The official MyAnimeList API v2 is the interface MyAnimeList ships itself, at https://api.myanimelist.net/v2. It differs from the unofficial Jikan in two key ways. First, even reading public data requires identifying your app: you register an application at https://myanimelist.net/apiconfig, receive a Client ID, and send it as an X-MAL-CLIENT-ID header; without it, public reads fail with an unauthorized error. Second, anything involving a specific user — reading their list (including private entries), updating watch status (watching/completed/on-hold/dropped/plan-to-watch), setting or changing scores, adding or removing list entries — requires the full OAuth2 authorization-code flow, where the user logs in and grants your app permission and you receive an access token scoped to that user. That OAuth2 path is the entire reason the official API exists for most developers, and it is where it is irreplaceable versus Jikan: only it can authenticate as a user and write to a user’s list. The trade-off is real friction — you go from "send a GET" to registering an app, implementing OAuth2, handling redirect URIs, storing and refreshing tokens, and managing per-user scopes. If your feature never touches a user account, that is wasted work. On rate limiting the official side publishes no clear numbers; the community consensus is to stay around 1 request/second to avoid throttling. In practice many MyAnimeList integrations use both APIs: the public catalog (search, detail, seasons, rankings) on the key-less, broad-coverage Jikan, and only the thin per-user slice on the official API’s OAuth2 — the public majority gets Jikan’s zero friction, and you pay the OAuth2 cost only for the part that genuinely needs it.