--- title: "Lightcast alternative: JobsPipe vs Lightcast" description: "Lightcast sells labour-market analytics, quoted per engagement. Where a job postings API replaces it, where it does not, and who should stay." canonical: https://jobspipe.dev/alternatives/lightcast date_published: 2026-09-30 date_modified: 2026-09-30 author: Dvir Atias --- > **Facts:** Free: 1,000 free credits, one time. Paid: from $49/month for 25,000 jobs. 12 months of history on every plan. Jobs from 30+ sources. Try it without a key: `curl -d '{"limit":3}' https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search` # Lightcast alternative: JobsPipe vs Lightcast A job postings API is a Lightcast alternative for one layer only: the postings. If you need rows of live job postings to build on, JobsPipe gives you those with a public price. If you need Lightcast's taxonomy, its modelled labour-market analytics or its consulting, nothing on this page replaces them. > Lightcast sells labour-market analytics and a skills taxonomy, quoted per engagement. JobsPipe is a self-serve job postings API. One replaces the other only for the postings layer. **Canonical URL:** https://jobspipe.dev/alternatives/lightcast **Competitor domain:** https://lightcast.io ## What Lightcast is Lightcast, formerly Emsi Burning Glass, sells labour-market analytics to employers, colleges and the public sector. Its data page counts 3 billion job postings, 6.3 million companies, 165 countries, drawn from job postings, government statistics and professional profiles. Those signals are cleaned and mapped to Lightcast's own occupation and skills taxonomies, and that mapping is the product as much as the data is. It is sold as software for analysts, as consulting, and as data delivery. Data is delivered through APIs, files loaded into Amazon S3, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, data shares in Snowflake, Databricks or Google BigQuery, SFTP, or Lightcast's own software. For developers there is an API: the Job Postings API takes an OAuth 2.0 bearer token and returns postings that can be filtered, sorted and ranked by company, occupation, skills and geography. Clients are allowed 5 requests per second by default, with higher limits on request. Organizational intelligence analyses a company's workforce through hiring behaviour, workforce composition, technology adoption and talent movement. ## Where a jobs API is a substitute for Lightcast A jobs API is a substitute when the thing you take from Lightcast is the postings themselves: which employers are hiring, for which roles, where, and at what stated pay. That covers a product that shows or matches jobs, a sourcing or sales tool that reacts to new openings, an agent that answers questions about who is hiring, and an analyst who wants current demand for one occupation in one region and is happy to aggregate the rows. In those cases the work is a search with filters. POST /v1/jobs/search takes a title, a country, a city, a skill, a seniority, a salary floor or a company, and returns individual postings with first-seen and last-seen dates and an open or closed status. You count, group and chart them yourself, and you can start on the free tier before anyone signs a contract. ## Where a jobs API is not a substitute JobsPipe does not replace Lightcast's taxonomy. Lightcast maintains a library of skills, occupations and titles with a team of taxonomists, keeps a changelog, and maps it to government classifications. JobsPipe postings carry an ISCO-08 occupation code and ESCO skills, which is enough to filter and group postings and is not a maintained skills library you can license into an HR system. JobsPipe does not replace Lightcast's analytics either. Lightcast models labour supply, wages and regional economies from government statistics and professional profiles as well as postings, and delivers them in software that a non-developer can use. JobsPipe returns postings and nothing else: no supply-side data, no modelled estimates, no regional economic series and no analyst on a call. History is the third gap. JobsPipe keeps 12 months of history on every plan. Longitudinal research that needs a long, consistent series belongs with a vendor whose product is that series. ## Lightcast pricing No published prices; subscriptions, data delivery and consulting are scoped with sales. The Lightcast Skills taxonomy is free for nonprofit and public-good use, subject to approval, while commercial use and job postings data are quoted. Pricing checked 2026-09-29: https://lightcast.io/solutions/pricing ## Lightcast target buyer Workforce analysts, economic developers, colleges aligning programmes to employer demand, talent-intelligence teams and public-sector labour-market units. The buyer holds a budget line and wants curated answers with a methodology behind them, not raw rows. ## Where Lightcast wins - Taxonomy. Skills, occupations and titles are standardised and maintained, so postings, profiles and statistics can be compared in one language. - More than postings. Government statistics, salary observations and professional profiles sit next to the postings, so demand, supply and pay can be read together. - Delivery into the systems analysts already use: data is delivered through APIs, files loaded into Amazon S3, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, data shares in Snowflake, Databricks or Google BigQuery, SFTP, or Lightcast's own software. - People. Economists, consultants and account managers scope the question with you and stand behind the methodology. ## Where JobsPipe wins - A public price and a free start: 1,000 free credits, one time, then paid plans from $49/month. Lightcast quotes each engagement. - Individual postings, not aggregates. Each record carries the job title, company, location, stated salary, URL, first-seen and last-seen dates and an open or closed