the API's format: converting money points to Open Exchange Rates, explaining or trading currency moves points to FXMacroData.

Recommendation

Choose Open Exchange Rates if you are building conversion into a product: prices, invoices, expense reports, or travel tools that need a consistent rate for 200+ currencies. Its free and Developer plans are hard to beat on cost for that job, and the Unlimited plan covers high-volume apps with 5-minute refresh.

Choose FXMacroData if you trade, research, or automate around currency moves. Start with the Individual plan and its 14-day trial, read the API reference, and check the measured release-speed record for the sources you care about. You get FX spot rates for supported pairs alongside the macro releases that drive them, so one key covers both the price series and its explanation.

If your product does both, run both. They overlap only on daily rates for major pairs, and the combined cost is still modest next to terminal-style data products.

Bottom line: Open Exchange Rates is the simpler, cheaper choice for currency conversion across 200+ currencies. FXMacroData is the better choice for FX traders, quants, and AI builders who need the macro drivers of currency moves, timestamped to the second, with FX spot rates included for supported pairs.

Compare plans on the pricing page or connect the MCP server to try the data inside your AI assistant.

Sources Checked

Competitor figures in this comparison come from Open Exchange Rates' public pricing page and API documentation, retrieved in October 2026. Plans and features can change, so check the linked pages before buying.

Open Exchange Rates pricing

Plans, request quotas, update frequency, base currencies, VIP features.

openexchangerates.org/signup

API introduction

Blended sources, history from 1999, no websockets or push.

API introduction

Endpoint plan gates

Time-series, convert, OHLC, and bid-ask availability by plan.

Time-series docs

FXMacroData

Plans, API reference including the forex endpoint, and measured release speed.

Pricing · API reference · Release speed

Takeaway: every competitor figure above links back to a public Open Exchange Rates page you can check yourself.

Related Reading

• FXMacroData vs OANDA Exchange Rates API: another rates-feed comparison, with a treasury and ERP angle.
• FXMacroData vs Alpha Vantage: a general market-data API compared with an FX macro API.
• FXMacroData vs Twelve Data: price data versus macro drivers for trading workflows.
• Best macroeconomic data APIs in 2026: a wider view of the macro data market.