An honest comparison
Comparison pages are usually written by the vendor and read like it. This one opens with where Climatiq is genuinely stronger, sources every claim from their own published pages, and dates its checks — because if you catch this page shading the truth, nothing else on this site deserves your trust either.
Claims about Climatiq checked against climatiq.io/pricing on 11 September 2026, read in a rendered browser rather than parsed — their comparison table puts feature labels and tick marks in separate columns, so a text scrape cannot pair them and should not be trusted to. If we are out of date, tell us and we will correct it visibly.
Can I buy API access, and what does it cost? Both companies publish the answer. Laid side by side, at the price each plan is actually sold for:
| Roughly | GreenCalculus | Climatiq |
|---|---|---|
| Free | API 1,000 calls/mo, every engine, commercial use with attribution. Whole corpus browsable without an account. | No API Browse only, non-commercial licence, limited metadata. |
| ~$50/mo | API $49 — 50,000 calls, every factor, every engine. | no plan at this price |
| ~$180/mo | — | No API Data Pro, €2,000/yr — a web product: exports, filters, Excel as an upgrade. |
| ~$300/mo | API $299 — 500,000 calls, redistribution rights, bulk corpus feed, change webhooks. | — |
| ~$440/mo | — | No API PCF Pro, from €4,900/yr — product footprints, branded exports, ISO 14067 docs. |
| Custom | Enterprise — uncapped, SLA, white-label. | API Enterprise. The only tier that includes it. Price not published. |
That is the whole difference in one row: the API is our entry product and their last one. Climatiq’s own comparison table marks data access, AI-powered mapping, PCF calculations and freight, travel & energy calculations unavailable on Starter, Data Pro and PCF Pro — available on Enterprise alone. Euro prices converted at roughly 1.08 for comparison only; theirs are billed in euro and annually.
Product carbon footprints. As of 11 September 2026 Climatiq leads with PCF: their site opens on “carbon intelligence for your products”, and PCF Studio, branded PCF exports, BoM mapping and ISO 14067 audit documentation are a product we do not offer at all. If the job is a product footprint rather than a corporate inventory line, that is their category and not ours. Breadth. Climatiq maintains a far larger emission-factor library than we do, aggregating many more datasets across many more activities. If your inventory needs a long tail of niche activity factors under one roof today, they are the more complete catalogue and we will not pretend otherwise. Maturity. They have been at this longer, with an established enterprise customer base and a product-carbon-footprint (PCF) toolchain we do not offer at all — if PCFs with audit documentation are your job, that is their lane. We are the younger product; this whole site tells you exactly how young, dated to the day.
Every value returns the publisher’s exact source reference and a public verify page pinned to the data version. Citations your auditor can open without an account.
Our whole corpus is browsable keyless. As checked on 11 September 2026, Climatiq’s free tier is non-commercial with limited metadata, and every row under API access in their own comparison table — data access, AI-powered mapping, PCF calculations, freight/travel/energy calculations — is marked unavailable on Starter, Data Pro and PCF Pro, and available on Enterprise alone, at a price they do not publish.
Card in, key out, commercial use from the free tier up. As checked on 11 September 2026 there is no Climatiq tier that sells API access self-serve at any price: their published plans run Free, Data Pro at €2,000/yr and PCF Pro from €4,900/yr, and API access appears only on Enterprise, which is “Custom — contact sales”. Their paid plans buy a web product; ours buys an endpoint.
An MCP server with keyless reads, so AI agents answer with sourced, versioned figures. We are not aware of an equivalent from Climatiq; check their docs — this claim ages fastest.
Underneath those: results are reproducible (deterministic receipts, ?as_of= version pinning against a public archive), changes are announced (changelog, watch alerts, webhooks), and the open layer is a written commitment, not a promotion.
| Your situation | Our honest recommendation |
|---|---|
| You need a long tail of niche activity factors, today, under one roof | Climatiq — breadth is their strength and our roadmap is public about our gaps |
| You need product carbon footprints with audit documentation | Climatiq — we do not offer a PCF toolchain |
| Your figures must survive an audit — source reference, version, public proof | GreenCalculus — verification is the product, not a feature |
| You want to evaluate against real data before any signup or sales call | GreenCalculus — the corpus is open; check us first, then decide |
| You are a developer or small team who wants self-serve at self-serve prices | GreenCalculus — free commercially, $49 when you outgrow it |
| You are building AI agents that must cite their numbers | GreenCalculus — MCP-native with keyless reads and proof links |
Both can be true. Some teams screen broadly on Climatiq and verify the material figures here, or vice versa. The factor keys and proof links do not care who else you use — and our public roadmap shows exactly which gaps we would need to close before you could consolidate.
Still surveying the field rather than choosing between two vendors? We keep an editorial field guide to Climatiq alternatives that sorts the whole category and is not written in the first person. Different question entirely? If you are weighing us against Watershed, Persefoni or another platform, that is a category choice, not a vendor choice — and if the real alternative is a downloaded workbook, we wrote an honest page about that too. Comparing us with Electricity Maps? Different jobs — that page says whose is whose.
