Nitter alternatives in 2026: what still works for scripts and agents
By Steven Van ·
Unif's curl test found Nitter instances down or blocked and lists the free options still working for scripts and agents, with their limits.
Public Nitter instances no longer work, according to a curl test published by the Unif team. On October 7, 2026, nitter.net timed out, nitter.privacydev.net refused the connection, and xcancel.com returned HTTP 451. The viewer sites sotwe and twstalker returned a Cloudflare challenge (HTTP 403) to non-browser requests. Unif API offers free X endpoints as one alternative.
How the test worked
The team made two requests per target with curl, a default User-Agent and no cookies: NASA's profile and one public post. They recorded the HTTP status, the content type, and whether a program could read the post's text and like count without running JavaScript. x.com itself returned a 147 KB HTML shell that loads its data through JavaScript.
What still works for scripts
- FxTwitter and vxTwitter: JSON for a single post, and for a single user on FxTwitter. Neither has search or replies, and neither states a rate limit.
- X's syndication endpoint: returns a single post as JSON. It is undocumented, and the rules for its token parameter have changed before.
- X's oEmbed endpoint: returns embed HTML inside JSON, with no metrics.
- Unif's /tools/x/* endpoints: profiles, posts, media, replies, search, trends, communities and followers, as JSON or Markdown.
Unif's free X endpoints
The eight GET endpoints sit under unifapi.com/tools/x/ and need no login, account or key. Responses carry X-RateLimit headers. Errors use an { error: { type, message } } shape, and lists return { items, hasMore, nextCursor }. Adding format=md returns Markdown, and adding format=json to any viewer URL returns the data the page shows.
The free limit is 20 lookups per 10 minutes per visitor, and a search counts as two. Protected accounts are not supported, and nothing free guarantees throughput. For volume, the post points to the metered X / Twitter API with a workspace key, pay as you go, which uses the same field names.
