esalah.com

What It Is

eSalah is a platform for Muslim users worldwide, offering prayer times, Qibla direction, the Hijri calendar, and a directory of halal and Islamic locations. It covers 170 countries, includes around 158,928 mosques, and extends to a total of 175,175 locations such as halal restaurants, Islamic schools, zakat organizations, and Islamic bookstores. Based strictly on the crawled text, it is more of a religious lifestyle and geographic information tool than an AI application centered on large language models.

Core Capabilities

The platform can calculate the five daily prayer times based on a city or latitude and longitude, using the PrayTimes.org algorithm and supporting different calculation methods. It also provides Qibla direction, Hijri and Gregorian calendar conversion, Islamic holidays, Hajj tracking, moon sighting, solar and lunar eclipse forecasts, multi-city dashboards, and travel planning. In travel scenarios, users can paste a hotel or airport address to get the Qibla direction, the next prayer time, and nearby mosques or halal dining options for that precise location.

API and Pricing

eSalah offers a set of public read-only APIs, including statistics, place search, prayer times, Qibla, Hijri conversion, and nearest-city lookup. It also provides embeddable prayer time widgets and RSS feeds. The public API is free, but unauthenticated requests are limited to 60 per IP per minute; higher limits require contacting the official team. The text does not show any paid plans or commercial pricing.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are a large directory, broad tool coverage, clear developer interfaces, and transparent explanations of the limitations of its prayer time and directory data. The drawbacks are equally clear: prayer times are “book times” and cannot replace local moon sighting or the actual schedule of a mosque; city coordinates are estimated using population centers, so edge areas may have deviations; and the directory is community-contributed, with no guarantee of accuracy. The text also does not indicate any AI model, intelligent Q&A, or automated recommendation capabilities.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is suitable for individual Muslims, travelers, mosque administrators, community organizations, and lightweight developer projects that need to embed prayer time or Qibla features. The crawled text does not provide information on access from mainland China, so the status is unknown; if it relies on location services, maps, or external resources, the actual experience would still need to be tested.