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The 7 best Gravy Analytics alternatives in 2026
Huq is our product. Here's how we compared everyone, including us.
Gravy Analytics, founded in 2011 in Ashburn, Virginia, sold mobile location and foot traffic data to data, adtech and product teams. In late 2023 it merged with Unacast, and gravyanalytics.com now redirects to unacast.com. Unacast now offers US visitation datasets with history from October 2018, analytics APIs and global raw mobility data, so comparing Gravy Analytics alternatives means comparing against the Unacast product line.
Some buyers review their options after two public events. In January 2025 the FTC finalized an order that bans Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel from selling, sharing or using sensitive location data, with narrow exceptions. The same month, Gravy confirmed a security incident it says it discovered on January 4, 2025. Other teams simply want a dashboard rather than data they have to build on.
Below we compare seven providers on coverage, delivery, history and validation, with fair pros and cons for each, Huq included.
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Quick answer
For retail chains, retail property owners and investors, start with Huq, built to give the broadest set of location data across 35 markets. For a US-only foot traffic dashboard, Placer.ai. For raw mobility files, Veraset. For POI data, Foursquare.
Gravy Analytics alternatives compared
A side-by-side view of what each provider is best for, where it covers and the level of detail it reports.
In this guide
How we evaluated
- Compliance record: public regulatory actions, security incidents and how each vendor describes consent.
- Coverage: the US and any other markets you operate in.
- Delivery: dashboard, data files or API, and how much your team has to build.
- Cadence and history: how often data updates and how far back it goes.
- Validation: whether the vendor publishes accuracy tests against real outcomes.
The best Gravy Analytics alternatives for foot traffic and mobility data
1. Huq: best for branded retail chains, retail commercial property, and investors and private equity evaluating retail brands and assets.
Gravy Analytics sold raw location data that buyers turned into their own analysis. Huq is built to give you the broadest set of location data across 35 markets, ready to use in one platform or as data feeds. Footfall comes by week, month and year, with total and average daily foot traffic, trends, period-on-period change and visiting versus passing traffic. You can split residents from visitors, map catchment and drive-time areas, and read behavior: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day, cross-visitation and international visitation for tourism.
Huq also covers footfall density and transportation mode, POIs, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, and shopping center and retail center types. Demographics (age, gender, purchasing power) and geo-spend by volume and category are available in selected markets. Data refreshes weekly. Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each market twice a year, and in its own validation study its visit data tracked Walmart's quarterly US net sales with 0.85 correlation and 3.8% error. Commercial teams use the Explore map, Projects, CSV and Excel exports and monthly PDF location reports. Technical teams that used Gravy files can receive Parquet and CSV feeds in Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. Ask Huq the same consent and sensitive-location questions you would ask any vendor.
Pros
- Built to give the broadest set of location data in one platform, from footfall and catchment to behavior, density, brands and industries
- 35 markets, with more than 1,000 locations manually validated in each market twice a year
- Straightforward for commercial teams and analysts alike, with the Explore map, Projects and monthly PDF location reports
- Technical teams get Parquet and CSV data feeds into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage
- Works on any address, including competitor sites, with no hardware, sensors or cameras
Cons
- Newer to the US than US-native vendors such as Placer.ai and Advan
- Demographics and spend are available in selected markets only, so check availability for each market you need
- Delivers data feeds (Parquet and CSV into S3 or GCS) rather than an API, so teams wanting on-demand API calls work from files instead
2. Placer.ai: best for US teams across sectors that want a mature foot traffic dashboard with add-on datasets.
Placer.ai (Placer Labs Inc.) is a US foot traffic analytics platform, tagline "Market Intelligence for the Physical World", with 4,000+ customers across retail, commercial real estate, local government, CPG, restaurants, finance and advertising. It estimates visits to places, chains, markets and regions from a panel of tens of millions of mobile devices, using property-level polygons, and says its correlations with first-party sources consistently exceed 90% (a vendor claim). Teams work in a SaaS dashboard that exports CSV, PDF and SHP files, or take data through an API and feeds via Snowflake and AWS. A Data Marketplace adds partner datasets such as sales estimates, demographics and consumer expenditure. Coverage is the United States only.
