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The 8 best Geolytix alternatives in 2026
Huq is our product. Here's how we compared everyone, including us.
Geolytix is a respected UK location planning company. Founded in 2011, it combines MAPP mapping software, GEODATA datasets and consultancy, and counts Asda, Tesco, Co-op and Marks and Spencer among its clients. Its strength is bespoke forecasting and network strategy, built by an experienced team.
Teams look at Geolytix alternatives for different reasons. Some want observed footfall they can check themselves every week. Some need the same measures across Europe. Others want to build models in-house, or need occupancy data next to footfall.
This guide compares eight options for UK buyers. For each one we cover what it sells, who it suits and the trade-offs, using only facts the vendors publish. Huq is listed first; we explain why, and where another tool may suit you better.
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Quick answer
Huq is the best Geolytix alternative for branded retail chains, retail commercial property, and investors and private equity wanting weekly observed footfall. CACI is the closest consultancy-led match; BT Active Intelligence and MyTraffic suit UK movement data and European expansion.
Geolytix alternatives compared
What each option offers a Geolytix buyer, at a glance.
In this guide
How we evaluated
- Observed or modelled: does the tool measure visits, or model demand from other inputs?
- Self-serve or consultancy: can your team get answers directly, or does it rely on analysts?
- Coverage: UK high streets, shopping centres and retail parks, plus other countries if you trade abroad.
- Refresh and delivery: how often data updates and how it reaches your team or warehouse.
- Breadth: footfall, catchment, demographics, spend and behaviour in one place, or several suppliers.
The best Geolytix alternatives, ranked
1. Huq: best for branded retail chains, retail commercial property, and investors and private equity
Where Geolytix leads with modelling and consultancy, Huq leads with observed data that commercial teams can use themselves, every week, on any address. You pick the sites, including competitors' stores and units you haven't opened, and see how they perform without commissioning a project. 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
- Self-serve: commercial teams get answers without a consultancy project
- Works on any UK address, including competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened
- Accuracy published by country: 18.7% median error in Great Britain
- Same measures across 35 markets for multi-country portfolios
- Weekly refresh for ongoing monitoring of stores and centres
Cons
- 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
- No bespoke forecasting consultancy: Huq supplies data and tools, and your team or partner builds sales models
2. CACI: best for location planners who want modelled catchments and spend estimates
CACI is the London-based company behind Acorn. It sells a mix of datasets, mapping software and consultancy. Retail Footprint is a spatial interaction model, built with machine-learning techniques, covering over 70,000 retail locations across the UK and Europe. It scores each centre for catchment, potential expenditure (residential, worker, tourist and online), market share, overlap and cannibalisation, and actual versus expected performance; in the UK, CACI says expenditure estimates are calibrated against real credit and debit card data. Location Dynamics covers over 38,000 UK destinations and uses movement and transaction data to model where visitors come from and what they spend. CACI also sells Acorn-coded footfall data, off the shelf for common locations or bespoke for sites you choose. Retail Footprint is available as raw data, through the InSite mapping software, in dashboards or as bespoke analysis by CACI consultants. For Geolytix buyers, CACI is the closest like-for-like: modelled catchments with expert support. Compare how each model is calibrated and what each licence includes.
Pros
- Catchment, spend potential and market share for 70,000+ UK and European retail locations
- UK spend estimates calibrated against real card data, per CACI
- Acorn segmentation built in for consumer profiling
- Choice of raw data, InSite software or analyst support
Cons
- Retail Footprint and Location Dynamics are modelled rather than directly measured visits
- Refresh frequency isn't published on the pages we reviewed
- European coverage is described in general terms, without a country list
3. 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 Geolytix users who buy its mobility datasets, BT offers population-scale UK movement from a single network, sold as data rather than as a planning project.
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
4. 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 Geolytix buyers, O2 Motion is a source of UK-wide movement trends rather than a retail planning toolkit; you'd still need your own models or a partner to turn it into site decisions.
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
5. MyTraffic: best for restaurant and franchise expansion across several European countries
MyTraffic is a French location intelligence company that bought geospatial intelligence platform Geoblink in January 2024. Its homepage lists 18 countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Poland and the United States, and says it is trusted by 600 companies across Europe, with logos such as Starbucks, Carrefour, JLL and Decathlon. The flagship product is now Gini, an AI assistant for geospatial analytics built from Geoblink and MyTraffic expertise. Alongside it sit DataLibrary, AudienceLabs for matching digital advertising to store visits, and SmartMonitor for shopping centres. Use cases it highlights include site selection, cannibalisation risk, competitor benchmarking and portfolio performance, and the industries it serves include restaurants, franchises, brokers, grocery, charging point operators and the public sector. For a Geolytix user expanding beyond the UK, MyTraffic offers one footfall platform across many European countries. The AI-assistant approach suits teams that want quick answers; check delivery options if you need bulk data in your own warehouse.
