InfraNode vs Urban Observatory

InfraNode unifies open data for dozens of German cities into a single versioned REST API, covering weather, air quality, EV charging, public-transit departures, demographics, and dozens of other civic datasets. Every endpoint is keyless and rate-limited per IP rather than gated behind a subscription ("Die API ist offen und braucht keinen API-Key"), with an OpenAPI spec and Postman collection published for quick integration. The project is open source (Apache-2.0) and runs on a server in Germany with no ads.

Urban Observatory, run by Newcastle University, streams one of the UK's largest real-time urban sensor networks, covering air quality, traffic, flooding, and weather, from thousands of fixed and mobile sensors across Newcastle and partner cities. Its v2 API is fully keyless and exposes sensor locations and readings as JSON, CSV, or Shapefile, with bounding-box filtering for GIS tools. It's an academic, publicly funded service with no commercial tiers.