Weather API Competitor Comparison

Competitor Comparison

How the Visual Crossing Weather Data API stacks up

How the Visual Crossing Weather Data API stacks up to the most popular weather API options available today and what essential features are exclusive only to the Visual Crossing solution.

Detailed feature comparison

 Visual Crossing Logo
Visual Crossing
OpenWeatherMapAccuWeatherDarkSky
(Discontinued)
WeatherStack
Weather Data
15-day Forecast
Multi-year Historical Data
Sub-Hourly Historical Data
Historical Climate Statistics
Long-term Weather Outlook
Data Cleansing, Gap-Filling & Interpolation
Weather API
RESTful Weather API
Weather Query Integrated Address Lookup
Automatic Timezone Conversion
Data Science & Analysis
Excel Addin with Data Joiner
OData Connector
Direct-from-Web Download
Direct-to-Database/Excel CSV API
Weather for Business
Business Hour Filtering & Aggregation
Offline Bulk Data Option
Enterprise Support & Licensing
Licensing
Combined Forecast/History Licensing
Affordable PricingUnavailable

Weather API Features Exclusive to Visual Crossing

Visual Crossing offers the ability to run reports aggregated at yearly, monthly, weekly and daily levels. By retrieving the hourly historical data and aggregating it to the appropriate level it produces more human-readable reporting statistics. The ability to build report-quality aggregations directly in an API is also a big time saver and reduces errors by analysts.

Predicting weather beyond the 35-day forecast is a challenge but being able to see into the future for weather conditions is invaluable. By utilizing 30+ years of historical weather data, Visual Crossing enables users to see statistically what the typical weather is for any location.

All weather data starts at a common collection point, but not all Weather Data delivery systems are the same. Visual Crossing cleanses weather station data for accuracy, fills in gaps where weather stations were in error or didn’t report, and can interpolate for areas that fall between multiple, distant stations to give even rural areas optimal accuracy.

Some Weather APIs include address geocoding as a service to enhance their service. Only Visual Crossing allows you to include location strings directly into your weather query in a single call. This allows API users and Excel Query users the ability to pass in raw data address strings and retrieve weather data immediately.

Visual Crossing processes and cleanses all weather datasources and this includes providing data converted into your timezone. Timezone’s hourly range define your “day” for your weather summary data and have to be intelligently converted depending on your regional adjustments such as Daylight Savings Time.

Many business systems now are supporting OData connections due to its cloud availability and low maintenance. Visual Crossing provides an OData service where weather data users can push query results to the cloud and then retrieve them directly into business systems to begin their weather analysis.

In addition to a strong weather API Visual Crossing offers users a web interface to allow users to download weather datasets directly to their desktop in CSV format. This web interface is also useful as a Query Builder tool to help Web Query users build their initial URL queries. Users have the option to download or copy a URL to fetch their data.

While most Weather APIs only support JSON which requires a script or application to process returning weather data, Visual Crossing offers a CSV return format that allows users to import weather data results directly into Excel, Google Sheets and Databases. Users can even customize the queries and refresh data from the same query.

Weather APIs are great, but sometimes the best option for large historical datasets is to download all of the data in an offline, bulk operation to be most efficient. For a low price per location, customers can request a 30+ year history data for any location.

Licensing can often times be confusing especially if you have limits on rate of queries, query counts or location limitations. At Visual Crossing we provide the best licensing terms in the simplest form for the lowest price available. This is why we include both History and Forecast Weather Data into a single license.

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