Overview
The Open Trivia Database (OpenTDB) is a free, community-maintained and public trivia question API. It offers thousands of questions across diverse categories (general knowledge, science, history, movies, etc.) and difficulty levels, making it perfect for quiz apps, educational tools, and games.
Docs: https://opentdb.com/api_config.php
Features
- Fetch random trivia questions
- Filter questions by category, difficulty, and type (multiple-choice or true/false)
- JSON responses for easy integration into apps
- Token-based session support to prevent duplicate questions
- Community-driven and constantly growing dataset
Usage
Example: Fetch 10 random questions
GET https://opentdb.com/api.php?amount=10Example: Filtered by category and difficulty
GET https://opentdb.com/api.php?amount=5&category=18&difficulty=mediumAdvantages
- Completely free and open-source
- Large, varied question pool
- No API key required
- Session tokens help avoid repetition in quizzes
Limitations
- Question set depends on community contributions and coverage may vary
- Some questions/answers may become outdated
- Limited to trivia/quiz use cases
Purpose
OpenTDB is commonly used to power trivia games, quiz apps, and educational tools. In projects like QuizzMe!, it acts as the main data provider, simplifying quiz creation without requiring developers to manually curate large datasets.