Big data has become a big industry as all manner of organizations look for more accurate and timely ways to make operational decisions.
As part of this process, organizations are discovering the power of geospatial data to help explain why things happen in certain places and not others. But where do they get geospatial data from? And what types of data do geospatial technologies provide?
We’ll answer these questions in the following sections:
Let’s start by going into a bit more detail about what kinds of companies provide geospatial data.
Geospatial data providers are organizations that collect, process, and/or distribute different types of location-based data. This can include information on points of interest, building footprints, human mobility patterns, population demographics, transportation networks, and more.
These providers can be government agencies, scientific or academic institutions, private corporations, and others. Regardless of who provides it, geospatial data can be used for a number of different purposes that benefit businesses, communities, or even the whole of humanity or Earth.
Due to geospatial data’s growing importance, there are some organizations that have based the bulk of their operations around it. Their main purpose is to gather geospatial data and process it into usable formats, then give or sell it to others who need it. We’ll take a few minutes to talk more about that now.
Geospatial data as a service (DaaS) is an industry where companies gather and clean location data for the purpose of selling it to other institutions. Many organizations don’t have the resources to collect and process location data in-house, so they get it from businesses who specialize in doing that.
Geospatial data can be used for a lot more than just mapping. To give some examples, businesses can determine where they should build new stores or close old ones down. Governments can plan where to build transportation, housing, and other critical services. Investors can look at potential performance indicators and make investment decisions without waiting for official financial data to be released. And insurance firms can more accurately assess risk for a location, so they can write liability policies that are better tailored to clients and priced more competitively.
With more business sectors continually finding new applications for geospatial data, it should come as little surprise that DaaS companies are in demand. We’ll introduce you to a number of them next.
The top geospatial data companies are a mix of public and private organizations. Some specialize in certain types of geospatial data, making them ideal for particular use cases. And some may also offer software platforms and other solutions that make geospatial data analysis easier. You’ll meet all kinds as we go through our list.
Cost: bulk pricing available
Types of data: POI | property
SafeGraph is your source for geospatial truth, providing comprehensive and accurate data on points of interest. Our Places and Geometry datasets provide location information and building footprints for millions of global locations.
Cost: $0.05/record; charged on a per-dataset basis
Types of data: POI | property
CAP Locations provides point of interest and building footprint data for over 1.2 million restaurants and retail stores in the US and Canada. Along with this niche, it also provides comprehensive spatial hierarchy data for over 42,000 malls and other shopping centers spread between the two countries.
Cost: $0.005/record; charged on a per-dataset basis
Types of data: property
BA45 has attribution data on over 125 million residential and commercial properties in the US. Its data schema has 85 attributes that cover things like when a building was built, what it’s made out of, what amenities it has, and what price it last sold for. At half a cent per record, its data is very affordable as well.
Cost: $0.05/record; charged on a per-dataset basis
Types of data: property
First American Data & Analytics specializes in property data attributes related to buying, selling, leasing, and mortgaging houses. This makes it a great source of information for real estate insurers and investors looking to gauge the financial risk associated with specific residential properties. Its data is comprehensive enough to cover the entire US housing market.
Cost: $0.05 per record; can vary based on level of detail and whether purchasing for the entire US or a single state
Types of data: property
Regrid has data on over 150 million parcels of land in the US, which can be segmented by state or county if you only need specific sets. Its premium datasets feature more attributes, including building footprint geometry.
Cost: $0.02-$0.05/record, charged on a per-dataset basis
Types of data: POI | mobility
Locomizer provides general footfall data around points of interest. It also uses machine learning to estimate how likely a person is to engage in a brand-affiliated activity (e.g. shopping, sports, movie-watching, and eating/drinking) around a particular point of interest. Locomizer’s data covers mainly the UK, but can include some other countries.
Cost: contact for pricing
Types of data: mobility
Veraset’s “Movements” dataset measures foot traffic centered on major points of interest in over 150 countries worldwide. Its “Visits” dataset combines this data with property profiles on over 6 million commercial buildings in the US to show who’s visiting which businesses, and when.
Cost: free
Types of data: demographics
The US Census Bureau is a United States government agency that provides survey-based information on demographics throughout the country to the public. However, it isn’t always in the most usable form, which is why SafeGraph has provided a cleaned-up version of its American Community Survey data.
Cost: contact for pricing
Types of data: demographics
Spatial.ai uses geotagged information from social media to build its demographics datasets. This allows it to segment census block groups into over 70 lifestyle categories based on food and drink, entertainment, faith, relationships, hobbies, and more.
Cost: annual subscriptions to their SaaS platform that includes data access
Types of data: POI | property | mobility | demographics | boundaries | environmental | streets | imagery
Esri partners with leading data providers to provide pretty much every kind of geospatial data that an organization could want to use. It also provides ArcGIS, a top geospatial data management system.
Cost: $0.01/record; $8,000-$10,000/month
Types of data: property | demographics | address
Infutor combines comprehensive US property data with transaction and demographic data to provide anonymized consumer profiles for over 260 million Americans. It also has address data for over 360 million places across the US, including geographic coordinates.
