Huq is our product. Here's how we compared everyone, including us.
SafeGraph is a strong source of places data. Its Places product lists 80M+ points of interest across 195+ countries and territories, updated monthly, alongside building Geometry, Address data and US Spend data. It's delivered through Snowflake, AWS, Databricks and other channels.
Many people searching for SafeGraph want something it no longer sells: foot traffic. SafeGraph's Patterns datasets were retired at the start of 2023 after Advan acquired the Patterns business in November 2022, and SafeGraph's docs now refer foot traffic buyers to a mobility data partner. SafeGraph is also data-only, with no dashboard, and pricing is a custom annual fee.
This list covers foot traffic providers first, then places data vendors if POI data is what you need. Each entry says who it suits and what to check, with sources listed at the end.
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with the CCPA and applicable US state privacy laws.
Quick answer
For retail chains, retail property and investors, choose Huq, built to give the broadest set of location data across 35 markets. To continue SafeGraph Patterns, Advan's Weekly Patterns+. For global POI data, Foursquare. For raw mobility data, Veraset.
Foot traffic and places data providers that SafeGraph users most often consider.
In this guide
SafeGraph users usually need two things: places data, which SafeGraph still sells, and the foot traffic it stopped selling in 2023. Huq is built to give you the broadest set of location data across 35 markets, so visits and places sit in one platform. On the places side, Huq covers POIs, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, and shopping center and retail center types. On the movement side, it reports footfall by week, month and year, visiting versus passing traffic, residents versus visitors, catchment and drive-time analysis, footfall density and transportation mode.
Behavior data covers visit frequency, dwell time, time of day, cross-visitation and international visitation for tourism. Demographics (age, gender, purchasing power) and geo-spend by volume and category are available in selected markets. Data refreshes weekly, and Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each market twice a year. Data teams that worked from SafeGraph files can take the same numbers as data feeds: Parquet and CSV files delivered into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. Teams without SQL skills use the Explore map to draw any area or pick layers such as ZIP codes, run Projects across many sites, and export CSV, Excel or monthly PDF location reports. In Huq's own validation study, its visit data tracked Walmart's quarterly US net sales with 0.85 correlation.
Pros
Cons
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.
Advan bought SafeGraph's Patterns business in November 2022, and Weekly Patterns+ and Neighborhood Patterns+ are its successors, so Advan is the closest continuation for teams that relied on SafeGraph for foot traffic. It doesn't replace SafeGraph Places or Geometry. Huq is the alternative for teams that want weekly footfall in a self-serve platform as well as files, across 35 markets, with feeds available as Parquet or CSV files delivered into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Pros
Cons
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 former SafeGraph Patterns users, Placer.ai swaps raw weekly files for a finished dashboard, while its feeds still suit teams that want visits in a warehouse. It doesn't sell a global POI database like SafeGraph Places. Compared with Huq, it has a longer US track record and a larger US customer base; Huq covers 35 markets in one platform, with footfall, catchment, dwell and cross-visitation refreshed weekly, and delivers feeds as Parquet or CSV files delivered into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Pros
Cons
Unacast is a location data company headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia, with Norwegian roots, and the parent of Gravy Analytics since their late-2023 merger. It sells global mobility data, US foot traffic data, consumer data enrichment and data linkages to adtech, martech, software, real estate, retail and government teams. Its visitation datasets cover weekly, monthly and quarterly foot traffic, dynamic trade areas, cross-visitation and visitation patterns, with US history from October 2018 and a weekly release with a 4-day lag. Analytics APIs include Area Visitors, Observations, Trade Areas and Personas, and bulk data can be scheduled into a warehouse, lake or S3. Foot traffic datasets cover the US; raw mobility feeds are listed for 247 countries.