status. - Self-serve from the first request: a sandbox that needs no key, an API key without a sales call, webhooks and an MCP server. - A source filter. Scope a search to any of the 30+ sources with source_or, or exclude one with source_not. ## Side-by-side comparison | | Lightcast | JobsPipe | |---|---|---| | Pricing entry | Quoted per engagement | $49/month for 25,000 jobs | | Free tier or trial | Skills taxonomy free for public-good use | 1,000 jobs to start | | What the data is | Labour-market analytics built on postings, statistics and profiles | Job postings from 30+ sources, deduplicated across sources | | Coverage claim | 3 billion job postings, 6.3 million companies, 165 countries | 30+ sources, each named on the sources page | | Company data | Company workforce analytics | Company fields on each posting, no employee records | | API shape | REST with OAuth 2.0 tokens: filter, sort and rank postings | REST: POST /v1/jobs/search, webhooks and an MCP server | | Bulk and datasets | API, cloud storage, data shares, SFTP or software | No dataset files; pull the jobs you need through the API | | Checked | September 2026 | September 2026 | Product page as captured on September 30, 2026. See the Lightcast product page (https://lightcast.io/solutions/pricing). | Axis | Lightcast | JobsPipe | |---|---|---| | Product | Labour-market analytics, software and consulting | A job postings API | | What you buy | A subscription or an engagement scoped with sales | Jobs returned, one credit each | | Taxonomy | Lightcast occupation and skills taxonomies | ISCO-08 occupation codes and ESCO skills on postings | | Data beyond postings | Government statistics, salary observations, professional profiles | None: postings only | | Who uses it | Analysts, planners and consultants | Developers, product teams and their agents | | Getting started | A conversation with sales | Sign up and call the API | ## Who should stay with Lightcast Stay with Lightcast if your deliverable is an analysis rather than a product: a regional workforce report, a programme review for a college, a skills-gap study, a location decision. Those need modelled supply and wage data, a taxonomy that holds still across years, and a methodology you can cite. A feed of postings gives you one input to that work and none of the rest. Stay with Lightcast if your HR or learning system already speaks its skills taxonomy. Replacing the taxonomy means re-mapping every skill in every system that uses it, and a postings API does not offer a replacement. Stay with Lightcast if the people who use the data are not developers. Its software answers questions on a screen. JobsPipe answers them as JSON, and someone has to write the code that turns JSON into a chart. ## When to pick which **Pick Lightcast:** You need labour-market analytics, a maintained skills taxonomy, supply and wage data next to demand, long historical series, or analysts who will scope the work with you. **Pick JobsPipe:** You need current job postings as rows you can query, filter and build on, with a published price, a free tier to test on and no contract. Roundup: [Lightcast alternatives for job data: the full roundup](https://jobspipe.dev/blog/lightcast-alternatives) ## FAQ ### Is JobsPipe a Lightcast alternative? For the postings layer, yes. JobsPipe returns individual job postings through a self-serve API, which covers products, agents and analyses that are built on postings. It is not an alternative to Lightcast's taxonomy, its modelled labour-market analytics, its software for analysts or its consulting. ### How much does Lightcast cost? No published prices; subscriptions, data delivery and consulting are scoped with sales. The Lightcast pricing page lists software, consulting and data delivery as the three things that shape a quote. Our notes on what a quote usually covers are at /blog/lightcast-pricing. ### Does Lightcast have a free tier? Not for job postings. The Lightcast Skills taxonomy is free for nonprofit and public-good use, subject to approval, while commercial use and job postings data are quoted. JobsPipe's free tier is 1,000 free credits, one time. ### Does Lightcast have a job postings API? Yes. The Job Postings API takes an OAuth 2.0 bearer token and returns postings that can be filtered, sorted and ranked by company, occupation, skills and geography. Clients are allowed 5 requests per second by default, with higher limits on request. Access is part of a commercial agreement; the guide at /blog/lightcast-api covers the API family in detail. ### Can I use Lightcast skills with JobsPipe postings? That is a licensing question for Lightcast: its documentation says commercial use of the skills taxonomy needs a commercial licence. JobsPipe postings carry ESCO skills and an ISCO-08 occupation code. If your systems already use Lightcast skills, mapping JobsPipe postings onto them is work you would do under your own Lightcast licence. ### What does JobsPipe not replace in Lightcast? The taxonomy, the analytics and the people. JobsPipe has no maintained skills library, no supply-side or wage modelling, no regional economic data, no software for non-developers and no consulting. It returns job postings. ## Related - **Product:** https://jobspipe.dev/jobs-api - **All alternatives:** https://jobspipe.dev/alternatives - **Intent data providers (comparison hub):** https://jobspipe.dev/intent-data-providers - **Sign up (free tier):** https://jobspipe.dev/signup --- Generated from structured data. View the rendered page at https://jobspipe.dev/alternatives/lightcast. --- Try it with no key: `curl -d '{"limit":3}' https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search`. AI agents: the full machine-readable index of this site is https://jobspipe.dev/llms.txt?src=md-twin - API quickstart, MCP server, pricing. Free key (1,000 jobs to start): https://jobspipe.dev/signup