DA PA Checker alternative: an eight-round scorecard that ends 4–3

The homepage of DA PA Checker is one white card. Two tabs, DA PA and DR UR. One red button, "Check DA PA". Above the card, one promise: paste up to 1000 URLs.

A guest gets five. The site's own modal sets the terms:

Guest user Limited to 5-DAPA or 2-DRUR at once only

The distance between 1000 and 5 is where the search for an alternative starts. This card scores one candidate: apibacklinks, a backlink and domain-rating JSON API with a free explorer in the browser. It is not a like-for-like swap. DA PA Checker says it works on Moz and Ahrefs data. apibacklinks computes its own number, from its own link index.

The rules are short.

• Eight rounds. One question each. One winner, or a draw.
• Facts about DA PA Checker come from its own pages, read on 8 October 2026. The one outside roundup quoted is named where it appears.
• Where the site is silent, the card says "not published".
• Rounds the tool wins, it wins.

Question: suppose a client, a link seller or a guest-post sheet asks for "DA 40+". Who can answer?

DA PA Checker can. Its results table has columns for DA, PA and SS: Moz Domain Authority, Page Authority and Spam Score. Domain age sits beside them. The source is stated on the homepage:

works on Moz and Ahrefs Premium APIs

apibacklinks cannot. It has one authority metric: Domain Rating, 0–100, logarithmic, computed from referring-domain counts in our own graph. It is comparable in spirit to the DR on DA PA Checker's second tab. It is not that number. It is not a Moz DA either. One reference point: ahrefs.com itself shows DR 67 in our index.

So when the brief names DA, PA or Spam Score, this round is over before it starts. No quantity of cheap calls on our side adds up to a DA.

Round 1: DA PA Checker.

Question: you want an authority number for one domain, now, without signing up. What stands in the way?

On DA PA Checker, a guest may submit 5 URLs on the DA PA tab or 2 on the DR UR tab. Free checks carry a CAPTCHA ("Hate CAPTCHA? Sign up to remove") and ads, and a modal asks visitors to switch off their ad blocker. Signing up for free does not raise the batch. It stays at 5 URLs per submission, with a daily limit of 30.

For a person at a keyboard that is a fair trade. For a script it is a wall. A CAPTCHA is built to be one.

On apibacklinks the domain action is free and takes no key:

GET https://apibacklinks.com/api.php?action=domain&q=dapachecker.org

It answers in JSON: DR, backlinks, referring domains, dofollow counts, first and last seen. The overview action is free as well and adds the top five referring domains, anchors and pages. Neither asks who you are.

The answer for dapachecker.org, for the record, is DR 35.

Round 2: apibacklinks. With the asterisk carried over from Round 1. It is our DR, not their DA.

Question: how many domains go through in one submission?

The page title ends in "(1000 URLs)". The plan cards say less.

So the 1,000 is real. It lives in the "Customize Your Own Plan" builder, not in the two listed plans. The DR UR checker's own title is more modest: "Check 30 URLs at once". A 2026 roundup on vefogix.com ranks the tool fourth of nine bulk checkers and calls 1,000 URLs the highest batch capacity on its list.

On our side bulk_dr takes up to 2,000 domains in one request. compare puts up to 20 side by side. Twice the ceiling.

A ceiling is not the whole round, though. DA PA Checker's batch is a paste box with an "Exclude Same Domain" tick, a min–max filter on DA, PA and SS, and a "Download Excel" button. Ours is a JSON array. Somebody has to write the ten lines that turn it into a sheet.

Round 3: draw. Bigger batch here. Friendlier batch there.

Question: what is the bill for 1,000 domains?

DA PA Checker sells credits by subscription. Its credit table sets the rate: 1 credit per URL on the DA PA Checker, 20 credits per URL on the DR UR Checker. The division below is ours, from the listed monthly prices. The API rows assume the same 1 credit per URL that the table gives for the web DA PA Checker.

Three things show. DA is cheap: under a dollar per thousand on every plan. DR is not: at 20 credits each, a Starter month is 500 DR lookups. And the largest API plan is not the cheapest per URL. What Enterprise adds is throughput: up to 200 URLs per request and 1,000 URLs a minute, against Basic's 5 and 60.

apibacklinks has no subscription and no monthly minimum. One credit is $0.0001. The domain lookup costs zero. Paid lookups cost 1 credit, so $0.10 per 1,000 calls. The first sign-in with Google adds $100 of credit, which is 1,000,000 credits, with no card.

For a DR-type number the gap is $12–14 against ten cents or nothing. For DA there is no gap to measure. We do not sell DA at any price.

