AbuseIPDB competitors and alternatives

The alternatives, briefly

Kaidn compared with AbuseIPDB

A community-reported database of IP addresses linked to abuse, queryable by API and free at modest volume.

AbuseIPDB is one of the more genuinely useful free things on the internet, and the honest summary of this page is that it is not our competitor. It answers a question we do not, and we answer one it cannot.

We wrote this page because it turns up in the same searches, and because a reporting database has a specific weakness worth understanding before you lean on it for signups.

No reports is not the same as clean#

The database is built from reports. That makes a hit strong. If forty operators have reported an address for credential stuffing, that address has a history and you should treat it accordingly.

It also makes a miss almost meaningless. An address with no reports is not a clean address. It is an address nobody has reported yet, which is the normal state of almost every address on the internet, including every home IP a proxy network is currently renting out.

For defending servers that lopsidedness is fine. You are looking for known-bad and you have other layers.

For a signup form it is a problem, because the fraud you care about runs overwhelmingly from addresses with no abuse history at all. The account farm is not port-scanning anybody. It is filling in your registration form politely, forty times.

We measure different things#

Their unit is an address. Ours is an event: this person, doing this thing, right now.

Those come apart quickly. The same address can carry a legitimate customer and an abuser within an hour, because mobile carriers and shared broadband put thousands of unrelated people behind one IP. Score the address and you score all of them the same way.

What separates them is everything that is not the address. Whether the email domain was registered last week. Whether the phone is a VoIP line already seen on other accounts. Whether this device has signed up four times today. Whether any of it connects to something another operator already labelled.

Those are the checks that fire on exactly the cases an IP database is silent about.

Use both#

This page is not arguing you should drop them. A record of reported abuse is a real signal and we would rather you had it.

The sane setup is to treat AbuseIPDB as one input among several, which is exactly how we treat IP reputation internally, and to make sure nothing in your stack reads "no reports" as "safe".

Wiring it in as one input, not the answer#

If you are keeping AbuseIPDB, and you should, the work is not the API call. It is making sure an empty result cannot be read as a clean one. The bug looks like this, and it is common:

const { data } = await abuseipdb.check(ip);

if (data.abuseConfidenceScore > 50) return block();
return allow();          // every unreported address on earth lands here

The same lookup used as evidence rather than as the answer:

const [abuse, decision] = await Promise.all([
  abuseipdb.check(ip),
  kaidn.score({ event: "signup", user_id: user.id, ip, email: user.email, device_id }),
]);

// A hit is strong evidence. A miss is no evidence at all, so it changes nothing.
if (abuse.data.abuseConfidenceScore > 50) return deny("reported_ip");

if (decision.verdict === "block") return deny(decision.reason_text);
if (decision.verdict === "review") return hold(decision.event_id);
return allow();

The lopsidedness is the whole point. A report raises risk. A clean record does not lower it.

The address is already in the score#

For the IP half specifically you may not need a second call. Reputation, connection type and network come back on the scored event:

{
  "check": "ipRisk",
  "weight": 45,
  "reason": "datacenter_ip",
  "message": "IP is a datacenter/hosting address, not a residential user",
  "evidence": { "asn": "amazon", "is_datacenter": true, "is_proxy": false, "is_tor": false }
}

There is also a standalone POST /v1/check/ip if you want the address on its own, without spending a scoring event on it.

Where we would send you elsewhere#

If you are protecting servers rather than accounts, stay with them and add GreyNoise to separate mass scanning from traffic aimed at you. If you need to know what an address is rather than what it has done, proxycheck.io costs a few euros a month. If your problem is email deliverability and spam history, Spamhaus is the authority and has been for a long time.