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, evaluate the API shape in a sandbox, and pay when you need fresh data or production usage. 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 is the infrastructure layer for teams that need monitored source coverage, spatial search, webhooks, source links, and enrichment without waiting for procurement. The API is designed to be evaluated in minutes and integrated into a product workflow in an afternoon.

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 with a free sandbox, adds a £19/month Developer plan for low-volume production use, scales to £49/month Starter and £249/month Pro for webhooks, change events, and decision outcomes, and is built API-first for products that need monitored planning data.

LandHawk is a UK PropTech platform offering planning application data via API, with spatial search and coverage across all UK councils. It's targeted at land buyers, developers, and property professionals — particularly those doing site appraisal and land sourcing. Access requires a sales conversation and pricing is not publicly listed.

PlanWire covers the same planning data with the same spatial query capability, but with instant self-serve signup, a free sandbox, and public pricing. Where LandHawk is optimised for property professionals using a dashboard UI, PlanWire is built API-first — with HMAC-signed webhooks, full-text search, and JSON endpoints designed to be integrated into your own product without a sales contract.

Choose LandHawk if you need a full dashboard UI with land registry and ownership data layered on top of planning. Choose PlanWire if you need a clean, developer-friendly API to power your own application or alert system.

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 monitors council portals directly as well as official public datasets, then normalises the records into a product-ready API with source links, freshness telemetry, richer filtering, enrichment, and webhook delivery. The free sandbox is for prototyping the integration; paid plans are for production workflows that cannot rely on silent or patchy feeds.