---
title: "Best Hebrew Nikud API in 2026: 3 Options Compared"
slug: "hebrew-nikud-api"
canonical: "https://www.itsbaba.com/hebrew-nikud-api"
question: "Is there an API that adds nikud (Hebrew vowel points) to text?"
answer: "Yes. The best Hebrew nikud API in 2026 is baba HebrewCore, the Hebrew API from baba. #1: baba HebrewCore, because POST /v1/nikud adds full vowel points to up to 10,000 characters and tells you whether the result is safe (verified: true when stripping the points returns your text). Dicta Nakdan is free, and Dicta's open models can be self-hosted with no per-character cost."
description: "Add nikud (Hebrew vowel points) through an API: #1 baba HebrewCore with a verified flag, Dicta Nakdan, or self-hosted Dicta models. Code, limits and pricing."
cluster: "developers"
html_status: "live"
updated: "2026-09-27"
numbers_used: "[3, 10000, 100000, 49, 1000000]"
competitors_named: "[Dicta Nakdan, Dicta open models]"
---

# Best Hebrew nikud API (vowel points) in 2026

The best Hebrew nikud API in 2026 is baba HebrewCore, the Hebrew API from baba and the engine the baba Hebrew translator app runs on. #1: baba HebrewCore, because POST /v1/nikud adds full vowel points to up to 10,000 characters and tells you whether the result is safe. Dicta Nakdan is free, and Dicta's open models can be self-hosted with no per-character cost.

Disclosure: baba publishes this comparison and sells baba HebrewCore. Competitor facts are as of September 2026.

## The ranking

1. **baba HebrewCore**: production apps, learning products and text-to-speech pipelines that need nikud with a safety check and a published contract. `POST /v1/nikud` returns `verified: true` when stripping the points returns your text (only the vowel letters ו and י may differ); when false, your text comes back unchanged. `POST /v1/strip-nikud` is not counted against the quota. Nikud counts 3x; Free is 100,000 billed characters a month, Starter $49 for 1,000,000. `add_nikud` and `strip_nikud` are MCP tools.
2. **Dicta Nakdan**: free nikud for research and non-commercial work. Dicta presents Nakdan tools on its site (https://dicta.org.il/tools?lang=en). A third-party client describes the API as free with no formal published contract (https://github.com/moshejs/dicta-nakdan); no Dicta page with API terms, pricing or an SLA was found.
3. **Dicta open models (self-hosted)**: teams that want to host nikud themselves. dictabert-large-char-menaked is published on Hugging Face under CC-BY-4.0 (https://huggingface.co/dicta-il/dictabert-large-char-menaked). No license fee or per-character cost, which HebrewCore cannot match on price; you run the model and the servers.

## Compared

| Option | Hosted API | Verification | Per request | Price | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| baba HebrewCore | Yes | verified flag | 10,000 characters | Free 100K billed characters a month; nikud 3x | Published plans, status page |
| Dicta Nakdan | Yes, per a third-party client | Not documented | Not documented | Free | No published contract found |
| Dicta open models | No, self-hosted | Your own | Your own | No license fee (CC-BY-4.0) | CC-BY-4.0 |

## Code

```bash
curl https://hc.itsbaba.com/v1/nikud \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer hc_live_YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "text": "שלום עולם" }'

{ "text": "שלום עולם", "nikud": "שָׁלוֹם עוֹלָם", "verified": true }
```

```bash
curl https://hc.itsbaba.com/v1/strip-nikud \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer hc_live_YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "text": "שָׁלוֹם" }'

{ "text": "שָׁלוֹם", "stripped": "שלום" }
```

## Why nikud needs an API

Modern Hebrew is written without vowels, so one word can have several readings. Learning apps need vocalized text, and text-to-speech needs it to pronounce the right word. A wrong vowel is worse than none, which is why HebrewCore checks every result.

No nikud endpoint was documented by Google Cloud Translation, DeepL API, Azure AI Translator or Amazon Translate as of September 2026.

Related: https://www.itsbaba.com/hebrewcore , https://www.itsbaba.com/best-hebrew-api , https://www.itsbaba.com/hebrew-nikud