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The 7 best Experian Mosaic alternatives and complements in 2026
Huq is our product. Here's how we compared everyone, including us.
Experian Mosaic is one of the UK's most respected consumer classifications. Experian builds it from individuals up to households and postcodes, sorting the population into 18 groups and 68 types, and teams use it for targeting, media planning and site selection.
Mosaic answers one question very well: who lives here? Some decisions also need a second question answered: who actually visits this place, when, and from where? That's observed visit data, and it works alongside a classification rather than replacing it.
This guide sorts the options by need. Some are other classifications, some measure real movement, and some are platforms for combining both. For each tool we cover what it does, who it suits, and its trade-offs, using only facts the vendors publish.
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Quick answer
Huq is the best Experian Mosaic complement for branded retail chains, retail commercial property, and investors and private equity who need observed visits. CACI Acorn is the closest alternative classification; BT Active Intelligence and Esri Business Analyst suit movement and GIS work.
Experian Mosaic alternatives compared
How each option differs from a household classification, at a glance.
In this guide
How we evaluated
- Classification or observation: does the tool describe who lives in an area, or measure who visits a place?
- Unit of analysis: household, postcode, grid cell, retail centre or any address you choose.
- UK depth and wider coverage: how well it covers UK high streets, shopping centres and retail parks, and whether the same measure exists abroad.
- Fit with what you already license: whether it works alongside Mosaic, your customer data and your existing tools.
- Transparency: whether the vendor publishes its method, sources and accuracy.
The best Experian Mosaic alternatives, ranked
1. Huq: best for branded retail chains, retail commercial property, and investors and private equity
Mosaic tells you who lives around a site; Huq tells you who actually visits it, when, from where and how often. For many UK teams the two work side by side, and Huq's UK geo-spend data comes through a partnership with Experian. Where Huq differs from a classification is that every measure is tied to a real place you choose. In the UK, one platform covers footfall by week, month and year (totals, average daily footfall, trends, period-on-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic); residents and visitors; catchment by postcode plus drive-time and travel-time analysis; demographics and profiling (age, gender, purchasing power); visit frequency, dwell time, dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs and international visitation; footfall density and transportation mode; points of interest, brand locations, industry performance and shopping centre and retail centre types; and geo-spend by volume and category, which in the UK comes via Experian. Teams work in the Explore map, run White Space Analysis and use Projects to monitor many sites and report to stakeholders. Data leaves as CSV or Excel exports, monthly PDF location reports, or Parquet and CSV data feeds into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets, and it refreshes weekly. Huq publishes its accuracy by country, an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall, and manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year.
Huq's clients range from the global insights, research and location intelligence teams at Nike, Adidas, JD Sports and Samsung to retail teams with five stores that want to expand and get an edge on their market. Local governments also use it to check whether economic development and regeneration work is paying off.
Pros
- Full breadth in one platform: footfall, catchment, behaviour, demographics and geo-spend (UK, via Experian)
- Works on any UK address, including competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened
- Visitor profiles built from who actually visits a place, not only who lives nearby
- Accuracy published by country: 18.7% median error in Great Britain
- UK geo-spend comes via Experian, so it sits comfortably alongside an Experian stack
Cons
- Not a household classification: Huq doesn't assign postcodes to segments the way Mosaic does
- No API: technical teams get data feeds (Parquet and CSV into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage) instead
- Weekly cadence, not intraday: you get time-of-day patterns, but data isn't refreshed by the hour
2. CACI Acorn: best for postcode-level consumer classification for marketing and customer profiling
Acorn is CACI's geodemographic segmentation of the UK population and the classification most often weighed against Mosaic. CACI says more than 1.6 million UK postcodes are coded with Acorn, built from over one billion data points and over 800 variables, and its segment wheel arranges them into 7 categories and 22 groups. Uses CACI lists include profiling a customer base or catchment, planning store or branch networks, assessing demand for local services and tailoring communications, across retail, utilities, the public sector, media, property and charities. The two systems share a history: Wikipedia notes Professor Richard Webber led Mosaic's statistical development with Experian and also developed Acorn with CACI. Choosing between them usually comes down to which segmentation fits your customer data, which one your agencies and media partners already use, and licensing. Beyond Acorn, CACI sells place datasets such as Retail Footprint, a spatial interaction model covering over 70,000 retail locations in the UK and Europe, and Acorn-coded footfall data, so you can add a view of visits from the same supplier.
