How do their APIs compare?

These two projects aren't really comparable on an "APIs" basis in the same sense — they serve entirely different purposes:

falconry/falcon: an actual code framework

Falcon is a Python web framework (ASGI/WSGI) for building HTTP APIs and microservices, and its own "API" is the set of Python classes/functions it exposes to developers. The public interface is assembled in [falcon/init.py:L27-L37], which surfaces core building blocks like App, HTTPError, HTTPStatus, before/after decorators, CORSMiddleware, and BoundedStream.

Key architectural pieces visible in the retrieved code:

• Request/response helpers: separate utility modules for parsing/handling request and response concerns, e.g. cookie name validation and ETag parsing in [falcon/request_helpers.py:L18-L36], and response utilities like secure_filename and range-header handling in [falcon/response_helpers.py:L17-L23].
• ASGI-specific response handling: [falcon/asgi/response.py:L17-L34] shows the async-flavored Response class, supporting AsyncIterator/Awaitable bodies and SSE (SSEEmitter) — this doesn't exist in the WSGI response class, reflecting Falcon's dual WSGI/ASGI support.
• Error hierarchy: exceptions like HTTPRouteNotFound (a 404 subclass) are richly documented with customizable title, description, headers, href, and code fields [falcon/errors.py:L510-L554], designed to be caught by custom error handlers.
• Media type negotiation: falcon/util/mediatypes.py exposes best_match, parse_header, and quality for HTTP content negotiation [falcon/util/mediatypes.py:L26].

So Falcon's "API" is a deliberately minimal, no-magic set of Python primitives that map closely to HTTP semantics — it doesn't hide the protocol from you.

public-apis/public-apis: a curated directory of other people's APIs

This repo has no code API of its own (aside from validation tooling). It's a crowdsourced README-based list of free/public HTTP APIs across categories like Anime [README.md:L161-L183], Web Scraping/Proxy tools [README.md:L649-L671], and dozens of other domains, formatted as a Markdown table with columns: API name/link, description, Auth type, HTTPS support, and CORS support (per the format spec in [CONTRIBUTING.md:L11-L18]).

The only "engineering" in this repo is a formatting/lint script, e.g. [scripts/validate/format.py:L87-L103], which checks that entries follow [TITLE](LINK) syntax and that titles don't redundantly end in "API".

Bottom line

• Falcon is an API framework — its code implements HTTP request/response handling, routing errors, media negotiation, etc.
• public-apis documents APIs — it's a reference list, not a piece of software you'd integrate against programmatically (beyond scraping the README/JSON export).

There's no shared technical ground to compare feature-for-feature; one is infrastructure, the other is a curated catalog.

FOLLOW_UPS:

• How does Falcon differ from WSGI vs ASGI apps?
• What is Falcon's error handling design philosophy?
• How does public-apis validate new API submissions?