For SafeGraph customers who used Patterns as weekly visit files, Unacast's visitation datasets and APIs are a like-for-like data option, including trade areas and cross-visitation. It doesn't replace SafeGraph's POI or building data. In January 2025 the FTC finalized an order on how Gravy Analytics, now a Unacast subsidiary, handles sensitive location data, so ask how it affects what you buy. Huq covers footfall, catchment and cross-visitation across 35 markets, with Parquet or CSV feeds.
Pros
Cons
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 former SafeGraph Patterns users, pass_by offers POI-level visit feeds into the same warehouses many SafeGraph customers used, such as Snowflake and Databricks, with brand and ticker mapping built in. It isn't a general POI database like SafeGraph Places. Huq is the alternative for teams that also need catchment, dwell, cross-visitation and a self-serve platform across 35 markets, with Parquet or CSV files delivered into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Pros
Cons
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 the most direct alternative to SafeGraph Places: a global POI dataset with warehouse delivery, plus a free Open Source Places tier. Esri switched Business Analyst's POIs to Foursquare Open Source Places in February 2025. It's a places provider first, so teams that used SafeGraph Patterns will need another source for visits. Huq covers that side, with weekly footfall, catchment and cross-visitation across 35 markets, plus brand and industry layers.
Pros
Cons
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.
Echo is the closest single-vendor replacement for SafeGraph's old mix of Places, Geometry and Patterns: POIs, building shapes and footfall from one source. You'll need in-house tools or a partner to analyze it, and its update cadence isn't published. Huq overlaps on footfall, catchment and cross-visitation, adds a self-serve platform and monthly PDF location reports, covers 35 markets refreshed weekly, and also delivers Parquet or CSV feeds.
Pros
Cons
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.
Veraset suits SafeGraph customers who used Patterns as an input to their own models and now want the rawer layer underneath: pings, visits with dwell, and trips. Turning that into site answers needs an in-house data team, and the scale figures are vendor claims. Huq is the alternative for teams that want aggregated foot traffic: weekly footfall, catchment and cross-visitation across 35 markets, in a platform or as Parquet or CSV files delivered into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Pros
Cons
SafeGraph still sells places data. If you need visit counts, you need a foot traffic provider instead.
Advan's Weekly Patterns+ is the direct successor. Check field names and history before switching.
If no one on the team writes SQL, choose a vendor with a dashboard. Huq offers both a platform and data feeds.
Most US foot traffic vendors cover the US only. Huq covers 35 markets and manually validates 1,000+ locations in each, twice a year.
SafeGraph is a places data company. It sells Places (80M+ points of interest across 195+ countries and territories, updated monthly), Geometry (building footprints and parking lots), Address and US Spend data. It delivers data files through Snowflake, AWS Marketplace, Databricks, CARTO and Esri rather than a dashboard, and no longer sells foot traffic.
No. SafeGraph's docs say its Weekly, Monthly and Neighborhood Patterns datasets were no longer available from the start of 2023. Advan acquired the Patterns business in November 2022. SafeGraph now focuses on places, geometry, address and US spend data, and refers foot traffic buyers to a mobility data partner.
Advan Research sells Weekly Patterns+ and Neighborhood Patterns+, the successors to SafeGraph Patterns. Placer.ai, Unacast and pass_by sell US visits. Huq covers 35 markets with 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, in a platform or as Parquet/CSV feeds into S3 or GCS.
For places data, SafeGraph competitors include Foursquare and Echo Analytics. For foot traffic, which SafeGraph no longer sells, buyers compare Advan Research, Placer.ai, Unacast, pass_by, Veraset and Huq. CB Insights and Datarade both publish longer competitor lists.
Yes. Unlike SafeGraph, Huq, Placer.ai and Advan offer dashboards. Huq's Explore map and Projects cover 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, with exports, monthly PDF reports and Parquet/CSV feeds into S3 or GCS.
SafeGraph doesn't publish prices. Its pricing page describes a custom annual fee based on your mix of rows, columns and usage rights, with no pay-per-use option and no self-serve shop. Academic users are referred to Dewey.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoHuq 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.
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.