- Home
- Alternatives
- Iframely
embisto vs Iframely
Iframely is a long-running link preview and embed service: a hosted cloud API with paid plans, and an open-source edition in Node.js, MIT-licensed and maintained. embisto speaks Iframely's API from a single Go binary, so a client of Iframely can switch by changing the base URL.
| Feature | embisto | Iframely |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes, the open-source edition; the cloud API is hosted |
| License | MIT, source on GitHub | MIT for the open-source edition; the cloud is a commercial service |
| Language and runtime | Go; one static binary, a distroless image | Node.js server |
| Library mode | Yes, a Go library with the same behaviour as the server | Node.js |
| Iframely-compatible API | /iframely and /oembed |
Native |
| Site plugins | Every provider on the oembed.com list, X posts; more planned | A large set of domain plugins, maintained for years; the cloud has more |
| Image sizes | Measured from the first bytes when the page does not state them | Often given for pictures |
| Price | Free software; the hosted API is free, 60 requests a minute per IP address, best effort | Open source is free; the cloud has paid plans, see iframely.com |
Where Iframely is stronger
- Site plugins. Iframely has a decade of domain plugins for sites whose markup is unusual. embisto covers the oembed.com provider list and X today; dedicated plugins for the most-shared sites are planned.
- Hosted features. Iframely's cloud adds features the open-source edition does not have, such as rendering embeds through its own iframes and per-URL customization.
- Track record. It has been used in production by many publishers for years.
Where embisto fits
- One binary, no runtime. No Node.js, no database, and Redis only to share a cache between instances: the cache lives in memory.
- A Go library. Import the same extractor into a Go service and skip the network hop.
- Cards for mobile apps. Every picture comes with its width and height, so a client reserves the box before it loads.
- Pictures from your own server. Built-in thumbnails are signed, resized copies of every picture, served by embisto itself, so clients never hotlink the original site.
- Safe by default. Address checks on every connection and redirect, size and time limits: see Security.
How close the formats are
/iframely and /oembed render the same card as /v1/preview in Iframely's shapes: meta and links grouped by rel, as Iframely's cloud API returns them. They were compared with the open-source Iframely at commit dbce782 on eight URLs (GitHub, YouTube, Vimeo, X, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Spotify, SoundCloud). /oembed matched on four of them; the differences elsewhere are extra or missing fields such as content_length, theme-color, keywords and scrolling, and a different author or title on some pages. The answers are close, not identical: test the URLs your app shows before you switch.
Switching
Point the client's base URL at an embisto server. embisto has no keys and ignores api_key and key, so the client can keep sending them. Failures come in Iframely's shape on these paths.