Top 10 best foot traffic data providers in Europe (2026)

Picking a foot traffic data provider is one of the few software decisions a development director makes that quietly shapes every store opening for the next five years. Get it right and your site scores, your catchment maps, and your competitor benchmarks all point the same direction.

Get it wrong and you are defending a bad lease to your CFO with numbers nobody trusts.

The problem is that the market got crowded. So here is a different kind of ranking: ten providers that matter in Europe in 2026, sorted by what each one is genuinely good at, and honest about where each one stops being useful. Some measure the whole market from the street. Some count heads inside your four walls. Mixing those two up is how teams end up paying for the wrong thing.

One distinction to keep in your head as you read.

Market-level providers tell you what is happening outside your store: who passes, who comes from where, how a street or centre compares to another. In-store counters tell you what happens once people are inside: entries, dwell, conversion.

A site selection decision needs the first. A store operations decision needs the second. Most teams need both, eventually, but not from the same tool.

How we ranked them

Five questions separate a provider you can build a strategy on from one you cannot:

• Coverage: does it cover your whole portfolio and your competitors, across every country you operate in, with the same method? Patchy coverage means uncomparable numbers.
• Data depth: visit counts alone answer one question. Catchment, visitor profiles, spend, and benchmarks answer the ten that follow.
• Method transparency: can the provider tell you how the data is validated, against what, and where it gets thin?
• Time to a decision: how long from question to answer? Some tools hand you a dataset and a three-month integration. It doesn't have to be that way.
• Who it is built for: a GIS platform for data scientists and a companion for an expansion director are different products, even when the underlying data overlaps.

With that frame, here is the field. A note on what is deliberately not here: this is a ranking of data providers, not a directory of every people-counting hardware vendor in Europe. There are dozens of those, and they matter for store operations, but they answer a narrower question than the one a development director brings to a lease decision.

1. Gini by Mytraffic: the first AI companion for location decisions

Gini by Mytraffic sits first because it solves the problem development directors actually have: not a shortage of data, but a shortage of decisions. You ask Gini a question in plain language, the way you would ask a colleague, and it answers. No dashboard to configure, no query to build, no data team to wait on.

The data underneath is the part competitors struggle to match in Europe. Mytraffic measures real-world foot traffic across 18 countries using anonymised mobile GPS data, drawing on more than 88.5 million unique users annually with history back to 2021. That depth is why over 700+ companies already rely on it.

What you get: footfall and vehicle flow at any address, catchment mapping, visitor profiles, and competitor benchmarks, all in one place. If you are new to the category, it is worth understanding what Gini is and how AI now drives site selection before you compare it to anything else. Using Gini is as simple as asking a question, no training time required. Each question returns a recommendation, not a chart or a confusing excel you still have to read.

Best for: Retail, F&B and real estate teams making European and US site selection and expansion decisions who want the answer faster than they could brief a consultant.
Where it stops: Gini measures the market outside your store. It can be used to measure in-store traffic, but it's accuracy won't be as precise as an operational counter, which will help measure per aisle flow.

2. Unacast: international reach for multi-region teams

Unacast earns second place for teams whose footprint runs well beyond Europe.

After merging with Gravy Analytics, it offers an integrated product suite spanning the full analytics journey, with over a billion monthly devices across 180+ countries and a GDPR-conscious positioning that matters to European legal teams.

The data comes aggregated from more than fifteen suppliers, which is both the strength and the catch. Broad reach, but accuracy is not publicly benchmarked against ground truth the way some rivals publish it, so you should validate fit against your own known locations before you commit.

Best for: Multinational teams that need one scalable source across many regions and accept a build-it-yourself approach to turning feeds into decisions.
Where it stops: It is data infrastructure, not a decision companion. You bring the analysts.

3. Geoblink: the Spain and Southern Europe specialist

Geoblink earns a place here thanks to it's distinct strength.

Founded in Spain, Geoblink is exceptional in Iberia and has extended coverage into Portugal, Switzerland, Poland and Austria. Its intuitive geospatial platform suits teams that want a guided interface for expansion decisions in those markets. Brands like Five Guys use it to forecast sales and compare opening locations across territories.

Best for: Teams whose centre of gravity is Spain or Southern Europe and desire an intuitive experience.
Where it stops: Geoblink requires training sessions before being completely adopted by new users.

4. Huq Industries: UK and European footfall with a self-serve angle

Huq is a credible European market-level provider, strongest in the UK and active across Europe. Its platform brings together footfall, catchment, visitor, spend and demographic data for retail, local government and commercial real estate teams, and it is built privacy-first as a zero-hardware, GDPR-conscious source.

A useful practical touch: you can buy instant footfall data across 2,500+ UK retail centre locations without a subscription, which makes it easy to test on a known location before committing.

Best for: UK-centric retail, CRE and public-sector teams that want quick, decision-ready footfall and catchment data with a low barrier to entry.
Where it stops: Its depth is strongest in the UK. For a genuinely pan-European expansion plan measured the same way in every market, a provider with broader native coverage carries more weight.

