The Nexar API: What Engineers Need to Know in 2026
Zenode.ai
If you've ever searched for electronic components online, you've probably used Octopart. It's been the default component aggregator for over 15 years, and for good reason — it surfaces pricing and availability from hundreds of distributors into one place.
What many engineers don't realize is that the same data powering Octopart's search is available programmatically through the Nexar API. This is the API that BOM management tools, EDA plugins, and procurement systems use under the hood. If you're building anything that needs component data, Nexar is likely on your radar.
But the API landscape has changed significantly since Octopart's early days. Pricing has increased, new restrictions have appeared, and engineers have higher expectations for what "component data" should mean in 2026. This guide breaks down what the Nexar API actually offers, where it excels, and where you might find yourself wanting more.
The Nexar Origin Story
The Nexar API originates from Octopart's electronic component aggregator.
Octopart launched in 2007 with a simple premise: why should engineers have to check DigiKey, Mouser, Arrow, and a dozen other distributor sites separately? The founders built a search engine that pulled pricing and availability from multiple sources and displayed it side by side. Engineers loved it.
Over the years, Altium — the company behind Altium Designer, one of the most popular PCB design tools — saw the strategic value in owning component data infrastructure. They acquired Octopart in 2015, then built out Nexar as a broader platform that combines supply chain data (Octopart), design data (Altium 365), and manufacturing services (Altimade).
In 2024, Altium itself was taken private by Renesas Electronics for approximately $5.9 billion AUD. So today, Nexar sits within Renesas's portfolio — a semiconductor manufacturer now owning the infrastructure layer that many EDA tools depend on.
This history matters because it explains both Nexar's strengths (deep integration with Altium, massive data moat) and its strategic constraints (tied to one EDA ecosystem, owned by a company with different priorities).
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What You Actually Get
The Nexar API is a GraphQL endpoint that exposes four main data domains:
Supply data is the core offering — this is the Octopart search functionality. You can query by MPN, keyword, parametric specs, or category. The API returns matching parts with pricing from franchised distributors, stock levels, basic specifications, lifecycle status, and datasheet links. The data comes from 280+ sources, covering over 70 million parts. That's a genuinely impressive aggregation effort built over more than a decade.
Design data connects to Altium 365 workspaces. If your organization uses Altium Designer, you can query project data, BOMs, component libraries, and comments through the API. This only works with Altium 365 — if you use KiCad, Fusion 360, or any other EDA tool, this entire namespace is irrelevant to you.
Spectra data provides supply chain intelligence: historical availability, procurability scores, and forecasted supply metrics. This is the premium analytics layer built on top of the raw supply data. Nonetheless, more powerful platforms such as Z2Data provide significantly more data than what is provided here.
Admin data handles organization and application management.
For most API users, the supply namespace is all that matters. You're querying parts, checking prices, and building that data into your own tools.
The GraphQL Experience
Nexar committed to GraphQL several years ago, migrating away from the older REST-based Octopart API. This has real implications for how you work with it.
The good: GraphQL lets you request exactly the fields you need. If you only care about pricing and stock levels, you don't have to pull down complete part objects with specs, images, and metadata you'll ignore. For applications making thousands of queries, this efficiency matters.
The less good: if your team isn't already comfortable with GraphQL, there's a learning curve, especially with the paucity of documentation provided on Nexar’s part. Simple integrations that would be a few lines of code with a REST endpoint require understanding query syntax, schema navigation, and GraphQL client setup. Nexar provides a Nitro IDE for testing queries interactively, which helps, but it's still more complexity than some teams need.
There's no REST alternative. If you wanted to do a quick part lookup from a shell script or a simple integration that doesn't justify a GraphQL client, you're out of luck.
The Pricing Reality
This is where things get complicated. Nexar doesn't publish clear pricing, which is itself a signal.
