Following on from my article about setting up an AIS receiver,, I’ve been comparing the benefits of different services you can send your data to and what you get in exchange.

Each of these websites lets you forward your AIS data to them, in exchange for some kind of premium access, whether it’s to features on their website or API.

There’s so many that I’ve decided to write them down to compare the benefits. If you only want to send to one or a few, this might help you decide which ones to choose.

If you work with one of these services and I’ve got anything wrong, or if I’ve missed your service, leave a comment and I’ll be sure to check!

AISHub

https://www.aishub.net/join-us

Number of vessels (2025-08-12): 101,884

Benefits:

Requirements:

  • Connect an AIS feed with:

    • Coverage of at least 10 vessels (average over the last 7 days)

    • At least 90% uptime (average over the last 7 days)

    • Maximum downsampling rate of 60 seconds

    • Maximum delay of 10 seconds for AIS messages

AISHub is the service I’ve had the most immediate benefit from. I filled out the form, and within a couple of hours I had an email with an IP and port to send data to. About 3 hours after confirming I’d done that, I had a reply with an API key enclosed.

The API key lets you query the AISHub API up to once a minute for ship or station data. I can’t find a paid option, so providing a data feed is the only way to gain access to the API.

At the time of writing a full data download in CSV format, BZIP2 compression and otherwise default parameters clocks in at about 1.9MiB compressed, 6.7MiB uncompressed with about 53k rows.

I’ve seen various claims on internet comments of a NMEA feed available via AISHub, but nothing on their website or comms indicating one. Perhaps once I’ve been a station for longer - I’ll update if that comes through.

AIS Friends

https://www.aisfriends.com/register

Number of vessels (2025-08-13): 176,624

Benefits:

  • Web-based monitoring of your AIS feed in real time

  • Automatic email notifications when your feed is offline for more than 6 hours

  • Live map with filters, customisable fleet and vessel track

  • Email notification if a vessel is in AIS station coverage

  • Access to ships particulars, management info and class information

Requirements (see Terms of Use):

  • Provide a data feed with:

    • at least 5 vessels in the zone of coverage (average for the last 7 days)

    • at least 50% uptime (average for the last 7 days)

    • up to 60 seconds downsampling rate

    • up to 10 seconds delay of AIS messages

Much like AISHub, onboarding was very quick - I filled out the form and shortly after received an email with a UDP port to send data to.

I can’t say much for the benefits - nothing particularly stands out versus other services. I guess the email notification thing could come in handy if you’re keeping an eye out for a vessel that’s gone out of range.

Marine Traffic

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/join-us/cover-your-area

Number of vessels (2025-08-12): 2,591,254

Benefits (see article):

  • Free or sponsored AIS receiver if you quality (see free receiver application)

  • Essential plan (once qualified) - normally 100EUR/month:

    • No ads experience

    • Track 1 vessel cross-ocean (via satellite)

    • See port calls, voyage forecasts, expected arrivals and movement replays

  • Enterprise plan (once qualified):

    • Unlimited cross-ocean tracking (via satellite)

    • More historical port calls, positions, events

    • Increased data export allowance to 10,000 rows/month

    • Movement notifications

    • Nautical charts

    • Create a ‘fleet‘ of 5k vessels and up to 2k monitoring areas

Requirements:

  • Essential plan: provide a data feed with >40% availability (over 3 months)

  • Enterprise plan: provide a data feed with >85% availability (over 3 months)

MarineTraffic is a popular tracking vessel app, and one of the benefits is that they make use of satellite data to augment the data from terrestrial vessels, so the enterprise plan is certainly a great bonus.

MarineTraffic do have an API, described here and documented here, although I’ve not yet been able to find a link between the enterprise plan and the API. If and when I get qualified for the enterprise plan I’ll report back with results.

In the meantime, it is possible to perform vessel searches on their website and bulk download the search results. This is limited to 10k rows of download per month, so you’ll have to be pretty sparing with your searches if they’re covering a wide range of ship types.

AIS-Catcher

https://www.aiscatcher.org/addstation

Number of vessels (2025-08-13): 80K+

Requirements:

  • Set up an AIS data feed, no published quality requirements

Benefits:

  • Access to ‘community feed’ via AIS-Catcher app

AIS-catcher followed the same pattern as the other services - fill in the online form, and get a UDP port by email. This also comes with a ‘sharing key’ which you can use to claim and manage the station on their website.

