Comparing Traffic Data APIs: Road511 vs HERE vs TomTom vs INRIX

If you’re building an app that needs traffic data, you have a few options. The big names — HERE, TomTom, INRIX — dominate the market. But they all sell the same thing: traffic flow from probe data (GPS traces from phones and connected vehicles).

Road511 is different. It aggregates infrastructure data from government 511 systems that the big providers don’t touch.

What Each Provider Actually Offers

Two notes before the table, because a comparison table is only as honest as its column definitions. The Road511 figures are active row counts measured against our North American production database on 14 August 2026 — not lifetime totals, which run considerably higher because retired hardware and expired records stay in the archive. And the other three columns mean one specific thing: “sold as a queryable, source-attributed data feed you can pull.” Several of the “map attribute” entries below are in HERE’s and TomTom’s map data — they are what makes their truck routing avoid a low bridge — but they are baked into a routing engine rather than exposed as an inventory you can query, list, and attribute to the agency that published it. That distinction is the whole point of this page, and it cuts both ways.

Where a cell reads “varies by product” we mean it literally: these are large vendors with wide catalogues that change, and we are not going to assert a flat “no” about a product line we do not buy. If a specific capability decides your build, check it on their own documentation rather than on ours — and hold us to the same standard, which is why every Road511 number above is a count you can reproduce against the live API.

Pricing

Road511 sits well below HERE/TomTom for comparable request volumes — and covers data categories they don’t sell as feeds. Treat the other three rows as order-of-magnitude only: they are approximate entry list points, they were approximate when this post was written, and enterprise pricing at all three is negotiated rather than published. Do not plan a budget from this table — price your actual call volume with each vendor. Our live plan tiers and quotas are on the pricing page, where they are the real numbers rather than an estimate.

When to Use Which

Use HERE / TomTom if you need:

• Real-time traffic flow (speed, congestion, travel times)
• Turn-by-turn routing with live traffic
• Global coverage (Europe, Asia, etc.)

Use Road511 if you need:

• Camera feeds, DMS messages, road conditions
• Bridge clearances, truck routes, weight restrictions
• Cross-state normalized 511 data
• Event lifecycle analytics (clearance times, trends)
• EV charging station data
• Fuel prices by state

Use both if:

• You’re building a fleet management platform — HERE/TomTom for routing, Road511 for truck restrictions, bridge clearances, fuel prices, and camera verification.
• You’re building a comprehensive navigation app — traffic flow from one, infrastructure data from the other.

The Real Differentiator

HERE, TomTom, and INRIX compete with each other on the same data: traffic flow from probe traces. They spend hundreds of millions collecting it, and they are good at it. Nothing on this page is an argument that they aren’t.

What Road511 aggregates is a different class of data from a different origin — government 511 systems rather than phone probes. As of 14 August 2026 that is 50,493 live cameras, 662,529 bridge clearances, 489,091 STAA truck-route segments, 12,668 dynamic message signs, 8,119 road-condition segments and 3,877 roadside weather stations, normalized across 64 US states and Canadian provinces and territories, plus federal datasets from FHWA, the National Bridge Inventory and the FRA. Those are active-record counts, and you can reproduce every one of them against the live API — /jurisdictions is public and needs no key.

The data is complementary, not competitive. If your product already uses HERE or TomTom for flow and routing, Road511 slots in beside it for everything those feeds leave out. We do not resell anyone’s probe data, and a flow provider is not something we replace.

Try It

• API docs — events, features, bridge clearances, truck data, and the GeoJSON variants in one reference.
• Live map — see the normalized 511 data across all 64 jurisdictions.
• Free API key — 14-day trial, no credit card.