Smarty address verification and alternatives

Is Smarty (formerly SmartyStreets) the right fit for your business? Or should you consider a Smarty alternative? It all comes down to your use case. We’ve compiled data on the top Smarty competitors to help you make an easy decision.

For a side-by-side analysis of Smarty alternatives, head to our comparison table.

In this article, we’ll compare Smarty vs Google, Melissa, and other Smarty alternatives so you can see how each provider’s API stacks up. If you’re looking for a specific topic, feel free to skip right to it. We’ll cover:

The foundation: what's validation?

If you’re new to validation, don’t stress. We’ll break it down for you.

Validation software checks an address against an authoritative database. If the address matches an entry in the database, it’s valid.

Then, to ensure valid addresses are as accurate as possible, good validation software checks secondary address information, including apartment, suite, and building details, and flags missing or incomplete data.

On top of that, validation software can provide useful address metadata, such as geocodes, CMRA status, county FIPS codes, and persistent, unique identifiers.

If no match is found, it’s invalid. Keep in mind that not all address databases contain every address, so just because one provider marks an address as invalid doesn’t necessarily mean it is.

To learn more about address validation, visit our validation guide and validation overview.

What is Smarty validation?

Businesses across industries—insurance, finance, healthcare, ecommerce, shipping and logistics, and more—rely on Smarty for top-notch validation accuracy, usability, speed, and support.

Smarty’s API matches addresses against an extensive database and standardizes components to fit United States Postal Service (USPS) or global guidelines. For US addresses, the API can also attach 55 metadata points and a SmartyKey® persistent unique identifier to each address.

Beyond validation, Smarty offers address enrichment, autocomplete, and geocoding. Need to streamline checkout processes, improve delivery success, boost risk analysis accuracy, or improve Anti-Money Laundering or Know Your Customer compliance? We’ve got you covered.

Core capabilities

The core capabilities of Smarty validation include:

• Confirming whether an address exists
• Parsing an address into components
• Normalizing and standardizing address components to match local postal authority formatting
• Flagging changes made to achieve a match or missing secondary information
• Returning address metadata

Technical features

To make implementation as easy as possible, Smarty provides developers with comprehensive documentation, including API references and loads of sample code, and SDKs for most major programming languages.

After implementation, developers can manage their subscription and access account reports in the Smarty account dashboard. These reports show lookup usage per subscription, making it easy for developers to monitor their API usage. They can also use Smarty’s changelog to stay up to date on any API updates.

Enterprise customers with strict policies that prevent calling cloud-based APIs over the internet can make the most of Smarty validation with a local API installation.

Pricing

Smarty validation is offered through monthly, annual, and enterprise plans:

US Address Verification:

• Monthly subscriptions range from $17/1,000 address lookups to $485/170,000 address lookups
• Annual subscriptions range from $195/12,000 address lookups to $4,980/2,000,000 address lookups
• Custom subscriptions support well beyond 2,000,000 annual address lookups

International Address Verification:

• Monthly subscriptions range from $40/1,000 address lookups to $350/10,000 address lookups
• Annual subscriptions range from $410/12,000 address lookups to $3,300/120,000 address lookups
• Custom subscriptions support well beyond 120,000 annual address lookups

Enterprise:

• Customize your annual address lookup count, processing speed, data privacy, and more to fit your company’s exact needs

Smarty competitors and alternatives comparison

Each alternative to Smarty (formerly SmartyStreets) takes their own approach to validation. This table compares Smarty vs competitors to help you decide which provider best fits your needs. For more details on any of these metrics, see the linked resources.

Competitor comparison table

For a more in-depth comparison of Smarty vs Google or Smarty vs Melissa Data, give our articles on Google address verification and Melissa address verification a read.

Looking for an overview comparing Smarty vs USPS? Check out our USPS API guide!

What are Smarty's validation APIs?

Smarty offers two validation APIs: the US Street Address API and the International Street Address API.

When called, the US API matches addresses against the USPS database and additional data sources that include ~20 million non-USPS addresses. The international API validates addresses against the best available data sources for each country. Because address data varies by country, some addresses can be validated only to the city/locality level, while others have much higher accuracy.

In addition to validated addresses, the APIs can return geocodes—the longitude and latitude coordinates of the primary structure at an address—and SmartyKey—a persistent, unique identifier. The US API also returns up to 55 metadata points, including Residential Delivery Indicators (RDI), Delivery Point Validation (DPV), and county FIPS Codes.

Have a massive backlog of addresses that need validation and deduplication? The API can process your entire list through bulk validation, an address-scrubbing process that instantly verifies and cleans large lists of addresses, whether uploaded to our dashboard, a Google Sheet, an Excel spreadsheet, CLI, or a QGIS mapping platform.

Ready to analyze APIs? We’ve compared Smarty vs Melissa Data, Google, and other competitors in the table below.

For more API comparisons, see our Smarty vs USPS article, or click here to return to the full competitor comparison table.

How Smarty approaches validation

Smarty alternatives each take their own approach to validation. Smarty’s validation is built around what actually drives ROI in mission-critical processes:

• Pinpoint accuracy
• Data retention
• API speed
• Scalability
• Best-in-class support

Whether your business relies on address data for risk scoring, HIPAA compliance, delivery success, fraud prevention, or something else entirely, Smarty delivers the accuracy and transparency those processes need.

That accuracy and transparency carry over to how Smarty handles edge cases. When key address components are invalid or missing, Smarty doesn’t force a match or overstate confidence.

Instead, the API response clearly indicates whether an address is valid or invalid. That way, you can build and automate workflows on reliable data, not best guesses.

Smarty’s validation experience is also built with people in mind. With address experts just an email, chat, or phone call away, everything from documentation to troubleshooting to address change suggestions becomes a whole lot easier.

Plus, Smarty’s support team sits right next to our engineers and developers, so even the most technical questions are answered quickly.

If you’re looking to parse addresses with hyper accuracy, match addresses against a database of over 210 million USPS and non-USPS addresses, and trust the validation results you get back, Smarty’s approach to validation may be the right fit over a Smarty competitor.

Smarty’s data sources and coverage

Top validation providers don’t cut corners—they rely on comprehensive, authoritative databases and allow users to store and reuse data. In this Smarty vs competitors breakdown, we’ll see how each provider stacks up.

For scary-good accuracy, Smarty validates US addresses against the USPS database AND over 20 million non-USPS addresses.

Non-USPS addresses are valid addresses that the USPS doesn’t recognize as deliverable—often because they’re remote or newly built. However, other carriers, like FedEx, DHL, and UPS, still deliver to these addresses.

Without non-USPS coverage, you’ll fail to validate 20 million valid addresses, leading to false negatives, failed deliveries, and frustrated customers. So when you’re evaluating Smarty alternatives, don’t forget to check their non-USPS coverage.

And that’s just in the US. Smarty’s international validation covers all 250 countries and territories. In a Smarty vs Google comparison, that’s 210 more regions!

When analyzing Smarty competitors, it pays to read the fine print—especially when it comes to data usage limits.

While some providers restrict how long you can store your address data, Smarty’s customers are licensed to retain, use, and store unlimited address data and metadata for internal business purposes, even after their subscription ends.

Beyond that, Smarty customers can use their address data with any mapping platform without restrictions.

See the table below to learn how other Smarty alternatives perform.

Click here to return to the full competitor comparison table.

API usability and developer experience

Developer experience depends on three things: straightforward documentation, easy implementation, and exceptional support. Let’s compare Smarty vs competitors.

Smarty’s API documentation helps you get up and running fast—whether you’re a customer or just giving Smarty a try with 1,000 free address lookups during the 42-day free trial.

