Smarty alternatives: Comparing 9 address verification solutions

Address data is critical to onboarding a customer or product shipping – yet surprisingly easy to get wrong. A single mistyped street name or missing unit number can derail an otherwise smooth process, and the systems meant to catch these errors don’t always get it right either. 

This creates a tough balancing act. Flag an address as invalid or ask a customer to “correct” information that was never wrong, and you risk frustrating genuine customers into abandoning their purchase or sign-up. Loosen your controls to avoid that friction, and inaccurate addresses can slip through instead – leading to failed deliveries, compliance issues, carrier correction fees and a growing number of support tickets.  

If that tension sounds familiar, it may be time to reconsider your current address verification setup. This guide compares leading address verification providers to help you select the best one for your business. We’ll also talk about our own solution, Loqate, which provides predictive address verification and capture in 250 countries. 

We’ll cover: 

• Loqate
• Precisely
• Informatica
• Data8
• Fetchify
• EasyPost
• Melissa
• Google Maps Address Validation API

Explore our address verification capabilities and see how they can work for you. Book a demo today. 

Loqate: Address capture and verification across 250 countries

Loqate was founded in 2009, which means we’ve spent almost 20 years turning messy, incomplete addresses into usable data for businesses like yours in 250 countries. This experience is what helps us handle the edge cases, like unusual formats and new construction.

As the author of this post, it makes sense to introduce ourselves first before covering other providers that are strong Smarty alternatives. Here are three reasons companies like IBM, Sephora and Kohl’s choose to work with us for global address verification: 

Make entering an address a lot faster with fewer keystrokes

Nobody likes typing out their full mailing address on a phone screen, especially when you’re trying to buy a product or sign up for an account.

With our real-time address capture and autocomplete, users don’t have to. Using smart IP- and device-based location biasing, our technology suggests local addresses in as few as three keystrokes, with results appearing in about 150 milliseconds.

Type-ahead search reduces typing effort by up to 78% and address entry errors by up to 20%. When every extra field or fumbled keystroke creates a small opening for a customer to leave, these reductions make a big difference. 

Our solution supports 130 address formats and structures every entry to match precise local conventions, so what ends up in your database is a clean, accurate reference record rather than whatever the customer happened to type. And if you want it to feel like part of your product rather than a bolted-on tool, you can remove our branding from the search bar so it looks native to your site.

If you already use GBG Go for customer onboarding, you can integrate our address capture directly into that journey.

Maximize global match rates with AI-powered parsing and fuzzy matching

Ask three customers to type the same address, and you'll probably get three different answers. One types "321 Main St Apt 1A," another writes "321 Main Street #1A," and a third forgets the unit number entirely. Now add typos, inconsistent local formatting, missing details and non-Latin characters into the mix, and matching that address to the right record gets complicated.

By combining fuzzy matching, AI-powered parsing and comprehensive global reference data, our solution helps you make sense of that mess.

Fuzzy matching catches the everyday slip-ups, like recognizing that "Mian St" probably means "Main St," and accommodates missing punctuation or shorthand. AI-powered parsing identifies and organizes individual address components (separating a building number from a suite, for example) even when the information is incomplete or out of order. 

And because your customers probably aren't all typing in English, our solution supports 78 languages and 139 character scripts, including non-Latin scripts like Cyrillic and Arabic.

None of what we just covered really matters, though, if the underlying data is thin. That's why we pull from multiple sources, including postal, geospatial and utility data, to build a comprehensive reference record for each location. We also support local postal standards like CASS in the US, SERP in Canada and AMAS in Australia.

Across the 250 countries we cover, you can expect an average 7% improvement in match rate and uplift globally, climbing as high as 19% in developing markets and averaging 8% in more established ones.

Reduce delivery failures with premise-level verification and geocoding

A missing apartment number or new residential building that hasn't been mapped yet might seem like small gaps, but they set off an expensive chain reaction with misrouted shipments, carrier fees, manual reviews and a spike in customer support tickets. 

You need to catch these issues before they snowball, and that starts with verifying addresses at a granular level (down to the premise or sub-premise, including unit, suite or house number) rather than simply confirming that a street or building exists. We provide that level of precision in 120 countries.

From there, geolocation technology maps each verified address to exact latitude and longitude coordinates, with rooftop-level accuracy in 60 countries, so you're not just confirming an address is real, you're pinpointing exactly where it sits.

Not every address is verified with the same degree of certainty, and you shouldn't have to treat them all the same way. Our Address Verification Code gives you verification, parsing, postcode and match scores instead of a flat pass/fail, so you can see exactly how confident that verification is and set your own acceptance thresholds based on your use case and risk tolerance.

If you're a retailer, for example, this data precision is what helps your delivery driver reach the right doorstep, not just the right street. And it's not only about new data: we can also cleanse and enrich the address records you already have, correcting inaccurate legacy entries while preventing new errors from creeping in.

How Rotita cut order holds by 51% and cancellations by 43% with Loqate

Rotita, a fast-moving fashion brand launching 400+ new styles every week, was losing more than $100,000 a year and frustrating customers with delayed orders and failed deliveries – all because of bad address data. 

Rotita's existing system could only verify addresses from new customers. Returning shoppers with outdated addresses, orders placed through other channels and manually overridden entries created a growing backlog of checkout holds that required manual review and led to an increase in cancellations.

Rotita rolled out our address capture solution to catch bad data before it could cause delivery issues. Now, every address – whether freshly typed or pulled from a saved profile – gets validated, corrected and enriched in real time to meet each country's exact postal requirements right at the point of entry.

Implementing our solution led to: 

• 51% fewer order holds
• 43% fewer cancellations from undeliverable shipments
• Fewer manual reviews, which frees up Rotita's team to focus on higher-value work instead of performing routine order checks

Read the full case study. 

Now that we’ve covered our address verification verification capabilities, here are seven other Smarty alternatives to consider: