Offset vs Cursor Pagination: How to Choose the Right Strategy for Your API

Pagination is a fundamental API design choice that becomes critical as datasets grow larger. Offset pagination works by skipping a fixed number of records, making it simple to implement and ideal for admin dashboards, search results, and small-to-medium datasets where users need direct page access. However, at large offsets the database must scan through many rows before returning results, and shifting data can cause records to appear twice or go missing between requests. Cursor pagination instead marks a specific position in the dataset, letting the database efficiently retrieve only the records that follow, which makes it well-suited for infinite scrolling, social feeds, and frequently changing data. Choosing between the two depends on dataset size, how often data changes, and whether users need to jump directly to a specific page number.