The public comparison page shows four tiers: Evaluation, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. The Evaluation tier gives you 100 parts — not per month, but total, lifetime. It's a trial, not a free tier.
Based on what customers have reported, the Standard tier (up to 2,000 parts/month) runs around $500/month, but it restricts access to lifecycle status, lead times, datasheets, and technical specs. To get the data most procurement and engineering tools actually need, you're looking at the Pro tier at roughly $2,000/month.
If you remember the early Octopart API from the 2010s, this represents a significant price increase. What was once free or cheap has become a substantial line item. Multiple customers have described this shift as "sticker shock."
The pricing model is also metered in a way that can catch you off guard. Nexar counts "matched parts" — unique parts returned by your queries. If your BOM tool queries 500 parts and each one returns results, you've used 500 of your monthly quota. For applications making broad searches or processing large BOMs regularly, quotas deplete faster than expected.
Rate Limits and Technical Constraints
Beyond pricing, there are technical walls you'll run into.
The rate limits are restrictive: 2 requests per second, 200 per 15 minutes, 3,000 per 12 hours, and 40,000 per week. For a production application serving multiple users or processing BOMs at scale, these limits require careful architecture — caching, queuing, and throttling.
Pagination has a hard ceiling. You can only access the first 1,100 results for any query (the `start + limit` cannot exceed 1,100). If you're doing a broad category search that returns thousands of parts, you simply cannot access results beyond that point. For some use cases, this is a real blocker.
Queries timeout after 90 seconds with no async pattern or job queue. Complex queries just fail.
And there's a 24-hour cache restriction in the terms of service — you're not allowed to store API data longer than that, which forces ongoing API dependency and makes it difficult to build any kind of local intelligence layer.
The Terms of Service Fine Print
Some restrictions in Nexar's T&Cs deserve attention.
Most importantly, there is an IP assignment clause: users must assign to Altium any intellectual property rights in derivative works or improvements relating to the Nexar API. If you build something clever on top of their data, they claim rights to it. For end users, this may restrict what you can build on top of Nexar’s platform without running into IP ownership issues.
Additionally, using the API for competitive analysis, benchmarking, or building competing products is prohibited. Historical trend analysis of pricing and inventory requires explicit written consent.
These aren't unusual for enterprise software agreements, but they're worth understanding before you build a business around the API.
Where Nexar Genuinely Excels
Despite the limitations, Nexar has real strengths that shouldn't be dismissed.
Nexar boasts seventy million parts from 280 sources, built over 15 years of relationships with distributors and manufacturers. When you need to know whether an obscure part is in stock somewhere in the world, Nexar probably has the answer.
For Altium users, the ecosystem integration is valuable. ActiveBOM embeds real-time pricing directly into the design workflow, so engineers see availability while they're selecting components. If your team lives in Altium Designer, this tight integration reduces friction.
The Spectra supply chain intelligence product is differentiated. Procurability scores, historical availability, and days-of-supply estimates provide insights that pure inventory aggregators don't offer. For organizations that experienced supply chain pain during the 2020-2022 shortage era, this data has real value.
What's Missing
The limitations become apparent when you compare Nexar to what engineers increasingly expect from data infrastructure.
There's no intelligence layer. Nexar returns raw data. You query, it responds with matches. If you want recommendations, alternative suggestions, or natural language search, you have to build that yourself. In a world where AI-powered tools are becoming standard, a pure data pipe feels dated.
There's no alternatives engine. Finding cross-references and functional equivalents is the most common task in component engineering, especially during shortages. Nexar can tell you what's in stock, but it can't tell you "this part would work instead."
The parametric data comes from distributor feeds, not manufacturer datasheets. This is a known quality gap — distributor specs are often incomplete, inconsistent, or simply wrong compared to what's in the actual datasheet. Datasheets themselves are just PDF URLs, not parsed or structured data.
