AbuseIPDB competitors and alternatives

The alternatives, briefly

Kaidn compared with AbuseIPDB

A community-reported database of IP addresses associated with 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 answer, and we answer a question it cannot.

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

Absence of evidence#

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

It makes the negative signal 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 residential IP that a proxy network is currently renting out.

For infrastructure defence that asymmetry is fine, because 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 is overwhelmingly conducted 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.

Different unit of analysis#

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

Those diverge quickly. The same address can carry a legitimate customer and an abuser within an hour, because carrier-grade NAT and shared broadband put thousands of unrelated people behind one IP. Scoring the address means scoring 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 these entities connect to something already labelled by another operator. Those are the checks that fire on the cases an IP database is silent about.

Use both#

This is not a page arguing you should drop them. Reported abuse history is a real signal and we would rather you had it.

The sane architecture 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 interprets "no reports" as "safe". If you are wiring it in yourself, the work is not the API call, it is the weighting, the caching, and deciding what to do when the answer is nothing.

Wiring it in as one input, not the answer#

If you are keeping AbuseIPDB (you should), the work is not the API call. It is making sure a null result cannot be read as a clean one. The failure 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 a verdict:

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 asymmetry is the whole point: a report escalates, and a clean record does not de-escalate.

The address is already in the score#

For the IP half specifically, you may not need a second call. Reputation, connection type and ASN 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 targeted traffic. 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 provenance, Spamhaus is the authority and has been for a long time.