Foursquare Places
Places search and point-of-interest (POI) data API with global coverage of 100M+ places, venue details, categories, photos, tips, and location intelligence for geospatial applications.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
API key auth. Places data — location intelligence. GDPR for location data handling. User check-in data involves PII. SOC2 not prominent.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You need high-quality, global POI data with rich attributes (hours, photos, categories) and a developer-friendly places search API for location-aware agent features.
Avoid When
Your primary need is geocoding (address-to-coordinates) rather than place search, or you need free access at scale.
Use Cases
- • Nearby places search — finding restaurants, shops, or services around a coordinate
- • Place enrichment — given an address, retrieving structured business category and attribute data
- • Location-based recommendations in travel or local discovery agent workflows
- • Verifying and standardizing place names and categories in data pipelines
- • Foot traffic patterns and visit trends for location intelligence (enterprise tier)
Not For
- • Turn-by-turn navigation or routing (use Google Maps or TomTom Routing API)
- • Geocoding addresses to coordinates (use Google Geocoding or OpenCage)
- • Real-time transit data
- • Free access at production scale — meaningful usage requires paid plan
Interface
Authentication
API key in Authorization header. Key scoped to account with rate limits based on plan. Formerly had OAuth for user-specific check-in data — that API is retired.
Pricing
Free tier is useful for prototyping. Production use requires paid plans. Enterprise location intelligence (movement trends, catchment areas) is significantly more expensive.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ User check-in API and social features from the original Foursquare are retired — only Places API remains
- ⚠ Place categories use Foursquare's own taxonomy (not Google's) — mapping to other systems requires translation
- ⚠ Search results return Foursquare Place IDs which differ from Google Place IDs — not interchangeable
- ⚠ Photos and tips data is community-sourced and may be outdated for less popular venues
- ⚠ Global coverage varies significantly — US and EU have much better coverage than other regions
- ⚠ Free tier daily limit resets at midnight UTC — build monitoring for limit exhaustion
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for Foursquare Places.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.