5. Geolytix: footfall plus card spend for UK retail planning

Geolytix is another company that has earned a strong reputation among UK retail location planners by pairing mobility-based footfall with card spend. Its footfall products report daily visitor numbers across more than 15,000 retail places, and its card spend layer shows where retailers actually outperform their own estates rather than where they should on paper.

It is refreshingly candid about method, openly discussing how it corrects for bias in mobile-device data.

Best for: UK retail and grocery teams that want micro-level footfall combined with spend signals for site selection and network planning.
Where it stops: It is a data and consulting house more than a self-serve companion, and its core strength is the UK rather than the full European map.

6. RetailNext: in-store conversion and store operations

Here the list crosses the line from market to store. RetailNext brought e-commerce-style analytics to physical retail, and more than 400 brands across 90+ countries use it to understand what happens once a shopper is inside: entries, paths, dwell, fitting-room behaviour, conversion against POS.

This is genuinely useful data, and it answers a completely different question from everything above it. RetailNext tells you how well an existing store performs. It tells you nothing about whether a new street is worth a lease.

Best for: Operations and store-experience teams optimising conversion inside locations they already run.
Where it stops: Site selection and expansion. It sees inside your four walls, not the market around them. Pair it with a market-level provider for the full picture.

7. MRI Software (Springboard): UK retail-destination footfall since 2002

Here the list crosses from market to destination. Springboard, now part of MRI Software's OnLocation suite, has tracked and forecast footfall to UK retail locations since 2002, analysing more than 70 million counts a week across almost 500 shopping destinations. It splits high streets from shopping centres from retail parks, which makes it the go-to benchmark for how UK retail destinations are performing over time.

Best for: UK landlords, destination managers and retailers who need authoritative, long-run footfall benchmarks at the destination level.
Where it stops: It measures destinations and the assets within them, mostly in the UK. It is a benchmark and operations tool, not a pan-European site-selection source.

8. Quantaflow: French shopping-centre flow specialist

Quantaflow is the French leader in shopping-centre visitor counting, with around 20 years of experience and certified, independently validated sensor data.

Part of the Quanteo Group alongside Eco-Counter, it goes beyond raw counts to visitor origin, frequency, profile and competitor cross-visitation, and it is trusted by major landlords such as Eurocommercial Properties across their French and Belgian centres.

A big plus is that it is GDPR-compliant by design.

Best for: Shopping-centre owners and asset managers in France and neighbouring markets who need certified, real-time flow data inside their centres.
Where it stops: It counts and profiles visitors inside the assets it is installed in. It does not tell you whether an address you do not yet operate is worth a lease.

9. Pygmalios: European in-store analytics with an AI layer

Pygmalios is next as a European in-store specialist now serving 2,000+ retail locations across Europe. It covers people counting, queue management, zone heatmaps and cross-store benchmarking, and feeds it all into an AI engine that pushes daily recommendations to store managers, with everything processed as anonymised sensor data inside EU infrastructure.

Like RetailNext, it lives inside the store. The AI briefings are a genuinely modern touch for operations teams.

Best for: European retailers optimising in-store performance who want AI-driven daily prompts rather than raw dashboards.
Where it stops: It measures inside the door. Your expansion map needs a market-level provider.

10. V-Count: 3D sensor people counting across venues

V-Count rounds out the list as a sensor-based people-counting specialist used across retail, malls, airports and other venues. It runs 3D AI-powered sensors that the company reports have 99% accuracy, with staff-exclusion and real-time occupancy features feeding a business-intelligence platform.

For teams that want hard, certified counts at the door rather than modelled market estimates, it is a solid operational choice.

Best for: Retailers and venue operators who need accurate, real-time people counts and occupancy inside specific sites.
Where it stops: Like the other counters here, it measures presence inside a location. It says nothing about the market outside it.

Matching the provider to your decision

Strip away the marketing and the choice gets simple, because it follows the decision you are trying to make.

If the question is where do we open next, you need market-level data that covers your whole European footprint with one consistent method, plus catchment and competitor benchmarks to back the call. That is the job Gini by Mytraffic was built for, with Unacast or SafeGraph as options if your reach extends well beyond Europe and the US and you have a data team to turn feeds into answers.

If the question is how do our existing stores perform inside, you need an in-store counter. RetailNext and Pygmalios are the strongest reads there, and they complement a market-level provider rather than replace it.

And if you are still learning what the category can do, Gini's free tier is a low-cost place to experiment, as long as you remember its numbers were tuned for American malls, not European high streets.

The teams that struggle are the ones who buy a single limited tool and expect it to answer every question. The teams that move fast pick a market-level companion for the where, an in-store counter for the how, and stop asking a dataset to do a decision's job.

There is one more test worth applying before you sign anything: ask each provider how its data behaves in the specific cities where you plan to grow next year, not the ones in its case studies. Coverage that looks complete on a global map gets thin in real markets, and the gap rarely shows up until you are staring at a location that should have a number and does not. A European-native source measures the same way in Milan as it does in Manchester, which is the quiet advantage that compounds across an entire expansion plan. Across that whole portfolio, with footfall, catchment, visitor profiles and competitor benchmarks in one place and an answer waiting the moment you ask, that companion role is where Gini by Mytraffic is hard to beat.