8 Best Drive-Time Mapping Tools for Comparing Candidate Sites

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A site search often ends with three addresses on a shortlist and a lease deadline a few weeks away. By then the choice of market has been made. What is left is a narrower question about who each address can reach by car.

A drive-time map answers that, and most location tools can draw one. The harder part is comparing three of them side by side, with the right numbers inside each area.

How to Compare Candidate Sites by Drive Time

Every tool here gets the same test. Take three candidate addresses, draw a 15-minute drive-time area around each one, and compare what falls inside.

A drive-time area, also called a drive-time polygon or isochrone, follows the road network. It stretches out along highways and stays tight where a river, a rail line or a slow street cuts the drive short. A radius circle ignores all of that.

Why bother? Two sites a mile apart can reach far different numbers of households in 15 minutes if one is near an interstate ramp and the other is stuck behind a single bridge.

Four things separate the tools on this test:

• whether areas are drawn one site at a time or around every point in a layer at once
• what gets counted inside each area, from customer rows to population
• whether the drive times account for traffic
• whether a business user can run it without an analyst

1. Esri ArcGIS Business Analyst

Esri's ArcGIS Business Analyst is the analyst-grade choice, sold as desktop software, a web app and a mobile app. In the web app's Standard tier, the trade area tool draws drive-time, walk-time and distance rings around an address. Each of the three candidates can get its own 15-minute area with Esri's demographic data attached.

Threshold Area Analysis runs the test the other way around. Instead of fixing the time, it grows each area until it contains a set amount of a variable, such as a target population. The comparison then becomes how far each site has to reach to get there. In a thin market, that is often the more useful question.

Business Analyst also lists benchmark comparisons of sites and trade areas, so the three results, built on the same data and the same rules, can be read side by side.

Business Analyst has no listed price, and a sales team without an analyst should expect a learning curve before its first useful report.

2. Maptive

Run the three-address test in Maptive and each candidate gets its own drive-time polygon, set in hours and minutes and drawn along the road network from an address or a map marker. Polygons are added one at a time, and all three stay on the same map, so overlap and gaps between candidates are plain to see.

Clicking a polygon opens a summary: the start address, the number of uploaded locations inside, and the sum, average, high, low or group count of chosen columns, such as annual revenue per customer.

Maptive can also export the rows inside one polygon, every polygon on the map as one file, or the ZIP codes and counties each area touches.

Its drive times assume perfect driving conditions and ignore both historical and current traffic, so a site beside a congested interchange can look better on the map than it will at 5 p.m.

3. Mapline

Mapline, a web-based spreadsheet mapper, includes drive-time polygons on its base paid plan rather than saving them for a higher tier. For the three-address test, a team pastes its candidates in with its customer list and draws a 15-minute polygon around each candidate pin.

Mapline also draws radius circles. Putting a ring and a drive-time polygon around the same site shows exactly where straight-line distance overstates or understates the reach.

For population counts inside each polygon, a team needs Pro or Enterprise, the two plans that carry demographic data.

4. Maptitude

Caliper's Maptitude does the three-address test in one step. Maptitude Online can draw concentric drive-time rings around every point in a layer at once, up to 10 hours out, and it calculates demographics for each ring. Caliper states there are no per-ring charges.

That means the three candidates can go in one layer and get 5-, 10- and 15-minute rings together, each with its own population figures. The desktop and Enterprise editions draw drive-time rings too.

The online edition used for this test costs $795 for one user for one year.

The table lines up all eight tools on the same 15-minute test.

5. CARTO

CARTO treats the test as a workflow rather than a map click. Its Create Isolines component builds drive-time or distance areas by car, bike or on foot for a whole table of points, so three candidates or 300 run through the same steps. The results can then be joined to whatever the team keeps in its cloud data warehouse.

Every isoline spends location data credits. Isolines built on H3, a grid of hexagon cells, spend five times as many. CARTO publishes no prices, and its free 30-day trial does not allow production use. The platform assumes a data team is running it.

6. Galigeo

Galigeo, a French location intelligence company, puts isochrones inside the business intelligence dashboards a team already uses. Its Power BI extension draws drive-time or straight-line catchments automatically, overlays several and compares them. It also works with Qlik, SAP Analytics Cloud, IBM Cognos and Salesforce.

For a US team, the gap is data. The population figures on Galigeo's pages come from France's national statistics office, INSEE, and US demographic coverage is not confirmed on its site. Prices are not published, and much of the site is in French.

7. MapInfo Pro (Precisely)

MapInfo Pro is Precisely's long-running Windows desktop GIS. Its support site documents a Drive Regions tool, plus a workflow for selecting objects that fall outside a drive-time region. For a team already working in MapInfo, that covers the core of the three-address test.

Pricing is by quote from Precisely. The support pages do not say whether drive regions need a separate routing service, so that is the first question to ask in a demo.

8. Smappen

Smappen is a browser tool that builds its travel-time areas from road networks, speed limits and transport modes. Smappen says it takes about five minutes to get from an address to the analysis, and the free plan is enough for this test, with up to 10 active areas at a time.

What it counts inside depends on the plan. Free and Essential show a basic population number. Income and age breakdowns need the Pro plan.

The Three-Address Test, Run in Any Trial

Most of these tools offer a trial, a free plan or a demo.

The same short test works in each of them:

1. Enter the same three candidate addresses.
2. Draw a 15-minute drive-time area around each one.
3. Write down what the tool counts inside each area, whether that is customers, population or both.
4. Export the results and open the file in the spreadsheet the team already uses.

Two tools will rarely return identical counts for the same address. The difference usually comes from the road data, the demographic source or whether traffic is modeled, and each vendor should be able to say which one explains the gap.