Orbyt vs Glassdoor.
Glassdoor has the volume. Orbyt has the answer.
Consumer salary database and employer review platform
Start free.At a glance.
Infrastructure coverage.
What Glassdoor is.
Glassdoor is a consumer salary database and employer review platform founded in 2007 by Robert Hohman, Rich Barton, and Tim Besse. Acquired by Recruit Holdings (Indeed's parent company) in 2018 for $1.2 billion, it now operates as a consumer destination with 60+ million monthly visitors. The product accumulates anonymous user-submitted salary data alongside employer reviews and interview experiences, aggregated into ranges displayed on company and role pages. As of Q2 2026, Glassdoor's public API is deprecated and no longer accepting new integrations. Total comp is not structured: equity, bonus, and signing are scattered across anecdotal comments, if present at all. Methodology is not publicly disclosed. For consumers looking up a base-salary range at a mainstream employer, Glassdoor is a decent free destination. For anyone building on top of the data, the product is closed.
Pricing, head to head.
Glassdoor's consumer site is free to browse. The business model is employer branding and recruiting products (Glassdoor for Employers) sold to HR teams at enterprise scale, with pricing negotiated per customer. There is no developer tier, no public API, and no documented path to programmatic access since the public API was deprecated. Orbyt Intelligence publishes its pricing in full: Free (60 req/min, 1,000 requests a month, Bearer authentication, AI Role Taxonomy engine), Pro at $99 per month (300 req/min, MCP server, /lineage provenance), and Ultra at $199 per month (1,500 req/min, company leveling catalog, annual reports). The two products solve different problems: Glassdoor is a consumer destination funded by employer advertising; Orbyt is a developer API funded by usage-tiered subscriptions above a free tier. For a candidate reading one offer, Glassdoor is free. For anyone integrating salary data into a product, an AI agent, or a research workflow, Glassdoor is not an option and Orbyt is.
Orbyt wins.
Volume, or signal.
Public API, free to start. The feature Glassdoor removed (or never built for developers), we built.
Structured fields, not a single range: base, equity, bonus and signing, plus the published BLS wage for the occupation. Glassdoor publishes consumer salary ranges; Orbyt publishes structure and provenance.
MCP server with six locked tools. Claude Code, ChatGPT, any AI agent can query Orbyt directly. Glassdoor has nothing for AI integration.
A lineage API, not a black box. Every estimate carries a data_point_id; UK and Canada ids resolve through /lineage to BLS OES and H-1B LCA (DOL). US figures are served from a modeled baseline today and we publish that rather than hide it. Glassdoor's submission-driven data has no provenance trail and no methodology page at all.
Structured total comp: base, equity, bonus, signing all broken out
Transparent methodology citing BLS OES and H-1B LCA (DOL)
Orbyt Intelligence is structured where Glassdoor is scattered. Base, equity, bonus, signing as separate fields on every query. Calibrated against BLS OES and H-1B LCA (DOL), with a published methodology that says what is still modeled. Public API free to start. MCP manifest. CC BY 4.0 license. Everything you would build if you were designing a salary dataset for 2026 instead of 2008.
Feature by feature.
On consumer brand recognition and accumulated submission volume, Glassdoor leads by a wide margin: hundreds of millions of data points since 2008. On everything a data product needs in 2026, Orbyt Intelligence leads. Glassdoor has no public API; Orbyt ships one on the free tier. Glassdoor has no MCP manifest; Orbyt publishes one at /mcp-intelligence.json with six locked agent tools. Glassdoor surfaces base salary only, mostly; Orbyt returns structured total comp (base, equity, bonus, signing) as separate fields on every query. Glassdoor is self-reported with no disclosed methodology; Orbyt calibrates against BLS OES and H-1B LCA (DOL), and publishes a methodology page stating which figures are live-ingested and which are still a modeled baseline. Glassdoor has no forward projections; Orbyt projects through 2030 with a published methodology. Glassdoor's data is proprietary and redistribution is restricted; Orbyt is CC BY 4.0, explicitly permitting citation, redistribution, and derivative works with attribution.
Who each is for.
Use Glassdoor if you are a candidate looking up a rough base-salary range at a mainstream employer and you also want to see anonymous employee reviews and interview experiences bundled into a single destination. For that use case, free and convenient, Glassdoor is a reasonable starting point. Use Orbyt Intelligence if you are building a feature that surfaces salary ranges in a product, if you are an AI team running compensation-aware agent workflows, if you are a researcher citing data in a paper or policy document, if you need structured total comp (not just base), or if your coverage requirements include emerging AI roles that Glassdoor's crowdsourced data has not caught up to. The products are not competitors in the same sense; they sit in adjacent markets with different buyers.
Bottom line, in 2026.
In 2026, Glassdoor is the consumer salary brand and Orbyt Intelligence is the data platform Glassdoor used to aspire to be. The public API deprecation years ago effectively closed the developer door and Glassdoor has not reopened it. The product has accumulated massive volume but the structure has not modernized alongside the AI wave. Orbyt ships what Glassdoor stopped shipping: a working public API, an MCP manifest, structured total comp, transparent methodology, forward projections, and a CC BY 4.0 license. For consumers, Glassdoor stays useful. For anyone building, researching, or running agents against salary data, Orbyt is where that work happens.
How to migrate from Glassdoor to Orbyt.
