Smappen is one of the fastest ways to draw a catchment area. Pick an address, choose a drive time, and in about three minutes you have a clean isochrone with the population inside it. For a franchisee opening a first or second site, that is often enough. But a catchment map answers a narrow question: who lives within reach. It does not tell you who actually goes there. Gini by MyTraffic measures real foot traffic across Europe and the US, then turns it into a decision you can act on, in plain language.

Here is what that difference looks like in practice.

Why retailers choose Gini by MyTraffic over Smappen

Smappen shows who lives there. Gini shows who actually goes there.

Smappen's data comes from census records and open sources: INSEE in France, census equivalents elsewhere, plus a points-of-interest directory for the businesses nearby. That gives you the residential profile of an area, age, income, household size, and what sits around a location. It is genuinely useful, and Gini by MyTraffic uses the same kind of demographic base. The difference is what sits on top of it.

Census data is static, and in France it is also old. The published figures run on a reference year about three years behind the calendar, and for towns under 10,000 people the underlying survey is run only once every five years. A neighbourhood can gain a station, a new development, or a whole new crowd inside that window, and the census will not show it. So Smappen describes who slept in the area a few years ago, not who walks past the door at 1pm on a Saturday today.

People rarely shop where they live. They shop near the office, on the commute, beside the gym, in the centre they drive to at the weekend. On top of that same demographic layer, Gini adds the one thing Smappen does not have: measured GPS foot traffic at 5 to 10 meter street-level accuracy, refreshed continuously, counting the visitors who are really there and showing where they came from.

When you are choosing between two units on the same street, residential demographics will rate them almost identically. Real footfall will not.

A catchment map is the start of the analysis, not the end of it.

Smappen hands you a map and a table of figures. You read them, interpret them, and reach your own conclusion. That is the model. You do the thinking. Gini works the other way around. You ask a question in plain English, "should I open a second site in Bordeaux?", and Gini reads the Place DNA of the address, measures the footfall, maps the competition, flags cannibalisation risk with your existing network, and returns a recommendation with the reasoning attached. The answer comes first. The evidence sits right behind it.

That gap widens as the stakes rise. A drive-time polygon is fine for sketching a territory. It is thin ground for a lease you will sign for nine years.

France-deep is not Europe-wide.

Smappen started in Toulouse, and its data is richest at home. French demographic coverage runs deep. Step outside it and the picture thins: unlimited business and competitor search is restricted to the US and UK, and demographic depth changes country by country. Drawing an isochrone works anywhere, but an isochrone is just geometry until there is real data inside it.

Gini covers 18 countries across Europe and the US at the same street-level GPS accuracy, through one interface. France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, the Nordic markets, and the US all behave the same way. For a network crossing borders, consistent depth in the markets you actually operate in beats a long list of countries where the data is shallow.

What are Smappen's limits compared to Gini?

Smappen does one job well: it builds and analyses zones. The limits show up at the edges of that job.

It measures potential, not performance. Smappen helps you draw a territory and estimate who lives in it. It does not track how your existing sites are actually trading, whether footfall is climbing or falling, or how you stack up against the shop two streets over. Gini answers both the prospecting question, where should I go, and the performance question, how is my network doing and which sites are slipping.

The feature ceiling is real, and so is the pricing step.

On review sites, the recurring note from heavier users is that Smappen lacks the depth they eventually needed, and that costs climb once you push past a data threshold. That is the honest shape of an entry-level tool: strong value at the start, tighter as the questions get harder. Gini is priced from $250 a month with a free trial, no setup, and no jump in cost the moment your analysis turns serious.

Where Gini by MyTraffic outperforms Smappen

The gap becomes visible the moment a network grows past a handful of sites. The Expansion Planner workflow takes your criteria, your existing footprint, and real mobility data and turns them into a territorial plan ready for leadership. There are no polygons to reformat, no extra step between the analysis and the decision.

It also shows up for teams that need an answer rather than a map to interpret. You type the question. Gini reads the Place DNA of any address, weighs real footfall against competition and demographic fit, and tells you what the data says, without requiring GIS skills or a waiting period.

The third gap is the data itself. Footfall is the signal Smappen does not carry. Gini combines it with visitor origin, competitor positioning, catchment profiles, and revenue modelling, then leads with the recommendation rather than handing you a layer to decode. As one of our users put it: "Tools like MyTraffic help support decisions with concrete data, which is important when justifying new sites internally or comparing options across markets."

If you are placing your first location in a single town, Smappen will do the job and do it cheaply. The day you start comparing real footfall across sites, or deciding where to open across three countries at once, you need measured mobility and a companion that reads it for you. That is Gini by MyTraffic.