Comparison
PermitFlow vs Socrata Open Data
Socrata is a goldmine if you have a quarter to write per-city adapters. We normalize every permit into one schema so you ship in an afternoon.
Feature
PermitFlow
Socrata Open Data
Schema across cities
✓One unified schema. Same fields everywhere.
Different per city. Phoenix ≠ LA ≠ NYC.
Field normalization
✓permit_type, valuation, contractor_name — always.
permittype / PERMIT_TYPE / Permit Type / type_of_permit…
Webhooks
✓HMAC-signed, filterable, retried
None. Polling only.
Freshness SLA
✓Daily 6am drop. Status page tracks each city.
Whenever the city updates the dataset (varies wildly).
Coverage outside Socrata
✓ArcGIS, CKAN, custom scrapers — wherever data lives
Socrata-hosted cities only
Search & filters
✓Filter by city/state/type/date in one call
Per-dataset SoQL. Cross-city = N requests.
Pricing
✓$99–$2k/mo. Public.
Free — but you pay in engineering time.
When to use Socrata directly
- • You only care about one city and you'll never expand.
- • You need fields PermitFlow doesn't surface (rare — open an issue and we'll add it).
- • You're a researcher doing one-off analysis, not building a product.