Cost: free
Types of data: address
This is another United States government institution providing free data to the public. Among its datasets is the National Address Database, which contains over 65 million confirmed records of street addresses across the US.
Cost: free
Types of data: POI | property | boundaries | demographics
The Trust for Public Land provides boundary and associated property information for public parks in nearly 14,000 communities across the US. Its dataset also includes some demographic information about people who live near the parks.
Cost: annual subscriptions to their SaaS platform integrates with their data marketplace
Types of data: POI | property | mobility | demographics | boundaries | environmental | streets
CARTO is another company that sells many different types of geospatial data, having partnered with over 40 other providers. It also provides services and software for spatial analysis and location intelligence.
Cost: $10,000/year; some content is free
Types of data: environmental
Tomorrow.io’s geospatial data software and datasets provide timely and accurate weather data so businesses can prepare for inclement weather. This has implications for events, logistics, transportation, agriculture, construction, utilities, insurance, and more.
Cost: $0.05/record, charged on a per-dataset basis
Types of data: property | environmental
ClimateCheck compares attributes of US properties against historical weather patterns and over 25 internationally-recognized climate change models. This allows them to provide an assessment of how vulnerable any property in the US is to natural disasters and other weather-related damage caused by climate change.
Cost: $0.02/record
Types of data: environment
CustomWeather collects weather data from over 80,000 sources worldwide to provide daily, monthly, and year-over-year weather forecasts and comparisons. Its dataset includes attributes such as humidity, wind speed, dew point, visibility, and many more.
Cost: annual subscriptions that vary based on the geographic region(s) covered
Types of data: mobility | boundaries | streets
Mapbox provides platforms for displaying maps, planning routes, doing custom mapping, and more. It also sells datasets for over 4 million jurisdictional boundaries worldwide; live and typical traffic on streets around the world, as reported by over 600 million active monthly users; and human mobility patterns based on over 20 billion daily location updates across the globe.
Cost: contact for pricing
Types of data: POI | address | environmental | streets | imagery
Bing is most commonly known as Microsoft’s search engine, and one of Google Search’s chief rivals. But it also provides a Spatial Data Services API that lets you store, query, and geocode various types of location data. Bing’s imagery also powers many online mapping applications.
Cost: $0.05/record; other options depend on specific product and length of license
Types of data: POI | demographics
CarePrecise’s geospatial data products cover over 6 million healthcare providers in the US, from hospitals to specialist clinics to individual practices. You can get data on what a practice is classified as, what kinds of (and how many) procedures they do, how to contact them, and what health organizations they’re affiliated with. You can even get anonymized information on patient and employee demographics and reviews.
Cost: up to $0.02/record; contact sales for other options
Types of data: POI | demographics
Netwise specializes in data that is useful for business-to-business marketing. It has information on over 30 million American companies, including anonymized demographics for both employees and customers of each company.
Cost: contact for pricing
Types of data: POI | demographics
DatabaseUSA is another business-to-business data specialist that provides data on over 15 million American companies, including over 40,000 new ones each week. It also has anonymized demographics data on over 260 million Americans, segmented by professionals, customers, and homeowners.
Cost: $0.05/record; charged on a per-dataset basis
Types of data: property | address
Transparent provides data on over 35 million properties worldwide that have been listed as vacation rentals. It has over 50 attributes of granularity, including property type, occupant capacity, minimum length of stay, and more.
Cost: $0.05/record; $800-$7,000/month (average is $2,500-$3,000/month)
Types of data: POI | property | mobility | demographics
Vertical Knowledge collects and processes all sorts of different information that’s publicly available on the Internet. So it has data on a wide variety of subjects, including rental properties, retail brands, automotive transactions, air and sea travel, and corporate demographics.
Cost: $0.005/record; charged on a per-dataset basis
Types of data: POI | property | address
HARNESS Data is a firm specializing in UK location data. It provides comprehensive information on most commercial properties in Great Britain. It also has an address-matching tool to check if an address corresponds to a place with a differently-formatted address, or to a place that even exists at all.
Cost: $0.05/record; charged on a per-dataset basis
Types of data: demographics
Greenwich.HR’s data is about corporate demographics. You’ll get to look at over 85,000 data attributes on positions at over 5 million companies. Find out who’s hiring, which roles are in demand, and how much money people are making per role and/or company in over 200 countries around the world.
Cost: $0.05/record; $4/report
Types of data: POI | property
SMR Research focuses on data concerning commercial real estate. This includes attributes that public records may not provide, such as information on building tenants, square footage, owner contact information, property use classification, and spatial hierarchy metadata for multi-unit buildings (e.g. apartments and malls). It also includes data on property valuation and other financial information that could be useful in measuring insurance or credit risk.
Cost: $0.05/record or $300-$400/user/month; free option available
Types of data: POI | property | address
CRED iQ is another firm that specializes in commercial real estate data. It provides basic property and address data for over 140,000 parcels of commercial real estate in the US, as well as finance-related information (where applicable) such as lease durations and loan terms.
Cost: $0.02/record
Types of data: POI
GoWeeWee has data on over 230,000 public restrooms worldwide. Attributes include gender designation (including gender-neutral), availability of baby-changing amenities, accessibility options, and when a restroom was last cleaned.