Round 4: apibacklinks, on DR. DA PA Checker's price for DA was never the problem.

Question: what can a program ask for?

There is a "Get API" pill in the corner of DA PA Checker's input card. It leads to the API price list, and the docs describe one endpoint: a POST to /api/user/dapa-checker with a Bearer key and a JSON list of URLs. It returns site_da, site_pa, site_mr and spam_score per domain. The design is tidy. A bad URL is skipped, not fatal, and skipped URLs are not counted against the plan.

Four API plans run from $9 to $149 a month. Basic allows up to 5 URLs per request; Enterprise allows 200. The docs describe no DR, UR, backlink, referring-domain or anchor endpoint. A free API tier is not published.

apibacklinks has 19 actions on one GET endpoint. Past the DR lookups:

• refdomains — the top referring domains of a target, with donor DR and first/last seen.
• backlinks — source URL, anchor, rel and last seen, filterable by follow, TLD, anchor text or minimum donor DR.
• anchors and toppages — the top 50 of each.
• intersect — referring domains shared by 2–10 targets.

A list call returns up to 1,000 rows. The rest is in the API docs.

If the program needs Moz numbers, DA PA Checker's single endpoint is the right one and ours is useless. If it needs to know who links to whom, the reverse holds.

Round 5: apibacklinks, on breadth.

Question: the tool says 35. Why 35?

DA PA Checker's table gives a row of scores: DA, PA, SS, DR, UR. The site's tool list has no report of the links that produced them. For a quick sort of a prospect list, that is enough. For pricing a placement it is thin, because two sites with one score can be made of very different links.

Take dapachecker.org itself as the specimen. Our DR is 35, from 347 referring domains and 1,184 backlinks. One refdomains call shows the composition:

• vidabyvayamedia.in — 245 links from 113 pages, all dofollow, DR 16. One small site holds 20.7% of the profile.
• predis.ai — 51 links, DR 46, anchored "DA Checker".
• ranktracker.com — 24 links, DR 47, anchored in Slovenian: "orodja za preverjanje DA PA".
• apple.com — DR 87, the strongest donor on paper. Three nofollow links from one page, anchor "developer's privacy policy". It is the App Store listing.

Of the top 100 donors, 58 sit below DR 30 and two sit at DR 50 or higher. None is a .gov or .edu. That is a 35 seen from the inside. The same report opens in the browser, free: explorer for dapachecker.org.

Round 6: apibacklinks.

Round 7 question: whose data is closer to today?

DA PA Checker's figures come from Moz and Ahrefs, by its own statement. Ours come from Common Crawl: 13 crawls, 181,132,097 domains, about 798.6 billion page-level backlinks, refreshed roughly monthly. That is a broad sample of the public web. It is smaller and less fresh than a proprietary crawler such as Ahrefs'. A link published this week can take weeks to reach us.

The specimen shows the limit. dapachecker.org was registered on 18 May 2021. Our index first saw a link to it on 12 July 2024. The three years in between are missing from our crawl window. They say nothing about the site.

How often DA PA Checker refreshes or caches what it shows is not published. On the source alone, it leads.

Round 7: DA PA Checker.

Round 8 question: who serves a person who will never write a line of code?

Not close. DA PA Checker offers the paste box, the results table, a four-site compare view, filters, an Excel export, Android and iOS apps and an Indonesian edition. It adds things we do not have at all: domain age, Moz Spam Score and, on the DR UR page, what it calls "estimated site traffic". apibacklinks has a free explorer in the browser and an API for the rest. No spam score. No traffic estimates. No keyword research or rank tracking.

Round 8: DA PA Checker.

Who should stay

• Anyone whose deliverable is a sheet with a DA column.
• Link buyers and sellers who quote placements by Moz DA and Spam Score.
• People checking a few hundred URLs a month by hand. A free registered account allows 30 a day, and Starter covers 10,000 DA/PA checks for $7.
• Teams that want DA, PA, DR and UR in one table, filtered and exported to Excel, by lunchtime.

Four to three, one drawn. The total matters less than the split. DA PA Checker takes every round about Moz metrics, third-party sources and a human at a keyboard. apibacklinks takes every round about scripts, the cost of a DR lookup and the links under the score.

So the practical answer is rarely either-or.

1. Keep DA PA Checker for the DA column.
2. Point the script that used to stall at the CAPTCHA to the free domain action.
3. Send long lists through bulk_dr, up to 2,000 domains a request, where a DR UR check would cost 20 credits each.
4. Pull refdomains before paying for a placement on a site whose number looks better than its neighbours'.

Other checkers scored the same way are in the domain rating tools hub, the Checkmoz page among them.