EcoFreight vs Climatiq for freight emissions APIs

Feature parity matrix

Side by side on the dimensions a freight integration buyer asks about. Climatiq entries are taken from their public pricing, data, customers, and API reference pages as of 2026-05-23; see the sources block at the foot for citations.

Pricing comparison

Climatiq does not sell a self-serve API tier. Their free Starter plan and the €250/month Data Pro plan are data-browsing and export products, not API products — both explicitly exclude API access per their public pricing page. API access is available only on their Enterprise tier, which is contact-sales with custom calculation volumes, commercial licence, and a customer success manager. They separately run a PCF Studio Beta that grants 10,000 free product carbon footprints as a limited launch offer, which is a different product surface.

EcoFreight runs a 1,000-request monthly free tier on the freight calculate endpoint with no credit card, and self-serve paid tiers above that. If you need freight API access today with budgeting predictability and without a sales conversation, the comparison is straightforward — only EcoFreight offers that surface. If you are willing to engage in an enterprise procurement cycle and you value SFC accreditation or multi-category breadth, Climatiq is the right destination for the sales call.

Where Climatiq beats us

Smart Freight Centre accreditation. Their Freight API holds SFC accreditation. We do not, yet. If your CSRD or CDP auditor specifically requires SFC-accredited methodology — or your sustainability team has standardised on accredited vendors as a procurement guardrail — that is a real reason to pick Climatiq today and we will not argue otherwise.

Breadth of coverage outside freight. Climatiq publishes 60+ data sources and 140 datasets across electricity, purchased goods, materials, business travel, and freight per their methodology page. If your team owns the full Scope 3 stack and not just Category 4 (upstream transportation), one vendor across categories is a real win on procurement, vendor management, and contract surface area.

Vendor maturity signals. Climatiq was founded in 2021 and raised a €10M Series A in June 2025 led by Singular and Cherry Ventures. They are B Corp certified and were an SXSW Pitch Winner. For a procurement team that weights vendor-stability signals heavily — and enterprise procurement almost always does — that is a legitimate point in their column.

Public customer reference set. Their customers page lists ten named enterprise logos including Siemens SiGREEN, Celonis, Kinaxis, Xero, and Zalaris, plus four anonymised case studies. We currently publish anonymised case studies only.

Where we beat Climatiq

Public free tier with API access. Climatiq's API is Enterprise- only. There is no self-serve route to a freight API key on either the Starter or Data Pro plans. Our 1,000-request monthly free tier is a real API tier — you sign up, you get a key, you call /api/v1/calculate, no sales call.

Per-shipment stable calculation_id. Every response carries a stable identifier. When a customer's auditor in 2027 asks to reproduce a 2026 calculation, the changelog plus the calculation ID gives them the exact factor version that ran. Climatiq's Source Trail is included for transparency but explicitly does not enable replication; their Audit Trail is an opt-in Enterprise feature.

ISO 14083 tier disclosed per shipment. Their quality framework is PACT-aligned representativeness scores plus data-quality flags. Neither is wrong, but if your reporting framework asks for ISO 14083 tier on the response, we surface it directly and they do not.

Single methodology chain. Freight is the only thing we do. Every calculation runs against the GLEC v3.2 factor set with one auditable chain per shipment, not a heterogeneous blend across DEFRA, EPA, ecoinvent, EXIOBASE, and GLEC.

Downloadable factor table. The complete GLEC v3.2 factor table is available as static CSV and JSON at /data/glec-factors.csv and /data/glec-factors.json. Climatiq's emission-factor export sits behind the €250/mo Data Pro plan and their full catalogue API on Enterprise.

Published latency target. Under 50 ms p50 on the freight call path is in our public docs. Climatiq does not publish a p50 figure anywhere we could find, which is a reasonable Enterprise-vendor choice — but if your carbon call has to land inside a real-time quote SLA, a published number is more useful than an unpublished one.

A note on methodology

Climatiq's Freight v3 intermodal endpoint uses GLEC factors updated to the current values — including GLEC v3.2 for rail and road — alongside their wider multi-source factor library across the rest of the catalogue. That breadth is the right choice for a multi-category emissions platform: you want the most defensible factor in each domain, even if the source set is heterogeneous, and their SFC accreditation on the freight endpoint is the proof point that the freight chain is held to the right standard. EcoFreight is GLEC v3.2 only — narrower, with a single auditable methodology chain per shipment, no SFC accreditation yet. Neither approach is wrong. It is a deliberate trade and you should pick based on whether your reporting framework requires accredited methodology, whether you need ISO 14083 tier surfaced per shipment, and whether you care about a single freight chain or the most defensible factor across categories.

Migration and dual-running guidance

If you are on Climatiq Enterprise for freight today and considering EcoFreight, expect the migration to take a quarter rather than a sprint. The integration code rewrites in a day — the request shape is similar enough — but you will want at least one full reporting cycle of dual running before you retire the Climatiq call path. The numbers will not match exactly: response field names differ (their Freight v3 returns hub_equipment_co2e, vehicle_operation_co2e, and vehicle_energy_provision_co2e split out; we return a single co2e plus tier), and the GLEC v3.2 snapshot updates on slightly different cadences. Document the difference, show your auditor the methodology version on both sides, and only retire the old path after the comparison reconciles cleanly. If SFC accreditation is a hard requirement in your assurance scope, do not migrate yet — wait until we are accredited or keep Climatiq for the accredited line.

In the other direction — Climatiq Enterprise today, considering EcoFreight for the freight line only and keeping Climatiq for the rest of Scope 3 — the integration is cleaner. You attach our REST call to your freight booking event, you keep Climatiq for electricity, materials, and business travel, and the two factor tables never have to reconcile because they cover different inventory lines. This is the more common pattern in practice and we are happy to recommend it where it fits.

Three questions to decide

Sources