Pros
- Long-established UK classification with 1.6m+ postcodes coded
- Over 800 variables describe each segment, per CACI
- Same supplier sells catchment models and footfall data
- Widely used across retail, utilities, public sector and charities
Cons
- Like Mosaic, it describes where people live, not where they go
- UK only
- Pricing isn't published on the Acorn site
3. Esri ArcGIS Business Analyst: best for GIS analysts building trade-area and territory analysis
ArcGIS Business Analyst is Esri's market and site analysis application, and Esri UK publishes a product page for it. Esri says it combines demographic, consumer-spending, business and census information with lifestyle data, across more than 15,000 market-data variables, and lets you add your own customer and location data. Functions include consumer profiling, market potential, sales forecasting, drive-time analysis and trade-area rings, territory design, location-allocation and customer segmentation, with customisable infographics and reports. It runs in the browser, on desktop and on mobile, or within an on-premises ArcGIS deployment. Because it sits inside the wider ArcGIS family, it suits organisations that already use Esri for mapping and want market analysis in the same environment, with results shared as map-based reports that non-specialists can read. For a Mosaic user, Business Analyst is less a like-for-like segmentation than a workbench for segmentation and catchment work: demographic data, your own customer records and drive-time tools sit together in one GIS. Esri UK's page cites Esri Demographics as its data source and doesn't say which UK classification is bundled, so confirm what UK segmentation data comes with your licence before assuming Mosaic-style segments are included.
Pros
- Full GIS toolkit: drive times, trade areas, location-allocation and territory design
- Over 15,000 market-data variables, per Esri
- Bring your own customer and location data
- Browser, desktop, mobile or on-premises deployment
Cons
- Esri UK's page cites Esri Demographics but doesn't say which UK datasets are included
- No observed visit or footfall data described on the product pages
- Built for GIS users more than commercial teams
4. Geolytix: best for grocers and multiples that want forecasting models built by consultants
Geolytix is a location planning company founded in 2011 by Blair Freebairn and Sarah Hitchcock, with offices including London and Leeds. It sells MAPP, its online market intelligence and mapping tool; GEODATA datasets; and consultancy covering sales and investment forecasting, network strategy and spatial modelling, from scorecards to gravity and machine-learning models. GEODATA includes Global Demographics, UK Banking Data, UK Retail Universe (100,000+ locations across 550+ brands), and mobility datasets for cross shopping and small area footfall. Small Area Footfall blends mobility data with survey data and public ground truthing to give average daily footfall estimates in 20m hexes across 20,000+ UK Retail Places. Named clients include Asda, Tesco, Co-op, Marks and Spencer, Wickes, TUI and IWG. For a Mosaic user, the appeal is joining demographics to modelled demand: Geolytix's consultants build the forecasting model and MAPP puts the results on a map. It suits organisations that want a planning partner as much as a dataset.
Pros
- Experienced consultancy team for forecasting and network strategy
- Wide GEODATA range: demographics, banking, retail places and mobility
- Fine-grained footfall estimates in 20m hexes across UK Retail Places
- Long list of UK grocery, retail and leisure clients
Cons
- Not a household segmentation like Mosaic
- Consultancy-led, which suits planning projects more than self-serve monitoring
- Footfall update frequency and delivery format aren't published
5. BT Active Intelligence: best for transport, events and regeneration teams measuring UK-wide movement
BT Active Intelligence is BT Business's mobility insights service. BT says it draws on movement data from over 24 million devices on the EE network, processes 25 billion events a day, and scales results to the UK population by comparing home locations with regional population and demographic figures. Outputs are aggregated and anonymised over time, geography, age and gender. It is sold as four products: Location insights (footfall for strategy, regeneration and events), Journey insights (road and rail traffic flows), Origin destination insights, and Audience insights for advertising. Customers use an on-demand portal or request specific insights, and Network Rail is a featured customer. BT's Location insights data is also available through CARTO's Data Observatory, on a fine H3 grid, with average daily footfall split by domestic and international, worker and resident, time period, age group and gender. For a Mosaic user, the relevant difference is that BT attaches age and gender to where people actually are, rather than where they live.
Pros
- Large UK base: 24 million+ devices on the EE network, per BT
- Location, journey, origin-destination and audience products from one supplier
- Age and gender attached to movement, not just to home postcodes
- Also available through CARTO for warehouse users
Cons
- UK only, so no like-for-like view of European sites
- Products are framed around places, journeys and audiences rather than retail brand or store analysis
- Pricing isn't published; BT licenses data in several ways to suit each buyer
6. O2 Motion: best for public sector teams using the same mobility data as the ONS
O2 Motion is Virgin Media O2 Business's anonymised and aggregated mobility data service. It is built from connection data between devices and phone masts on the O2 network, and Virgin Media O2 says its insights never allow individuals to be identified or mapped. In April 2024 the Office for National Statistics picked Virgin Media O2 Business as its strategic partner for mobility data. O2 Motion data sits on the ONS Integrated Data Service, a cross-government data platform, where it is updated weekly and combined with ONS surveys and administrative sources for outputs such as small area population estimates. Virgin Media O2 says O2 Motion does not collect GPS data. Virgin Media O2 also publishes O2 Motion analysis of shopping trips, such as festive visits to central London. For Mosaic users, O2 Motion answers a different question: not who lives in a postcode, but how populations move between areas. That makes it a natural fit for government, transport and place-level planning rather than customer segmentation.
