Abstract offers a family of developer APIs (email validation among them, alongside others such as IP geolocation and phone validation) under one account and one style of integration. If you want many small utility APIs from one vendor, that’s convenient.
isBusinessEmail does one thing: tell B2B products whether a signup is a work email, and whether the company runs Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.
What isBusinessEmail does differently
| isBusinessEmail | |
|---|---|
| Focus | Work vs personal (custom domain vs shared provider), disposable, relay, blocked, education, government |
| Decision | recommendation: allow / review / block under b2b, strict or lenient policies |
| Explainability | Every verdict comes with reason codes (MX fingerprints, SPF/DMARC, SaaS verification tokens…) |
| Workspace detection | Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, with Microsoft tenant ID, region and federation |
| Mailbox checks | None by design: no SMTP probing, no account lookups |
| Price | Free, fair-use limits |
Abstract’s current feature set, response fields and pricing are on their website; we don’t track them here.
Choose Abstract when…
- You want one vendor for several unrelated utility APIs.
- Their email validation output already covers your needs.
Choose isBusinessEmail when…
- “Is this a company?” is the question, not “is this mailbox valid?”
- You need Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 detection to route onboarding, sales or integrations.
- You want a policy-driven allow/review/block decision and the reasons behind it.
- You want a free API with publishable keys for browser-side hints.
Migrating a check
Most email-validation integrations look the same: send an address, read a few booleans. With isBusinessEmail the field to branch on is recommendation:
const r = await fetch('https://api.isbusinessemail.com/v1/check', {
method: 'POST',
headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.IBE_API_KEY}`, 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
body: JSON.stringify({ email }),
}).then((res) => res.json());
if (r.recommendation === 'block') { /* ask for a work email */ }Field mapping help: Response fields. Try without a key using test addresses.