Data.gov
Worth it
Confidence: Medium
Use it whenever you need free U.S. federal data for research, journalism, or app prototyping.
New check
Comparison
Data.gov and World Bank Open Data both land on Worth it.
Use it whenever you need free U.S. federal data for research, journalism, or app prototyping.
Use it if you need free, authoritative macro and development indicators for research, policy, or dashboards.
| Compare | ||
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Worth it | Worth it |
| Best for | Researchers needing U.S. federal data | Academic researchers |
| Who it's not for | Anyone needing guaranteed uptime or support SLAs | Traders needing real-time market data |
| Privacy | No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.10 | No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed. |
| Support quality | No support evidence in sources. | No support evidence in sources. |
| Public sentiment | Users value the free breadth of federal data but consistently gripe about clunky search and fragile dataset links.⁴ | Researchers and students treat it as the standard free source for development data, though no numeric ratings or full user quotes surfaced.16 |
| Biggest gotcha | Datasets periodically removed under policy changes; archivists maintain backup lists. | No security page or support SLA . it's a public portal, not a vendor product. |