And crucially, Nexar has no presence in the majority of the EDA market. If you use KiCad, Fusion 360, OrCAD, PADS, or Zuken, there's no native integration. The design data features only work with Altium 365. This leaves roughly 65-70% of professional EDA users without design integration options.
Who Should Use It
The Nexar API makes sense for specific use cases:
If you're building a BOM management tool and need multi-distributor pricing, Nexar provides that aggregation out of the box. The data is comprehensive, the API is well-documented, and you don't have to build distributor relationships yourself.
If your organization is invested in the Altium ecosystem, the integrated value proposition is real. Design data, supply data, and manufacturing services in one API surface is genuinely useful.
If you need Spectra's supply chain intelligence for risk management, that's a differentiated product that competitors don't directly match.
And if raw data breadth is your priority — you need to query 70 million parts and see results from 280 sources — nothing else offers that coverage today.
When to Look Elsewhere
But Nexar isn't the right fit for everyone.
If you need AI-powered features — natural language search, intelligent alternatives, or datasheet-grounded answers — Nexar doesn't offer them. You'd be building that layer yourself on top of raw data.
If you use EDA tools other than Altium, you're paying for an ecosystem you can't access. The design namespace is irrelevant, and you're left with supply data at prices that assume you're getting more.
If transparent, accessible pricing matters to your organization, the "contact sales" model and opaque tiers may be a bad fit. Startups and smaller teams often prefer services with clear, public pricing they can evaluate without a sales conversation.
And if the terms of service restrictions affect your use case — you're building something Nexar might view as competitive, you're in distribution, or you need to run historical analytics — the legal constraints may be deal-breakers.
The Bigger Picture
Nexar represents a certain era of API infrastructure: comprehensive data aggregation with enterprise pricing and restrictive terms. It's powerful, battle-tested, and dominant in its space.
But the market is shifting. Engineers expect more intelligence, not just more data. They want tools that understand what they're trying to accomplish, not just endpoints that respond to queries. They want transparent pricing, permissive terms, and integrations with the tools they actually use.
For component data, this means the next generation of APIs won't just aggregate inventory — they'll help engineers make decisions. Natural language search, explained alternatives, datasheet intelligence, and design tool integration beyond a single EDA vendor.
Nexar isn't going anywhere. The data moat is real, and 15 years of market position doesn't disappear overnight. But understanding both its strengths and its limitations helps you make better decisions about when to use it, when to look elsewhere, and what the future of this space might look like.
Where Zenode Fits In
If you're evaluating Nexar, Zenode offers a different approach worth considering.
Where Nexar is a data aggregation layer — comprehensive, broad, but fundamentally a pipe — Zenode is building an intelligence layer on top of component data. Our Discovery engine accepts natural language queries, so instead of constructing parametric filters, you describe what you need and get ranked results with explanations. Our Alts engine provides component alternatives with explained tradeoffs, not just cross-reference lists.
Zenode's specs come from parsed manufacturer datasheets rather than distributor feeds, addressing the accuracy gap that Nexar's aggregation model creates. And with both GraphQL and REST endpoints plus an MCP server for AI-native tools, Zenode is designed for how engineers are increasingly working.
The tradeoff is data breadth. Nexar's 70 million parts from 280 sources represents years of relationship building. Zenode's coverage is large and growing (40 million parts) but doesn't match that today.
For many use cases, understanding which tool solves which problem is key. Nexar has slightly more breadth, and Zenode provides intelligence and datasheet-grounded accuracy.
For a deeper comparison, stay tuned for our Nexar API vs Zenode API guide.
Sources
- [The Nexar API | Nexar](https://nexar.com/api)
- [API Supply Scope Comparison | Nexar](https://nexar.com/compare-plans)
- [Nexar API Terms of Use](https://nexar.com/api/legal)
- [The Nexar Story | Altium](https://resources.altium.com/p/the-nexar-story)
- [Looking for the Octopart API?](https://octopart.com/business/api/v4/api-transition)