For teams leaving Gravy Analytics' raw feeds, Placer.ai offers both a finished dashboard and data feeds, so analysts and business users can work from one source. Its FAQ sets out the privacy threshold that hides low-traffic sites. Placer.ai is US only. Huq suits buyers with locations in several countries: 35 markets in one platform, with weekly footfall, catchment and visitor behavior, plus feeds as Parquet or CSV files delivered into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Pros
- 4,000+ customers and a mature US dashboard
- Dashboard, API and data feeds through Snowflake and AWS
- Data Marketplace bundles demographics, business counts and consumer expenditure
- Free tools and a freemium version to try before you buy
Cons
- Covers the US only
- Locations with fewer than 50 unique devices are not shown, which limits low-traffic sites
- Pricing is a custom subscription; one Capterra reviewer calls it "expensive but worth the cost"
- A Capterra reviewer notes not all data has been input for all centers or stores
3. Advan Research: best for hedge funds and quant teams that want US foot traffic alongside card-spend data.
Advan Research is a New York alternative-data company founded by former hedge fund and fintech people. It combines mobile location data with credit and debit card transactions, sold as raw datasets and through web dashboards: FIT for foot traffic, REI for traffic plus spend, REVEAL for property-level analysis and SpendView for consumer spend. Weekly Patterns+ gives POI-level visit counts for the US and Canada, Monday to Sunday, delivered on Wednesdays, with history from January 2018; Neighborhood Patterns+ works at census block group level. SpendView is built from 120M+ cards and covers the US. Data is delivered by FTP, AWS S3 and Google Cloud. Buyers include hedge funds covering 2,000+ tickers, REITs, corporates and the public sector.
For buyers moving away from Gravy Analytics, Advan offers a similar data-feed model with a disclosed source: its site describes GPS, Wi-Fi and beacon signals from opted-in devices, with no ad exchanges. In November 2024 it acquired RetailStat's REI platform. Advan is US-focused and analyst-first. Huq suits retail chains, retail property teams and investors who want weekly footfall, catchment and cross-visitation across 35 markets in one platform.
Pros
- Weekly Patterns+, the successor to SafeGraph Patterns, with history from January 2018
- US card-spend data (SpendView) alongside foot traffic
- Both dashboards and raw datasets via FTP, AWS S3 and Google Cloud
- Named Best Alternative Data Provider at the Inside Market Data awards in 2020
Cons
- Weekly Patterns+ covers the US and Canada; SpendView is US only
- Pricing is not published; a demo or call is required
- A vendor-authored comparison describes it as built for analysts and quants, with no public REST API documentation
- Its current panel claim (45M US devices) is lower than the 100M+ it cited in 2020
4. Veraset: best for data science teams that want raw mobility files to model in-house.
Veraset is a raw mobility data provider for data science and engineering teams. Its products are Movement, a global dataset of GPS pings; Visits, device visits to 4M+ POIs with dwell; Home & Work, inferred residence and workplace locations; Trips, origin-destination journeys covering 100M+ trips a month; and MATCHLINK, which links devices to emails, IP addresses and households. Veraset cites about 300M devices and 10 billion daily pings across 200+ countries. Data is pushed as flat files to S3 or GCP or accessed through APIs, and in March 2026 it launched Orchestrator, a self-serve platform for location workflows. Buyers span adtech, finance, real estate, retail, urban planning, government and research.
For data teams replacing Gravy Analytics' raw signals, Veraset is the closest like-for-like option. Its MATCHLINK identity product raises the consent questions the FTC's Gravy order put on the agenda, so ask how consent is verified. Huq delivers aggregated weekly foot traffic rather than device data: footfall, catchment and visitor behavior across 35 markets, in a platform or as Parquet or CSV files delivered into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Pros
- Wide range of datasets: movement, visits with dwell, home and work, and trips
- Flat-file delivery to S3 or GCP, plus APIs
- Orchestrator self-serve platform, launched March 2026
- Publishes its sensitive-location removal and supplier consent criteria
Cons
- Raw data, so your team builds the analysis and reporting
- Device and country figures are vendor claims
- Prospects must state a use case, which Veraset reviews before granting data access
5. pass_by: best for data and analytics teams that want US retail visit feeds delivered into their warehouse.
pass_by (Passby Technologies Ltd) is a London-based retail market intelligence company. Its Almanac platform brings brand, market, spend and trip insights into one view, AI Retail Agents put the same data into AI assistants, and Feeds & API delivers the signals into customers' own tools. Its US visit data covers about 93% of branded retail points of interest: 1.31M POIs across 7,080 brands, 292 retail categories and 687 stock tickers. Visit counts are aggregated daily at POI level, with history from January 2019 and 90-day visit forecasts updated monthly. Delivery options include S3, SFTP, Snowflake, BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, Databricks and a REST API. pass_by self-reports correlation to actual traffic of 86% daily, 80% weekly and 88% monthly.
