How IRIS compares
You are about to sign a lease and commit a fit-out. You deserve a straight comparison, not a rigged one.
What we will and will not claim
The comparison
The tools most often weighed alongside IRIS in Europe for forecasting a new site's revenue are RetailSonar, Targomo, Geoblink (now part of MyTraffic), Geolytix and Kalibrate (Kalibrate is global; the other four are European). They are capable products with real data and real clients. Here is how they line up on the things that decide whether you can defend the number in the room where the capital is committed.
| What lets you defend the number | IRIS | RetailSonar, Targomo, Geoblink, Geolytix, Kalibrate |
|---|---|---|
| A forecast shown as a range, not one number | Yes. An 80% interval on every forecast | Not published by any; none publishes a range |
| Out-of-sample validation on your own stores, published | Yes. Spatial leave-one-out on stores the model was never shown puts R2 between 0.69 and 0.87 and a typical error between 9% and 21% across the models we have built. A published range, not a single headline figure | Not published by any of the five |
| A method you can open and adjust | Yes. An auditable, adjustable model: open it, argue with it, change it | Described publicly as an AI or ML model; some explain the drivers, none we could find publicly exposes an adjustable method |
| A written accuracy guarantee, money back | Yes, on the IRIS tier. Miss the R2, MAPE and interval we agree in writing, and your first-year licence for that market is refunded, where that market has 50 or more comparable mature sites | Not published by any of the five |
| Prices you can see without a sales call | Yes, both. Licence bands are published (IRIS Market €6,000 a year; the forecasting tiers from €9,000 a year, banded on your whole estate's revenue in that market, so you can find your own band without calling us). The build is a published €12,000 per four-week sprint, and the Validation Sprint is the first of them, credited in full. That sprint runs in two stages, so the way in is a €4,000 Kick Start, and you can stop there. The sprint fixes the remaining count in writing before any build work starts | The forecast price is quote only for all five (Targomo publishes API pricing, but not for its GeoAI forecast) |
| You talk to the people who build the model | Yes. Direct access to the builders | Sales-led contact, then a dashboard or a separate data-science or consulting team |
"Not published" means we did not find it in the vendor's public materials on 24 July 2026. It is not a claim that a vendor cannot do it, only that they do not show it. Differences between the five are in our research notes.
Among these five forecasters, IRIS is the only one that publishes an honest range, shows its accuracy on your own stores, lets you open the method, stands behind it in writing, and prints its price. That is not a claim to be the most accurate. It is a claim to be the most checkable.
Why trust the method: IRIS is research-led. It is built by a team led by an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University whose field is algorithmic accountability, and is based at UtrechtInc, the Utrecht University startup incubator. That research is the difference behind "auditable".
What IRIS consolidates
The biggest line item was never a tool. A team assembling GIS licences, geodemographic data, isochrone APIs and a mobility feed spends into six figures a year, and most of it is the analyst who stitches it all together. IRIS replaces that integration and maintenance work, not a wall of logos. Here is what it does and does not replace, in three columns.
Loaded cost of one GIS or data-science analyst, per year
NL, base ~€76.5k, loaded for employer cost. Glassdoor, Nov 2025.
Drop the tool
Scope it, keep what is bespoke
We do not claim to replace this
Only published list prices appear as figures, in their published currency and labelled by region. Feeds sold by quote, footfall panels and Benelux POI depth among them, are marked quote-only: no number, because we do not have one. Reviewed 22 July 2026.
Straight talk
No tool is right for every job. Here is when one of these is the better buy than IRIS.
Each of these is a capable product with real data and real clients. What follows is what each is good at, where IRIS is different, and when to buy them instead. Everything said about a vendor was read from their public materials on 24 July 2026, and "not published" means we did not find it, not that they cannot do it.
RetailSonar positions itself as a Benelux market leader, with a large curated footfall and car-passage data layer and a long retail client list. The difference is what you can check: IRIS publishes its licence bands and its build price, and it measures its error on stores you already run before you commit, where RetailSonar's forecast is a quote-based engagement. Buy RetailSonar if that data depth and enterprise delivery fit you and a quote is fine.
Targomo is leading travel-time and isochrone routing, with a published pay-per-use developer API. It is a different layer of the stack: Targomo tells you what is reachable, IRIS tells you what a site will earn and how sure you can be, as a revenue forecast with an 80% interval and the demand drivers behind it. Many teams use reachability data and a forecast for different jobs. Buy Targomo if you need routing and reachability infrastructure to build on.
Geoblink, now part of MyTraffic, is a broad location-intelligence dashboard covering catchment, cannibalisation and territory, with a sales forecast as one feature and MyTraffic footfall data behind it. IRIS is narrower on purpose: it does one job, and it publishes the range around every forecast and its out-of-sample error on your own estate. Buy Geoblink if you want the wider dashboard and forecasting is one need among several.
Geolytix builds consultant-led models with driver explainability, from an established UK data-science team. The difference is ownership and repeatability: IRIS is a platform your own team re-runs the moment the site list moves, with the model and its outputs yours to keep, rather than a study commissioned each time. Buy Geolytix if you want a hands-on consulting build.
Kalibrate is a long-established global vendor with a full software-plus-services stack, strongest in fuel and convenience networks. IRIS is European by design, hosted and processed in the EU with no US mobile-location panel, and it prints its prices instead of routing you to a sales call. Buy Kalibrate if you run a large multi-site network and want that heritage.
Some teams still commission a site-selection consultancy to produce a location report by hand. Buy that if you want a person to walk the street, meet the landlord and read the pitch for one flagship site. For a portfolio, or for a number you will revisit as the site and the market change, a report has limits a model does not:
The bottom line
If you want the widest dashboard, the deepest footfall panel, or a person for one flagship site, this page told you where to go. If you want a site revenue forecast you can open, check on your own stores, and defend in the room, that is the one thing IRIS is built to do. Book a demo and we will show you, or go straight to a Validation Sprint and see our error on your own stores first, from €4,000 for the Kick Start.