UK Planning Application API Comparison

Glenigan is the market leader for UK construction intelligence, with decades of data, contact information for key decision-makers, and deep CRM integrations. Their pricing starts at several hundred pounds per month and requires a sales contract. There is no self-serve API access, no free tier, and no public documentation.

PlanWire is built for developers who want to query planning data programmatically without a sales conversation. You get an API key in 30 seconds, start for free, and only pay when you scale. If you're building a product or running automated queries, PlanWire's developer-first REST API is the faster path to production.

Choose Glenigan if you're a construction sales team that needs lead enrichment and contact data. Choose PlanWire if you're a developer building an application or alert system.

Barbour ABI (now part of Landmark Information Group) launched a Planning API in early 2025 providing 19 data attributes with daily updates and data from 2017. Access requires a contract and is targeted at enterprise land and property professionals. No public pricing is listed.

PlanWire offers a comparable planning dataset with spatial search, webhook alerts, and same-day data freshness — at a fraction of the cost and with instant self-serve access. Our API is designed to be integrated in an afternoon, not after a month of procurement.

Searchland is the closest competitor to PlanWire in developer accessibility, with public API docs and a credit-based system. However, their base license starts at £195/month and is primarily designed for property professionals rather than developers building APIs or tools on top of the data.

PlanWire starts free, scales to £29/month for serious projects, and is built API-first with webhooks for real-time alerts when new planning applications match your criteria — a feature Searchland doesn't offer.

planning.data.gov.uk is the DLUHC/MHCLG open data platform — free, public, and genuinely useful for basic entity lookups. Its planning application coverage is partial (not all councils submit data), filtering is limited, and there are no webhooks or alert capabilities.

PlanWire aggregates from both the government platform and council portals directly, giving you broader coverage, richer filtering (status, type, date, keyword, radius), and webhook delivery when new applications are submitted. Our free tier includes everything you need to prototype.