For teams replacing Gravy Analytics' feeds, pass_by delivers aggregated visit counts rather than device-level signals, through warehouses, cloud storage or an API. Its accuracy figures are published, though self-reported, and its US data centers on branded retail. Huq suits teams that want weekly footfall, catchment and visitor behavior for any address across 35 markets, in a platform or as Parquet or CSV feeds.
Pros
- Visit data for about 93% of US branded retail POIs (1.31M POIs, 7,080 brands)
- Delivery into S3, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks or by API
- US history from January 2019
- Platform, AI agents and feeds from one provider
Cons
- Coverage centers on branded retail, so other property types may be thinner
- Its 94% correlation to ground truth is self-reported
- Its homepage doesn't list the countries it covers
6. Foursquare: best for teams that need POI data and visit attribution for marketing.
Foursquare is a POI and location data company with more than 15 years in location technology. Its places data comes as the Places API, Places POI Data files, Open Source Places and Business Listings, and it also sells marketing products (Attribution, Audience, Proximity) and geospatial tools such as Spatial Workbench and Spatial H3 Hub. Foursquare lists 100M+ POIs in more than 200 countries, 16 billion+ check-ins and data from 500M+ devices. Data is delivered in customers' preferred formats and through 550+ integrated partners, including AWS, Snowflake and The Trade Desk. On September 18, 2026 Infillion announced it would acquire Foursquare; AdExchanger reports Foursquare will keep its brand and keep selling data to third parties "for now".
Foursquare is a Gravy Analytics alternative for teams whose main need is places data, or audiences and attribution for advertising, delivered through partners they already use. Infillion's acquisition may change the roadmap, so check contract terms. Huq focuses on location decisions rather than ad measurement, with weekly footfall, catchment and cross-visitation across 35 markets for retail chains, retail property and investors.
Pros
- 100M+ POIs across 200+ countries
- Open Source Places alongside commercial Places data
- 550+ partner integrations, including Esri Business Analyst
- Attribution and Audience products for marketers
Cons
- Focuses on places data and ad measurement rather than store-level foot traffic analysis
- After the Infillion deal, AdExchanger reports third-party data sales continue only "for now"
7. Echo Analytics: best for data teams that want footfall and cross-visitation files for Europe and the US.
Echo Analytics is a geospatial data provider that sells location datasets rather than a dashboard. Its core products are Places, POI data on 80M+ locations worldwide, and Shapes, building footprints for commercial locations with 95%+ polygon coverage. Its insight datasets cover Footfall, Catchment Area, Cross-visitation, GeoPersona and Travel Patterns, and it also offers a Location SDK and geolocation APIs. Coverage varies by product: its Datarade listings span Europe and the US, from 5 to 33 countries depending on the dataset. Echo sells to retail, adtech and martech, FMCG, consulting and market research teams. It offers free data samples and public documentation, and works with partners such as CARTO and Esri for teams that want to map the data.
For teams replacing Gravy Analytics, Echo sells aggregated insight datasets such as footfall and catchment rather than raw device signals, with coverage in Europe and the US. It has no dashboard of its own. Huq covers similar ground across 35 markets, refreshed weekly, and adds a self-serve platform, Projects for monitoring many sites, and monthly PDF location reports alongside Parquet or CSV feeds.
Pros
- Footfall, catchment and cross-visitation datasets from one provider
- 80M+ locations with 95%+ polygon coverage claimed
- Free data sample before you commit
- Merges with your own data while keeping your taxonomies
Cons
- No built-in visualization; Echo relies on partner tools
- Country coverage varies by product, from 5 to 33 countries on Datarade
- Its homepage doesn't state a data refresh schedule
How to choose a Gravy Analytics alternative
Do you need a dashboard or raw data?
