Geocodio and Smarty (SmartyStreets) are both online services that provide geocoding services and allow you to turn addresses into coordinates and coordinates into approximate addresses.
This article compares the two services with some commonly-asked questions.
Questions answered in this article:
This information is complete to the best of our knowledge. We believe competition is a good and necessary thing, and strive to accurately and fairly describe our competitors. See any mistakes? Please email us.
Smarty (SmartyStreets) has several different APIs, each with different terms of use. For their rooftop geocoding API, Smarty does not allow you to permenantly store or share results from their service. From the Smarty US Rooftop API Terms of Use:
3. Restrictions:...Except as permitted as internal business use purposes, Client shall have no right to disclose, reproduce, copy, reverse-engineer, mine, scrape, modify, assign, distribute, sell, rent, lease, market, publish, transfer, share, or sublicense
and
4. Termination and Deletion Obligation: Upon expiration of a subscription or term set forth in a Service Order, Client shall cease use of, delete, destroy, and/or purge from its computer system any Geocoding Content in its possession. Upon request, Client will provide certification of removal, deletion and disposal of Provider's proprietary Content.
Geocodio allows you to permanently store, share, reuse, copy, or otherwise use results from our service without restrictions. Our caveat is that it must be allowed by the underlying data source license, yet we only integrate underlying datasets that are restriction-free. (See more about our sources here.) Here's the exact language from our Terms:
4.5.1. Provided your usage of Geocodio and the way you acquired, uploaded, and use the data is in compliance with all applicable laws (including but not limited to those listed in section 4.4), there are no additional restrictions on how data from Geocodio is used or stored, provided the license for the underlying data permits it. We use best efforts to determine that our underlying data sources permit replication, but you take responsibility for ensuring your usage complies with our sources' licenses. All results are provided with sources and you understand it is your responsibility to use that information as needed.
and
4.5.2 Provided the above is satisfied, data from Geocodio, including addresses and coordinates, may be stored in your database, reproduced, or otherwise reused, manipulated, or resold.
Smarty (SmartyStreets) does not have a daily free allowance. Smarty (SmartyStreets) instead has a monthly free allowance of 250 lookups for US address validation and ZIP+9 level geocoding. Smarty (SmartyStreets) does not have a free tier for reverse geocoding and starts at $54/month for 25,000 lookups. Smarty (SmartyStreets) does not have a free tier for rooftop geocoding and starts at $104/month for up to 5,000 lookups/month.
Geocodio's free allowance is 2,500 lookups per day, which works out to roughly 75,000 per month if used every day in full during a 30-day month. We have the same free tier and pricing for USPS data matching, forward geocoding, reverse geocoding, and rooftop geocoding. See Geocodio's pricing here.
Smarty (SmartyStreets)' US forward geocoding plus USPS results are at the ZIP+4 level, which is roughly equivalent to the block or neighborhood level. Smarty (SmartyStreets) also offers a separate rooftop geocoding product.
Geocodio's geocoding accuracy is mostly at the individual address level. Given a random sample, 70% of results will be the exact rooftop, 20% of the results will be in front of the house on the street, and 10% will be lower accuracy types such as a nearby address, neighborhood, or city-level. All results are returned with an accuracy score and type so you can easily filter out lower-accuracy results.
Smarty (SmartyStreets) uses the US Census Bureau TIGER/Line dataset for geocoding. It is unclear what their data sources are for rooftop data and they state it is their own data. See their page on data sources here.
Geocodio's geocoding engine uses over 1,000 datasets, most of which are official state and city datasets. As a fallback, Geocodio also provides results from TIGER/Line. All results are returned with the underlying data source. See Geocodio's data sources here.
Yes, Smarty (SmartyStreets) does USPS address verification.
Geocodio does provide USPS address verification, yet is not currently CASS certified. Address verification can be done through the zip4 data append. USPS indicators such as ZIP+4, ZIP9, carrier route IDs, and more are retiurned as well. See more here.
Smarty (SmartyStreets)' pricing is based around monthly plans, each with a set limit of requests per month. Smarty (SmartyStreets) does not have a pay-as-you-go option.
For US address verification, 250 lookups per month are free. Paid plans for US addresses start at 500 lookups per month for $20 and go up to $1,000 for unlimited usage. See SmartyStreets' US pricing here. International pricing can be found here.
Smarty (SmartyStreets) reverse geocoding starts at $54/month for 25,000 lookups/month.
Smarty (SmartyStreets) rooftop geocoding starts at $104/month for up to 5,000 lookups/month. The highest volume they publicly list a price for is 6 million lookups per year for $23,328/year. The price for the Unlimited plan is not publicly listed.
Geocodio has two options: pay-as-you-go and Unlimited. With pay-as-you-go, the first 2,500 lookups per day are free, and then $0.50/1,000 after that. You can estimate your costs here. There is a rate limit of 1,000 API calls per minute.
Unlimited geocoding, which is not rate limited as it gives you a private dedicated instance of the Geocodio platform and lets you process 5M per day when optimized with batch processing, is $1,000 per month and is available month-to-month. See Geocodio's pricing here.
Yes, Smarty (SmartyStreets) has an API. You can see the documentation here.
Yes, Geocodio has an API. You can see the documentation here.
Smarty (SmartyStreets) has a copy/paste tool. Addresses must be copy/pasted into the tool and copy/pasted out. Smarty (SmartyStreets) limits list processing to 50,000 US addresses or 5,000 international addresses. See here.
Geocoding spreadsheets is one of Geocodio's core features. You can geocode a CSV, TSV, and Excel spreadsheets of addresses or coordinates via file upload or API. Lists must be 1 GB or less and results are provided in a CSV file. You can upload the file or copy/paste. Upload your list here.
You can also process a CSV via API with Geocodio (see documentation here.)
Smarty (SmartyStreets) supports the US through their own geocoder and has integrated another geocoder for international support. Their international pricing is higher than their US pricing and can be found here.
Geocodio supports the US and Canada. The price is the same for both countries.
This information is complete to the best of our knowledge. We believe competition is a good and necessary thing, and strive to accurately and fairly describe our competitors. See any mistakes? Please email us.