holidata.net

What It Is

Holidata.net is an international public holiday data site created by Gothenburg Bit Factory. Its positioning is very lightweight: ad-free, with data provided under a Creative Commons License. It is not a complex SaaS API, but rather a public data endpoint that can be read directly via URL. It is suitable for developers who need holiday information in calendars, scheduling, task management, time tracking, and similar scenarios.

Core Capabilities

Access is straightforward: https://holidata.net/<LOCALE>/<YEAR>.<FORMAT>. Users only need to specify the locale, a four-digit year, and the output format to retrieve data. The year cannot be earlier than 2011. Supported formats include CSV, JSON, YAML, and XML, covering most backend, scripting, and data-processing use cases. The page also mentions that Holidata is the Python package used to generate the site’s data, but it does not clarify whether an SDK or installable API client is available.

Openness and Ecosystem

The data is licensed under CC BY 3.0, which is relatively friendly for reuse. The page mentions that Taskwarrior and Timewarrior, two open-source task and time management applications, rely on holidata.net, suggesting that it already has some practical adoption within the developer tooling ecosystem. However, the page does not clearly state whether the holidata.net website or the Holidata Python package itself is open source, nor does it provide self-hosting deployment instructions.

Pricing and Support

The page does not include any pricing information and emphasizes that the service is ad-free, so it can be regarded as a free public data service. Support options are fairly basic: data errors can be reported, new locales can be requested, and update announcements are followed via Twitter. There is no visible SLA, commercial support, versioning policy, error code documentation, or stated update frequency, so production-grade use requires an independent assessment of availability risks.

Pros, Cons, and Who It Is For

Its advantages are simplicity, no authentication barrier, multiple formats, and a clear license. Almost any programming language can fetch and parse the data over HTTP. Its limitations are relatively narrow query capabilities, mainly retrieving a full dataset by locale and year; documentation is also sparse, and supported countries and locales need to be checked separately. It is well suited to personal projects, open-source tools, and small to mid-sized applications that need quick holiday data integration. If you need high SLA guarantees, complex filtering, commercial contracts, or verified global coverage, you may want to compare alternatives such as Nager.Date and Calendarific.

Access from China

The page does not provide information about access from mainland China, payment, or mirrors, so actual connectivity cannot be judged from the page alone. Since no payment or account is required, integration costs should be low if the network connection is available. If access is unstable, consider caching annual data or using an alternative data source that can be self-hosted or mirrored.