Gravy sold data to teams that build their own tools. If you'd rather answer site questions directly, pick a platform with a dashboard. If you have data engineers, file feeds may suit you better.
Which markets do you need?
Most US foot traffic vendors cover the US only. If your stores or assets sit in several countries, check that one provider measures them all the same way.
What will your compliance team ask?
After the FTC's order, AdExchanger advised buyers to ask how vendors verify consent and handle sensitive locations. Ask every vendor on this list, Huq included.
Can the vendor show its validation?
Ask for accuracy tests against ground truth, such as door counts or reported sales, and check which country each test covers.
Frequently asked questions
What is Gravy Analytics?
Gravy Analytics is a location data company founded in 2011 in Ashburn, Virginia. It merged with Unacast in late 2023 and is now a Unacast subsidiary, and gravyanalytics.com redirects to unacast.com. Unacast sells location data, foot traffic data, analytics APIs and data linkage products, so Gravy buyers now deal with Unacast.
What did the FTC order say about Gravy Analytics?
In December 2024 the FTC alleged that Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel sold sensitive location data, including visits to medical facilities and religious organizations, without verified consent. On January 14, 2025 the FTC finalized an order banning the sale, sharing or use of sensitive location data, with narrow exceptions, and requiring deletion of historic data unless deidentified or consented.
What was the Gravy Analytics data breach?
Gravy Analytics confirmed a security incident in January 2025 and says it discovered it on January 4, 2025. The Register reported that at least four lawsuits followed and that Gravy filed a report with Norway's Data Protection Authority. We found no public record of the lawsuits' outcomes.
What is the best alternative to Gravy Analytics for foot traffic data?
Huq suits retail chains, retail property owners and investors: footfall by week, month and year, residents vs visitors, catchment, drive time, frequency, dwell, dayparts, cross-visitation, tourism, density, transport mode, POIs, brands, industries, plus demographics and spend in selected markets, across 35 markets, in a platform or as S3/GCS feeds, updated weekly. Placer.ai is a US-only dashboard, Veraset suits teams wanting raw files, and Foursquare suits POI needs.
How often is Huq data updated?
Huq data refreshes weekly. That covers footfall by week, month and year, residents vs visitors, catchment, drive time, behavior, cross-visitation, tourism, density, transport mode, POIs, brands and industries, plus demographics and spend in selected markets. Use the Explore map, exports, monthly PDF reports, or Parquet and CSV feeds into S3 or GCS.
Does Huq cover the US?
Yes. The US is one of Huq's 35 markets, and Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each market twice a year. Huq's data covers footfall by week, month and year, residents vs visitors, catchment, drive time, frequency, dwell, dayparts, cross-visitation, tourism, density, transport mode, POIs, brands, industries, plus demographics and spend in selected markets. Request a free analysis to see what's available for your US locations.
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Book a demoSources
- Huq: Walmart sales validation study
- Unacast: About (Gravy Analytics merger)
- Wikipedia: Gravy Analytics
- FTC: complaint against Gravy Analytics and Venntel (Dec 2024)
- FTC: final order (Jan 2025)
- The Register: Gravy Analytics breach lawsuits
- AdExchanger: FTC settlements with location data sellers
- Placer.ai
- Placer.ai: FAQ
- Placer.ai: data delivery methods
- Advan Research
- Advan Research: data dictionaries
- Advan Research: SafeGraph Patterns acquisition
- pass_by
- Datarade: pass_by US visit data
- Veraset
- Foursquare
- AdExchanger: Infillion acquires Foursquare
- Echo Analytics
- Datarade: Echo Analytics foot traffic
- SourceForge: Gravy Analytics alternatives
- Unacast: foot traffic data
- Unacast: visitation datasets
- Placer.ai: pricing
- TechCrunch: Placer.ai raises $75M (Aug 2024)
- Capterra: Placer.ai reviews
- Advan Research: About
- Business Wire: Advan acquires RetailStat REI (Nov 2024)
- Advan Research: news
- Advan Research: 2020 award
- Advan Research: 2020 coverage release
- GrowthFactor: foot traffic provider comparison (vendor-authored)
- pass_by: Placer.ai alternatives (self-reported figures)
- Esri: Foursquare data update in Business Analyst
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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