Pros
- Chosen by the ONS as its strategic mobility data partner
- Network-wide view of how populations move across the UK
- Updated weekly on the ONS Integrated Data Service
Cons
- No public product page with formats, granularity or delivery details on the pages we reviewed
- UK only
- Not positioned as a store-by-store retail footfall product
7. CARTO: best for data teams running spatial analysis inside their own cloud warehouse
CARTO is a cloud-native spatial analysis platform that it calls an agentic GIS. Analysis runs inside your own cloud data warehouse, with support for Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, Azure and Oracle, so data stays in your environment. Its Data Observatory lets you subscribe to third-party datasets and join them to your own; BT Active Intelligence footfall, for example, is offered there with a free sample. Listed use cases include site selection, geomarketing, market analysis and territory planning, and CARTO now offers AI agents for decision support and lets users build map apps from natural-language prompts. It describes this as enterprise-grade, using your models, end-points and cloud, and says CARTO for Agents works with leading AI agents and models. The trade-off is that CARTO supplies the platform and access to data; your team still chooses the datasets, licenses them and designs the analysis. For a team that licenses Mosaic today, CARTO isn't a replacement classification. It's where a data team can combine a segmentation, movement data and its own customer records in one analysis, inside the warehouse it already runs.
Pros
- Runs inside BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks and others
- Data Observatory for subscribing to third-party datasets
- AI agents and natural-language app building
- Data stays in your own cloud environment
Cons
- A platform, not a dataset: footfall and demographics are licensed separately
- Built for data teams with warehouse access
- Analysis and models are yours to build
How to choose an Experian Mosaic alternative or complement
Do you need a different classification, or a different kind of data?
If Mosaic's segments don't fit your customers, compare Acorn. If the gap is knowing who visits a site, add observed visit data such as Huq.
Is your question about residents or visitors?
Mosaic profiles the people who live around a site. Shopping centres, high streets and retail parks also draw workers and visitors, which only movement data shows.
Who will use it?
Commercial teams need answers in a dashboard or report; GIS and data teams may prefer Esri or CARTO. Check who will run the analysis day to day.
Do you need spend as well as visits?
In the UK, Huq offers geo-spend by volume and category via Experian, alongside footfall and catchment.
Frequently asked questions
What is Experian Mosaic?
Experian Mosaic is Experian's UK consumer segmentation. It classifies individuals and households, then maps them to postcodes, using Experian's ConsumerView data plus permissioned partner and proprietary data. Experian says it doesn't rely on census data. Teams use it for targeting, media planning, personalisation and choosing store sites from local catchment profiles.
How many Mosaic groups are there?
Experian's current UK Mosaic, its eighth release, has 18 groups and 68 types, each with a name such as A, Lavish Lifestyles. Experian says 74% of its inputs are at household level. Older releases had different counts, so check which version your licence or data partner uses.
What is geodemographic segmentation?
Geodemographic segmentation groups people by where they live, on the idea that neighbours tend to share characteristics. Mosaic and CACI's Acorn are the best-known UK examples. It describes residents, not visitors, which is why many teams add observed footfall and catchment data to see who actually comes to a place.
Can Huq data be used alongside Experian Mosaic?
Yes. Mosaic profiles who lives around a site; Huq shows who visits it, when, where they come from and where else they go. In the UK, Huq's geo-spend data also comes via Experian. Many teams use a classification for targeting and observed visit data for site and portfolio decisions.
How often is Huq data updated, and which markets does it cover?
Huq data refreshes weekly. Huq covers 35 markets, including any address in the UK: high streets, shopping centres, retail parks, competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened yet. It manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each market twice a year.
Can I get a free analysis from Huq?
Yes. Tell us the UK locations you care about and Huq will prepare a free analysis showing footfall, catchment and visitor profiles for them, so you can see how observed visit data sits alongside the classification you already use.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoSources
- Huq
- Experian Mosaic
- Mosaic (geodemography), Wikipedia
- CACI Acorn
- CACI Retail Footprint
- CACI footfall data
- Esri ArcGIS Business Analyst
- Esri UK: ArcGIS Business Analyst
- Geolytix
- Geolytix: about
- Geolytix GEODATA
- Geolytix Mobility: Small Area Footfall
- BT Active Intelligence
- CARTO: BT Active Intelligence data
- ISPreview: ONS picks Virgin Media O2 Business for mobility data
- Virgin Media O2: O2 Motion festive shopping analysis
- CARTO
About Huq
Huq is a location intelligence company. We turn anonymised mobile location data into footfall, catchment and visitor insight for any place, so retailers, property owners and local authorities can make decisions on evidence.
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