Our competitors are built for different jobs. We compare them side by side on the things that matter.
We get a lot of questions about how Shovels stacks up to similar services and platforms. Here, we try to answer your questions as honestly as we can.
We built a comparison table of the companies we get asked most about. Often, when a provider fits your job better, it's not because it's the best product for all use cases, but because it's solving the right problem. And that's how this table is organized.
| Alternative | Best for | How it differs from Shovels |
|---|---|---|
| PROPERTY DATA AND RISK PLATFORMS | ||
| ATTOM | Buying deeds, mortgages, AVMs, and hazard data alongside permits in one contract | Permits are one dataset in a catalog licensed from upstream suppliers |
| Cotality (CoreLogic) | Valuation, mortgage, catastrophe, and fraud data within one property data ecosystem | Permits are one dataset among many, and their origins are not published |
| Verisk (BuildFax) | Carriers that want a finished roof age, condition score, or replacement cost estimate | Permits are an input to scores rather than records you can query |
| CONSTRUCTION LEADS | ||
| Construction Monitor | Contractors and local suppliers who want new permits with contacts in one market | Permit leads sold per market and category rather than nationwide |
| Dodge & ConstructConnect | Winning commercial work before the bid closes | Research-verified commercial projects, tracked from planning to bid award |
| HOMEOWNER MARKETPLACES | ||
| BuildZoom | Homeowners finding and vetting a contractor for their own project | A contractor matching marketplace for homeowners, with data licensing on the side |
| BUILD IT YOURSELF | ||
| DIY scraping | One city or a one-time historical pull, with engineering time to spare | You own the scrapers and the upkeep every time a portal changes |
Permits come straight from jurisdictions, including offline ones, standardized the same way in every market.
Every permit connects to the contractor who pulled it, with permit history, inspection pass rates, and contacts.
Decisions tracks zoning, planning, and entitlement records, surfacing projects months before a permit is filed.
Vendor comparison tables, including this one, are written by vendors. Ultimately, the only comparison that settles anything is the one you run on your own jurisdictions.
Include at least one small or rural one. Many providers look good in Los Angeles County. Coverage claims are won and lost in the long tail.
Ninety days is usually enough to see cadence and completeness without a long procurement cycle.
Check fill rates field by field. A permit with no valuation, no contractor, and no work description inflates a row count without answering a question.
Refresh cadence is how often a pipeline runs. Lag is how long after issuance a permit becomes queryable and correct. Lag is the number that affects your work.
If your use case links permits to contractors, or to parcels, test that join. Single-entity providers can look fine until you try to connect what you need.
Sign up for Shovels Online free and query permits in the jurisdictions you care about today. No sales call required.
The most common alternatives are ATTOM and Cotality (formerly CoreLogic), which license broad property data catalogs that include permits; Verisk, which absorbed BuildFax and uses permits as an input to insurance scores; Construction Monitor, which sells permit-based leads by market and category; Dodge and ConstructConnect, which track commercial construction projects through bid and award; BuildZoom, which runs a homeowner-facing contractor marketplace and licenses data on the side; and building an in-house scraping pipeline against municipal portals. Each is built for a different job, so the right comparison depends on whether you need permit records, project leads, risk scores, or a broad property catalog.
Permit data records what a jurisdiction actually authorized, with dates, valuations, work descriptions, and the contractor who pulled the permit. Project leads describe commercial jobs earlier in their life, usually before a bid closes, and are tracked by research teams. Leads are earlier but sparser and commercial-focused. Permits are later but complete, verifiable, and cover residential work too.
It depends on the use case rather than on a universal standard. Shovels refreshes core permit data twice monthly and publishes release notes for every release. The more useful question than refresh frequency is lag: how long after a permit is issued does it become queryable and correct. A daily pipeline pulling from a jurisdiction that publishes monthly is still a month behind.
For a single jurisdiction or a one-time historical pull, usually yes. Across many jurisdictions it usually is not, because the recurring cost is maintenance rather than the initial build. Municipal portals change format without notice, publish in inconsistent schemas, and some do not publish online at all. The ongoing work of deduplication, standardization, and repair is what commercial providers absorb.