The sharing key also seems to unlock some extra features in the AIS-catcher app, which the aiscatcher.org team recommend but isn’t required for sending data.

I haven’t yet found an API to query data programmatically, so as far as I can tell the only way to interact with AIS-catcher is through the website or their app. There’s mention of a community feed at aiscatcher.org - community, although this seems to be baked into AIS-catcher and not publicly documented.

Vessel Finder

https://stations.vesselfinder.com/become-partner

Number of vessels (2025-08-13): 124,534

Requirements:

  • Set up an AIS data feed, no published quality requirements

Benefits:

  • Free premium account (see details - premium as opposed to satellite)

  • Access live map with ship data

  • Monitor station statistics

  • Email notifications if there’s a problem with performance

  • Embed a personalised live map of your area on your website

Vessel Finder provides a live AIS API and raw NMEA feed: Real-Time AIS Data API. Unfortunately access to the NMEA feed is gated behind a contact form without much clarity on what the fees are and who can have access.

MyShipTracking

https://www.myshiptracking.com/help-center/contributors/add-your-station

Number of vessels (as of 2025-08-13): 1,061,053

Requirement:

  • Set up an AIS data feed, no published quality requirements

Benefit:

  • Forward NMEA data to other services

  • ‘Chief Officer’ account (see details)

MyShipTracking offers a unique benefit: you can configure it to forward on your NMEA data to other services. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell you can only forwards to one other service, but that’s at least one less copy of data being pushed from your device.

Signing up was pretty much trivial, there’s a ‘login with Google’ option and on filling out a form there’s immediately a popup with a IP and TCP/UDP port. Certainly the fastest I’ve gone from signing up to having an active connection!

Once that’s configured, the stations shows as active and pending manual review, with a note saying it’ll take <24 hours.

One snag I hit is that to set up NMEA forwarding I had to provide my password again, but since I logged in with Google I didn’t have a password to put in. Since it was trivial to delete my account, I simply deleted and created a new account using the username/password option.

The service also provides an API described at API Documentation, which the Chief Officer account receives 1000 coins a month towards.

ShippingExplorer

https://www.shippingexplorer.net/en/freeaccess

Number of vessels (as of 2025-08-13): over 500,000

Requirements:

  • Set up an AIS data feed, no published quality requirements

Benefits:

  • Free basic license, one per station (see details)

  • Free AIS receiver if you qualify (see details)

ShippingExplorer takes slightly longer to sign up for - instead of a form to fill in with all the receiver and location details, the website points to a contact form with a free-form message field. The interaction with the team was speedy and pleasant.

The license is for their chart plotting software, valid for desktop and mobile. Each linked station entitles to you another license, so there’s an incentive to connect more stations.

ShipXplorer

Not to be confused with ShippingExplorer above.

https://www.shipxplorer.com/addcoverage

Requirements:

  • Maintain an active AIS data feed, no published quality requirements

Benefits: (see detail)

  • Free Business Account (see benefits)

  • Access To Premium Apps

  • Hardware Discounts (occasionally)

  • Free AIS receiver if you qualify (see critiera)

Going through the account creation and ‘addcoverage’ form automatically provides a hostname and UDP port to send data to. The website says that 24 hours of successful data, the account is automatically upgraded to a business account, however in my case I had an email within an hour saying I had been upgraded to a business account.

Others

These are other services I’ve come across and haven’t had a chance to try:

  • S&P Global: AIS Antenna Network Partnerships

    • Seems to be more geared to commercial partnerships

    • Offers ‘preferential subscription rates’ on their products in return

  • WorldwideAIS (WAKE) WorldWide AIS Network

    • Exchange AIS data for crypto

    • Unfortuantely this went a bit over my head - I’ve not played around much with crypto platforms, and there were a lot of steps (install a wallet, configure a custom blockchain) to get onboarded.

    • Some small things aren’t inspiring - the sign-up page is hosted on a vercel app and could really do with a custom domain, and the wallet was complaining that the blockchain identifiers didn’t match up with the names being given. With a bit more polish this might be an interesting idea.