Comparing IP data providers
Most IP data vendors solve one half of the problem well. Geolocation databases tell you where an address sits but say little about how the connection is being made; threat feeds flag proxies without the location and network context you need to act. Guarda returns both in a single response: country, region, city, coordinates, timezone and currency alongside ASN, ISP, hostname, connection type and a proxy, VPN, TOR, hosting or residential verdict with an explainable risk score.
MaxMind alternative
GeoIP2 and minFraud users who want city-level geolocation, ASN and proxy/VPN/TOR verdicts from one hosted API without database downloads or update pipelines.
IP2Location alternative
For teams on IP2Location BIN files or IP2Proxy who would rather call a live endpoint than ship a database with every release.
IPinfo alternative
For people who already have geolocation and ASN, but want proxy, VPN, TOR, hosting and risk scoring answered in the same response.
How to evaluate any IP vendor
Accuracy claims in marketing pages are close to meaningless because every provider measures against its own reference set. The only test that matters is your own traffic. Take a few thousand addresses from the surface you care about — signups, checkouts, logins — and run them through each candidate. Compare the disagreements, not the agreements: where two vendors differ is where your rules will behave differently in production.
Then look past the data itself. Does the vendor charge per lookup or per database refresh? How quickly do freshly-provisioned cloud ranges show up as hosting? Can you explain a decision to a customer or an auditor, or does the score arrive as an opaque number? Does the integration keep personal data out of a third party's logs?
Guarda answers the last one directly: lookup results are never written to our database. We keep anonymous daily counters for billing and nothing else.
Run your own comparison
Paste a batch of addresses into the bulk lookup tool and export the verdicts as CSV, no account required.