Pros
- One footfall platform across 18 countries, including the UK
- AI assistant answers questions in plain language
- Strong restaurant and franchise use cases
- Advertising-to-visit attribution through AudienceLabs
Cons
- The homepage doesn't name its underlying data source
- The homepage doesn't describe an API or data delivery formats, so check them if you need feeds into your own warehouse
6. 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 Geolytix user, Business Analyst offers the self-serve mapping side of MAPP, with drive times, trade areas, segmentation and reports, but without a consultancy layer: your analysts build the models.
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
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 Geolytix users, CARTO is the do-it-yourself route: your analysts build the gravity or machine-learning models that Geolytix's consultants would otherwise build, using datasets you subscribe to and your own data.
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
8. Local Data Company: best for tracking occupancy and vacancy across GB high streets and retail parks
Local Data Company, owned by commercial real estate intelligence provider Green Street since November 2023, tracks the occupancy of Great Britain's retail and leisure premises. Field researchers check whether premises on high streets, retail parks and shopping centres are occupied and trading; LDC says its teams spend over 2,000 hours a week in the field and visit over 70,000 premises a month. Its LocalDataOnline software offers portfolio, sector, historical and gap analysis, benchmarking and mapping, with indices such as its Retail Index and Diversity Index, plus context such as population, employment and floorspace. In October 2024 Green Street launched Retail Analytics Pro on LDC's data, adding a health index, competitor tracking and over 10 years of vacancy history. LDC is not a footfall or catchment product. For a Geolytix user, it answers a complementary question: which units are open, closed or changing hands, and how a centre's mix is shifting. It pairs naturally with a footfall source.
Pros
- Field-verified occupancy, not modelled
- Over 10 years of vacancy history, per Green Street
- Openings, closures and competitor footprints across GB
- Retail mix and diversity indices for each location
Cons
- Not a footfall or catchment product
- Great Britain only
- Answers what's trading, not how many people visit
How to choose a Geolytix alternative
Do you need a model or measured data?
If you need a sales forecast built for you, a consultancy such as CACI fits. If you need to see how sites actually perform, start with observed footfall.
Will the work be a project or ongoing?
One-off network reviews suit consultancy. Monitoring stores, centres and competitors week to week suits a self-serve platform.
Which countries do you trade in?
If your estate goes beyond the UK, check that the same measures exist in each country. Huq covers 35 markets; MyTraffic lists 18 countries.
How will data reach your team?
Check exports, reports and feeds. Huq delivers Parquet and CSV feeds into S3 or Google Cloud Storage rather than an API.
Frequently asked questions
What does Geolytix do?
Geolytix is a UK location planning company founded in 2011. It sells MAPP, an online market intelligence and mapping tool; GEODATA datasets covering demographics, mobility, banking, points of interest and retail places; and consultancy for sales and investment forecasting, network strategy and spatial modelling. Clients include Asda, Tesco, Co-op and Marks and Spencer.
Does Geolytix offer open data?
Geolytix says open data is central to its story: its about page states, "Without Open Data we wouldn't exist." Its GEODATA range includes Global Retail Places, UK Retail Universe and mobility datasets. Check Geolytix's site for which datasets are currently free and which are licensed.
Who provides UK footfall benchmarking data?
Several suppliers do, in different ways. MRI Software (formerly Springboard) publishes free benchmarks from its counters. Huq benchmarks any UK location against regional and national figures in its monthly PDF reports, using observed visit data across high streets, shopping centres and retail parks. Geolytix, CACI and BT also sell UK footfall datasets.
Is Huq a consultancy like Geolytix?
No. Huq is a data platform: your team picks locations, explores them in the Explore map and monitors portfolios in Projects. It doesn't build bespoke sales forecasts. Many teams use Huq's footfall, catchment and spend data as inputs to their own models or a partner's.
How often is Huq data updated, and what does it cover?
Huq data refreshes weekly. It covers 35 markets, including any UK address, and manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each market twice a year. Data is available in the platform, as CSV or Excel exports, as monthly PDF reports or as data feeds.
Can I get a free analysis of my sites?
Yes. Send Huq a list of your stores, a competitor's or sites you're considering, and Huq will prepare a free analysis of footfall, catchment and visitor behaviour, so you can compare it with what you use today.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoSources
- Huq
- Geolytix
- Geolytix: about
- Geolytix GEODATA
- Geolytix Mobility: Small Area Footfall
- CACI
- CACI Retail Footprint
- CACI Location Dynamics
- CACI footfall data
- 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
- MyTraffic
- tech.eu: MyTraffic acquires Geoblink
- Esri ArcGIS Business Analyst
- Esri UK: ArcGIS Business Analyst
- CARTO
- Local Data Company
- Business Wire: Green Street acquires Local Data Company
- Business Wire: Green Street launches Retail Analytics Pro
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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