SafeGraph earned its reputation the honest way: building one of the most cited point-of-interest datasets in the data science world. Academics like it. Data engineers like it. But SafeGraph is not built for the person deciding where to open a store or which lease to sign. It sells the raw material. Gini by MyTraffic sells the answer.

Here is what that difference looks like once you get past the marketing pages.

Why retail and real estate teams choose Gini by MyTraffic over SafeGraph

SafeGraph sold its foot traffic business. Gini never needed to.

For years, SafeGraph's Patterns product was the closest thing it had to a mobility offering: weekly and monthly visit counts tied to points of interest. That product does not belong to SafeGraph anymore. In November 2022, Advan Research acquired the Patterns business outright, and SafeGraph's own documentation now states plainly that SafeGraph Places does not contain mobility data. What people still assume is SafeGraph's core strength, foot traffic, has not been theirs for three years.

Gini by MyTraffic was built around mobility signals from day one. Ask a question about visitor volume, catchment overlap, or seasonal patterns, and Gini answers with current GPS-based data, not a dataset a competitor bought off the shelf in 2022.

Coverage you have to ask about, not coverage you can see.

SafeGraph groups every country into a coverage tier, from Tier 1 down to Tier 4, and by its own definition, lower tiers miss niche categories like hospitals, schools, and parks entirely. Continental Europe has historically sat in those lower tiers, with SafeGraph adding coverage market by market rather than starting there. If you are scoping a site in Lyon or Lisbon, you are relying on a dataset that was built for Denver first.

Gini by MyTraffic covers 17 European countries plus the US with a consistent standard of accuracy, not a tiered system where some markets get the full picture and others get whatever spillover comes from global brands.

Gini by MyTraffic is built for European law. SafeGraph opted out of it.

This is worth reading twice. SafeGraph's own privacy policy states that the company is not established and does not offer products or services involving personal data in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, and that GDPR and UK GDPR consequently do not apply to it. That is not a compliance gap. It is a company that structured itself to sit outside the law your business operates under.

Gini by MyTraffic was architected GDPR-first.

No individual is tracked or identified, every mobility signal is anonymized and aggregated at the source, and every output documents its assumptions. For a European retailer or real estate team, that is not a footnote. It is the difference between a vendor your legal team can sign off on and one they cannot.

Where SafeGraph's limits show up

Three things come up consistently when European teams look past SafeGraph's reputation.

No decision layer.‍

SafeGraph delivers a CSV, an S3 bucket, or a Snowflake share. Someone on your team still has to clean it, join it, and turn it into a recommendation. Gini's conversational interface skips that step. Ask "should I open a second location in Bordeaux?" and Gini runs the Site Selector workflow, maps competition, flags cannibalisation risk, and gives you a recommendation with reasoning attached.

Pricing you have to negotiate for.‍

SafeGraph does not publish rates. Depending on rows, columns, and delivery frequency, quotes for its datasets have ranged from a few cents per record to tens of thousands of dollars a year. Gini by MyTraffic starts at $250/month with no procurement cycle required.

Quality gaps SafeGraph itself tracks.

To its credit, SafeGraph publishes an internal quality framework built around what it calls a "Real Open Rate" and a coverage rate, an admission that some share of any given pull will be duplicate, closed, or simply missing. That lines up with what shows up in independent reviews: users pointing to gaps in specific categories, like parks or newer local businesses, that a location-decision workflow cannot afford to miss.

A data science team can filter around that. A retail director evaluating one address cannot.

SafeGraph has also drawn sustained criticism from privacy researchers over how it has handled sensitive location categories in the past, including a widely reported 2022 controversy that prompted a congressional inquiry. Worth knowing before your legal team signs anything.

Where Gini by MyTraffic outperforms SafeGraph

For decision-makers without a data team on standby.‍

SafeGraph hands you rows and columns. Gini hands you an answer, with the reasoning attached, the moment you ask the question.

For expansion across multiple European markets.‍

The Expansion Planner workflow builds a data-driven territorial plan from your own network and real mobility data, ready to bring to leadership, not a file to reformat first.

For teams that need governance their legal department can sign off on.‍

Gini by MyTraffic was built GDPR-first for a European business. SafeGraph built its policies to sit outside that framework entirely. As Juan Carlos Martin, Head of Expansion at a major European retailer, put it: "Tools like MyTraffic help support decisions with concrete data, which is important when justifying new sites internally or comparing options across markets.