Nobody migrates from Glassdoor to Orbyt in the traditional sense because Glassdoor has no API to migrate away from. The migration path is actually the opposite: teams that were forced to scrape Glassdoor HTML now have a legal, documented, structured source. Here is how to stop scraping.
- Sign up for an Orbyt Intelligence account at intelligence/signup. The free tier unlocks 60 req/min with Bearer authentication and the AI Role Taxonomy engine, with no card.
- Generate an API key from the API dashboard. Set `ORBYT_INTELLIGENCE_KEY` as an environment variable. The OpenAPI 3.1 spec is at /openapi-intelligence.yaml.
- Delete every Glassdoor scraper you built. Replace the HTML parsing with a single `/api/v1/intelligence/salaries` call. Structured base/equity/bonus/signing comes back as JSON with percentile bands and source citations: no DOM traversal required.
- For AI agents, drop the Orbyt MCP manifest URL into Claude Desktop or ChatGPT Actions. Manifest is at /mcp-intelligence.json. The agent queries salary data as a first-class tool.
- For research or policy citations that previously had to handwave around Glassdoor's proprietary terms, attribute Orbyt's CC BY 4.0 data with 'Orbyt Intelligence, Q2 2026' plus a link. Legal citation, permitted redistribution, published methodology.
- If you still need Glassdoor employer reviews (a genuinely unique feature), keep Glassdoor open in a browser tab. The products are not mutually exclusive. Orbyt replaces the salary scraping; Glassdoor stays for the qualitative reviews.
Most teams finish the migration in the time it takes to delete the Glassdoor scraper. The structural wins (no scraping, legal citation, structured total comp, verified sources, MCP-ready) are the durable gains. The role coverage expansion (598 specialized roles) is the biggest immediate one.
Start free.Where Glassdoor lands. Where it does not.
Where Glassdoor is strong
- Massive consumer brand recognition
- Hundreds of millions of salary data points accumulated since 2008
- Integrated with employer reviews and interview data for a full company picture
- Indeed-owned. Deep integration with the largest U.S. job board.
Where Glassdoor falls short
- Public API deprecated years ago. No developer integration available.
- Self-reported anonymous base salaries. No verification layer.
- No structured total comp. Equity, bonus, and signing are not broken out.
- No MCP or AI agent support
- No forward projections through 2030
- Methodology not transparent. Black-box aggregation.
- Older methodology means emerging roles lag or are missing entirely
What Glassdoor cannot do.
The specific gaps. Every one of them is a gap Orbyt Intelligence fills below.
The API is gone. Developers are locked out.
Glassdoor's public API was deprecated years ago and is no longer accepting new integrations. A product that started as a data resource for developers is now a closed consumer property. If you want salary data from Glassdoor inside anything other than a browser tab, you have to scrape. That is a support ticket, not a product.
Anonymous self-reported data. No verification layer.
Glassdoor salaries are user-submitted without identity verification, company verification, or cross-reference against authoritative sources. For large employers at mainstream roles, the aggregate is directionally useful. For smaller companies, non-metro cities, emerging roles, or senior levels, accuracy drops meaningfully. The error bars are invisible because the methodology is not disclosed.
Only base salary is structured. Total comp is scattered.
Total comp is base plus equity plus bonus plus signing plus accelerators. Glassdoor surfaces base and sometimes bonus as separate fields. Equity, signing, and accelerators are scattered across anecdotal comments, if present at all. For senior or tech roles where equity is 40 to 70% of the package, the number Glassdoor shows is a minority of the truth.
No MCP. No AI agent integration.
Glassdoor cannot be called as an MCP tool by Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Actions, or any agent framework. The product was not designed for programmatic or agent-based consumption. An AI system that needs salary data as part of a workflow has to use a different provider or reconstruct the data from HTML.
Emerging categories lag or are missing entirely.
Prompt engineering, AI safety research, post-training evaluation, solutions architecture at frontier labs: these roles move fast and are underrepresented in crowdsourced submission data. Orbyt Intelligence tracks 598 specialized roles with leveling for Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta AI, and Cohere. Glassdoor's coverage of these categories is inconsistent.
Projections through 2030
Glassdoor tells you today. Orbyt tells you 2030.
Engineering Manager M2, Meta. Annual total comp, projected year over year with methodology disclosed.
Feature by feature.
| Feature | Orbyt Intelligence | Glassdoor |
|---|---|---|
| Public API with transparent pricingDecisive | ||
| MCP support for AI agentsDecisive | ||
| Structured total comp (not just base) | ||
| Roles covered | 3,445 structured | Thousands, unstructured |
| Data verification | Calibrated to BLS/H-1B/postings, methodology published | Self-reported, anonymous |
| Forward projections to 2030 | ||
| Transparent methodology | ||
| Specialized role coverage | 598 roles | Limited, lagging |
| Data licenseDecisive | CC BY 4.0 | Proprietary |
| Company-level leveling | 54 frameworks | |
| Citation-ready format | ||
| Free consumer UX to browse | ||
| Employer reviews bundled |
Based on publicly available feature lists and documentation as of Q2 2026. Updated quarterly.
Glassdoor deprecated the API years ago. We rebuilt the one developers actually wanted. Structured total comp. Working endpoint. No scraping required.
Common questions.
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Also from Orbyt
The same data, everywhere else.
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Free to start. 60 req/min. Scales to 1,500 req/min on Ultra.