With sample code, API playgrounds, best practices, and clear technical requirements, you’ll be able to set up an API, send a request, and understand the response without breaking a sweat.

Some Smarty alternatives, like Melissa Data, offer US and international validation through a single API. While implementing one API may save time upfront, separate APIs—like Smarty’s—give developers more control over their API requests and responses. So when you compare Smarty vs Melissa Data, keep API control in mind, especially if your team needs more redundancy, geolocation, scalability, or traffic prioritization.

When implementing either of Smarty’s APIs, developers can expect a smooth experience. The process is straightforward, so you can receive a proof of concept in 1–2 hours and, with a capable developer, full implementation in 1 day to 1 week.

For even more speed (and even less coding), Smarty provides SDKs for most major coding languages, including .NET, Go, iOS, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Rust. Not familiar with code? Smarty also offers a QGIS plugin, a Google Sheets add-on, and a Microsoft Excel add-in so you can validate addresses without writing a single line of code.

Support & free trial

Developers can reach Smarty’s support team by email, chat, or phone. Located at our US headquarters, support sits right next to our engineering and development teams so they can quickly access the answers you need. When you have questions, we’ll connect you with someone who’s happy to help in real time.

As for free trials, Smarty provides developers with 1,000 free US address lookups and 100 free international address lookups to test Smarty APIs for 42-days.

Smarty vs Melissa Data, Google, and other Smarty alternatives—how do they really compare?

Click here to return to the full competitor comparison table.

API pricing and licensing model considerations

Smarty’s transparent pricing is easy to predict and won’t surprise you as your address needs grow. Both US and international validation are offered through two pricing models:

• Professional: Smarty offers monthly and yearly subscriptions that range from 1K to 170K address lookups per month, and from 12K to 2 million lookups per year. Smarty’s most popular subscriptions include 5K lookups for $50/month and 60K lookups for $552/year.
• Custom: Custom plans are available for businesses that need to validate more addresses than professional plans support. In addition to choosing their address lookup volume, businesses can tailor API speed, integrations, and compliance.

Since each Smarty alternative uses a different pricing model, there’s no universal way to compare costs in a Smarty vs competitors analysis. In the articles listed below, we’ve compared Smarty’s pricing against a standard plan from each competitor:

• Smarty vs EasyPost
• Smarty vs Google
• Smarty vs Melissa Data
• Smarty vs PostGrid
• Smarty vs Precisely

Performance, scalability, and enterprise readiness

The best APIs run at mind-blowing speeds, even at scale. Here’s how Smarty performs, and how Smarty alternatives measure up.

SLA-guaranteed speed

Smarty is committed to providing reliable API response times. The service level agreement (SLA) for the US Street Address API is to process a single request in ≤ 500 ms, and the International Street Address API SLA is at ≤ 1000 ms per request.

Smarty’s throughput varies by API. With a base plan, the US validation hits processing speeds of 250 address lookups per second (with POST requests of 100 addresses per query) or 25,000 address lookups per second (with GET requests for individual addresses), while the International Street Address API has a default rate limit of 3,500 address lookups per second.

In a Smarty vs Google comparison, that translates to 35 times faster international address lookups, and 250 times faster US address lookups!

And those speeds are just the starting point. With a custom plan, Smarty’s validation APIs can go as fast as you need.

Uptime

Smarty’s SLA guarantees 99.98% uptime for the US Street Address API and 99.9% uptime for the International Street Address API. But Smarty has actually exceeded these expectations with a historical uptime of 99.999%!

Check out the response times and uptimes for Smarty and Smarty alternatives:

Click here to return to the full competitor comparison table, or check out our Smarty vs USPS article for more provider comparisons.

When a Smarty alternative is a better choice

A Smarty alternative may be a better option for your business if your goal is to bundle address validation into a broader, single-sourced workflow—like mailing campaigns, shipping label creation, data management, or contact data validation. If you prefer a single provider that handles both address validation and another downstream process, like those just mentioned, a Smarty alternative may better align with your needs.

