ssid.ai vs macaddress.io

Where macaddress.io is the right answer

It sold the table, and ssid.ai does not. If your product needs an offline vendor database with a commercial licence behind it, in a format your stack already reads (JSON, XML, CSV, or the Cisco vendorMacs.xml layout that Cisco ISE and Meraki consume), that was macaddress.io's core offer. Its lookup also reported whether a prefix belongs to a virtual-machine vendor, which ssid.ai does not model as a field. It has operated since 2018 under CodeLine Oy in Helsinki, a longer record than ssid.ai has.

Everything in that paragraph is past tense because we cannot check any of it today. Read the next section before you build on it.

Reliability record, 2026-08-13 to 2026-09-04

We fetch every service on this site's comparison list once a day. On 2026-08-13 macaddress.io answered with HTTP 523 (Cloudflare could not reach the origin). On 2026-08-19 the code changed to 521 (the origin refuses the connection) and has stayed there. On 2026-08-25 the API host stopped resolving through Cloudflare, pointing straight at an IP that refuses port 443, and status.macaddress.io stopped resolving at all.

What this record is, and is not:

• One observer. One machine in one datacentre, one plain curl per endpoint per day at about 05:00 UTC, routed through Cloudflare's Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Prague edge. We never fetched from a second network.
• No third-party confirmation. On each of these days we looked for a status page, a Downdetector entry, a news item or a social post and found none. That is an absence, not a corroboration.
• Raw headers only. From 2026-08-21 we stopped trusting any tool that summarises a response after one reported a Retry-After header the server never sent. Every row above comes from the header dump itself.
• A record of the past. If macaddress.io loads for you, this table is history. We will add the recovery date as a row and keep the table.

Where ssid.ai is different

The lookup itself is free without a key at any daily volume (60 requests a minute burst; the router and compliance data are what the paid tiers meter). Each response names its source:

$ curl "https://ssid.ai/api/v1/lookup?mac=00:00:0C:12:34:56"
{ "oui": "00000C", "kind": "universal", "randomized": false,
  "vendor": { "organization": "Cisco Systems, Inc", "address": "170 WEST TASMAN DRIVE SAN JOSE CA US 95134-1706" },
  "confidence": 1,
  "source": { "name": "IEEE OUI registry", "url": "https://standards-oui.ieee.org/" } }   # HTTP 200

$ curl "https://macaddress.io/"
error code: 521                                                                            # HTTP 521, 2026-09-04

Beyond the vendor table, ssid.ai holds three things macaddress.io never listed:

• Router default logins across 424 models: gateway IP, admin username, password and reset steps, each transcribed from the manufacturer's own documentation with the source URL attached. A field with no citation does not publish.
• The compliance index: 72% of 424 tracked models no longer ship a universal default password, the pattern the UK PSTI Act and the EU Cyber Resilience Act target, with a free JSON feed.
• An MCP server, so an assistant calls a typed tool instead of scraping a page, plus a correction endpoint agents can write to.

Alternatives that no longer exist

WhoisXML API's MAC Address API is gone from their catalog: mac-address.whoisxmlapi.com redirects to the company homepage, the product page returns 404, and the homepage product list has no MAC entry (checked 2026-08-04 to 08-06, 2026-08-27 to 08-30, and 2026-09-04; the Internet Archive holds working captures of the API docs through 2022). We found no deprecation notice anywhere.

How to decide

Ask whether you need a file or a call. If you need the vendor database on disk under a commercial licence, macaddress.io sold exactly that, and you should check whether they still do before you look elsewhere; the IEEE's own registry at standards-oui.ieee.org is the free fallback. If you need a lookup that answers today, and you want the answer to say whether the address is randomized, what the router it hangs off logs in with, and where each fact came from, that is what ssid.ai is for.