Alternatives
oddb.org vs Drug Database — open data, or a maintained API.
oddb.org is the long-running open Swiss drug database — community-maintained and free. Drug Database aggregates oddb among 30+ public sources behind a maintained, SLA-backed API. Here is the honest side-by-side.
At a glance
Side-by-side, on the dimensions buyers actually compare.
oddb is genuinely free and open, and we use it as one of our sources. We compete on maintenance cadence, freshness guarantees, multi-jurisdiction breadth, support and developer experience — not on being cheaper than free.
Drug Database aggregates public sources including oddb.org. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by the oddb.org project. oddb is open data you can self-host; the trade-off is maintenance and support effort.
When to pick each
Honest scenarios — no winner-takes-all.
Pick oddb.org when…
- You want free, open Swiss drug data and are happy to self-host and maintain it.
- Your needs are Swiss-only and you can tolerate variable update cadence.
- You prefer owning the pipeline over paying for an SLA.
Pick Drug Database when…
- You need a freshness guarantee — schema-validated ingest and stale-data freeze — not a best-effort dump.
- You want an SLA, support and a DPA for production.
- You need EU/US coverage, managed interaction checks, FHIR and a change feed alongside the Swiss data.
Use them together
- Prototype against open oddb data; move to the managed API when uptime and freshness matter.
- We already ingest oddb among our sources, so the Swiss identifiers line up.
- Subscribe to the change feed to keep your own copy current without re-crawling.
FAQ
Questions buyers ask before they switch.
Do you use oddb data?
Yes. oddb.org is one of the 30+ public sources we aggregate (it backs Pharmacode, pack and price data for Swiss products). We are not affiliated with the project; we credit it as a source.
Why pay when oddb is free?
You are paying for maintenance and guarantees, not the raw data. The watchtower schema-validates every ingest, alerts on upstream schema drift within 24 hours, and freezes stale sources rather than serving them as current. You also get an SLA, support, EU/US coverage, managed interaction checks, FHIR output and a diff change feed.
Can I still self-host?
oddb is built to self-host. Drug Database offers self-hosting on the Enterprise tier; the lower tiers are the managed, SLA-backed API.
How fresh is your Swiss data versus oddb?
Every response carries last_synced_at and schema_state. Our ingestion runs on a managed schedule with drift detection, so freshness is reported as a field rather than left to a community cron.
Try the data before you commit to a contract.
The free tier gives you 100 requests a day with no card. Point it at your real use case and see whether the coverage and freshness hold up.