That makes it important to understand what Smarty is and isn’t designed to do.

Smarty’s APIs are built for high-accuracy address validation, not as a single solution for a specific end-to-end workflow automation. For example, Smarty:

• Doesn’t automate mailing workflows beyond validation. Some providers bundle validation with print-and-mail services, which can be helpful for mailers with simple, low-volume needs.
• Doesn’t generate shipping labels or manage fulfillment. Other vendors provide address verification as the first step in label creation, tracking, insurance, and shipping analytics.
• Doesn’t validate contact data beyond the address itself. Certain providers validate names, emails, and phone numbers alongside addresses.
• Doesn’t offer multiples of free monthly lookups (although we will give you the first 42 days free). Some Smarty alternatives offer users free lookups every month, which can appeal to small ecommerce businesses with simple, low-volume needs where pinpoint accuracy may not be required.

Final thoughts on choosing the right solution

Some Smarty alternatives bundle address validation into a single, broader solution, but that can mean their core focus isn’t on providing the most accurate, reliable, and easy-to-implement address validation service around.

If your business relies on high-quality, global address data, mind-blowing API speeds, unlimited address data usage, transparent API pricing, and top-notch support, you may find that Smarty competitors don’t meet your needs.

But Smarty’s address validation is built for just that.

Smarty’s APIs parse addresses with precision, match US addresses to a massive database of both USPS and non-USPS addresses, and international addresses to the best data available for each country. And as we do, we don’t force matches. If an address is invalid, we’ll let you know so you can verify your addresses are reliable.

Ready to see how Smarty performs in your workflows? Start a 42-day free trial to put Smarty’s address verification APIs to the test.

Frequently asked questions about Smarty

How can Smarty improve data accuracy for businesses?

Compared to Smarty competitors, Smarty’s US address database is insanely comprehensive. Smarty validates addresses against the USPS database of ~190 million delivery points AND non-USPS addresses. In a Smarty vs USPS comparison, that’s 20 million more US addresses!

That level of data accuracy helps us reduce false negatives, so when an address is verified, your business can be confident it’s a real location.

What are the main features of Smarty?

Smarty validation features include:

• Real-time validation and standardization
• Coverage for all 250 countries and territories
• A persistent, unique identifier, SmartyKey
• 55 metadata points for US addresses
• An SLA-guarenteed 99.98% uptime
• API speed starting at 25,000 lookups per second
• A 42-day free trial

Can Smarty integrate with CRMs or ecommerce platforms?

Yes! Smarty integrations are so simple that you can be up and running with a proof of concept and a full implementation in hours or days, not weeks. Our comprehensive documentation walks you through every step of integration, whether you choose to implement a validation API, plugin, or on-premise solution. Plus, our human technical support team is available to answer any questions you may have.

What types of errors can occur during Smarty's validation process, and how are they handled?

When we receive incorrect, incomplete, outdated, or just plain invalid addresses, our API won’t force a match. If an address is invalid and we can’t confidently fix it, we’ll let you know. If it’s missing a component, we’ll let you know. If the address is more precise with secondary information, we’ll let you know. If we’ve updated the street or ZIP, we’ll—well, you get the point.

Is Smarty suitable for high-volume or enterprise use cases?

Absolutely! We’re built for enterprise. Smarty’s custom plans can be tailored to your enterprise needs. You’ll be able to choose your API speed (starting at 25,000 address lookups per second and scaling up from there), add enhanced data privacy and compliance, and customize your legal terms. Plus, you’ll decide how many lookups you need annually. Whether you’re a small business, mid-market, Fortune 500, or beyond, we’ve got you covered.

What factors should be considered when evaluating alternatives to Smarty?

The best validation solution for your business is the one that matches your use case. Considering your use case and the capabilities each provider offers would help you narrow your search.