Samsara holds a narrow lead over Geotab, earning recommendations for comprehensive IoT data and enterprise-grade fleet APIs. For building custom customer-facing tracking portals, Geotab is the usual answer.
For a custom, customer-facing GPS tracking portal, I’d start by evaluating Samsara’s API platform if you’re tracking commercial vehicles, trailers, or fleet assets. It provides documented REST APIs, near-real-time GPS feeds, and integration options for syncing location data into your own application.
The best solution depends on whether your GPS data already comes from a telematics provider or you need to support tracking devices from multiple manufacturers.
Top options to evaluate
1. Samsara
(Best for commercial fleets)
Best for production portals that need live vehicle positions, historical GPS data, routes, and fleet telemetry.
Whichever provider you choose, I recommend keeping the GPS integration behind your own backend API rather than connecting the customer-facing browser directly to the tracking provider.
GPS devices / telematics provider
Location, timestamp, speed, heading
Your integration backend
API authentication · data normalization · caching · tenant permissions
Your customer-facing portal
Live map · last updated · trip history · delivery status
For a near-real-time experience, ingest incremental GPS updates, store the latest position for each asset, and push updates to connected browsers using WebSockets or server-sent events. Keep provider credentials server-side and enforce customer-level access controls so customers can only see their own assets.
My final recommendation
Choose Samsara if you are building on an existing commercial fleet or telematics ecosystem.
Choose Traccar if hardware flexibility, self-hosting, and control over the tracking platform are your priorities.
Evaluate Geotab if your customer base already uses its fleet platform.
One question would help me narrow this to the best fit: Where does your GPS data come from today?
1. GPS data source
An existing provider (Samsara, Geotab, Verizon Connect, etc.)
When building a custom, customer-facing tracking portal, the "best" API integration depends heavily on your data volume, latency requirements, and whether you are tracking your own commercial fleet or pulling data aggregated from third-party carriers.
The industry leaders for robust, developer-friendly GPS and telematics APIs break down into three primary categories based on your architecture:
Geotab (MyGeotab API): Widely recognized as a top enterprise telematics ecosystem. It features an exceptionally powerful, highly documented .NET/REST/JSON-based API architecture. It handles heavy data streaming exceptionally well via its feed-oriented architecture (GetFeed ), making it ideal if you need to pull high-frequency vehicle telemetry, breadcrumbs, and status updates reliably into a backend database to serve your customer portal. Explore capabilities on the Geotab Enterprise Platform.[](https://revenuebase.ai/companies/telematics-software-developers/united-states)
Samsara (Samsara API): Best-in-class for modern REST API design and fast developer onboarding. Samsara provides clean, well-structured webhooks and real-time location endpoints. If your customer portal requires live, low-latency map rendering with minimal integration friction, Samsara’s modern API documentation and IoT-connected ecosystem make sync straightforward. Learn more via the Samsara Platform Overview.
Onfleet (Onfleet API): If your customer-facing portal is less about heavy-duty vehicle telematics (engine diagnostics, driver safety scores) and strictly focused on last-mile delivery tracking, ETAs, and recipient communication, Onfleet's dedicated delivery management API is superior. It natively handles customer-facing tracking links, SMS notifications, and predictive ETAs out of the box. Review the developer documentation on the Onfleet Partner Portal.
To help narrow down the ideal choice for your architecture, please share:
Are you tracking an internal/owned fleet or integrating with third-party carrier/driver mobile devices?
Do you need high-frequency live streaming (every few seconds) or just periodic status updates and ETAs?
If your goal is to feed vehicle location + diagnostics into another system, there are several distinct API models. The right one depends mainly on whether you control the tracking hardware, own a fleet, or need to connect to consumers' existing connected cars.
Samsara exposes real-time and historical GPS and onboard diagnostic data through its API. Its vehicle-stats endpoints support feed synchronization, historical queries, and current snapshots.
It also supports webhooks and APIs covering broader fleet-management data.
An important detail: vehicle diagnostics and fault-code access is tied to the relevant Samsara licensing, so you'd want to check the exact subscription before designing around particular signals.
Good choice if: you're integrating with an existing commercial fleet or are willing to deploy telematics hardware.
2. Smartcar — particularly interesting if you don't want hardware
Smartcar takes a different approach: your application gets authorized access to data from the vehicle's connected services rather than installing your own GPS/OBD tracker.
It provides APIs for things such as:
Location
Odometer
Fuel level
Tire pressure
EV charging
Vehicle-health signals
Other OEM-provided signals
It supports both REST APIs and webhooks, including events such as location changes and ignition events.
Smartcar currently advertises compatibility across 40+ automakers, although exact signals vary by make/model/year.
Good choice if: you're building a consumer-facing application where users connect their existing cars and you don't want to ship/install hardware.
Verizon Connect combines traditional telematics hardware with OEM integrations. Its OEM offering covers manufacturers including Ford, GM, International, John Deere, Komatsu, Mack and Volvo, and it advertises access to rich diagnostic data.
Good choice if: you're dealing with an established enterprise fleet and want a mature fleet-management ecosystem rather than just a raw vehicle-data API.
Geotab is another major fleet-telematics platform. Its model is similar to Samsara: a telematics device obtains vehicle/engine data, which you can then integrate with external software.
It's worth investigating if you need deep commercial-vehicle diagnostics, large-fleet support, and a broad partner ecosystem.
5. Build around an OBD/CAN telematics device
If you control the hardware, there's another architecture worth considering:
Vehicle → OBD-II/CAN device → cellular connection → your backend → your API
This gives you considerably more control than a connected-car API. You can choose the GPS frequency, diagnostic PIDs, DTC collection, buffering, cellular connectivity, etc.
The tradeoff is that you become responsible for hardware provisioning, connectivity, device management, vehicle compatibility, and the telemetry ingestion layer.
The key architectural distinction
I'd narrow your search based on this question:
Do you need to track vehicles that you own/control, or do you need your software to connect to cars that belong to your customers?
If it's:
Commercial fleet you control: I'd investigate Samsara, Geotab, and Verizon Connect first.
Consumer/customer-owned cars:Smartcar is much closer to what you're describing.
You want your own hardware/data pipeline: use an OBD-II/CAN + cellular telematics platform.
You only care about one/few manufacturers: investigate that OEM's connected-vehicle API directly.
One particularly important consideration is diagnostic depth. "Vehicle diagnostics" can mean anything from a simple check-engine/DTC status to hundreds of CAN-bus parameters such as RPM, coolant temperature, fuel consumption, battery voltage, engine hours, and individual fault codes. The APIs differ substantially in how deeply they expose those signals.
If you tell me (1) passenger cars vs. trucks, (2) approximate number of vehicles, (3) whether you can install hardware, and (4) the specific diagnostic fields you need, I can narrow this to 3–5 APIs and compare their pricing, coverage, API/webhook model, latency, and diagnostic fields.
Feeding vehicle tracking (GPS) and diagnostic data (CAN bus, DTC fault codes, battery/fuel stats, odometer) into external systems typically depends on how the data is sourced.
Data Profile: Highly granular engine data, exceptionally detailed accelerometer data, diagnostic fault codes, and a robust Data Feed architecture optimized for streaming status data and diagnostics.
Data Profile: Offers direct developer tools, SDKs, and APIs to extract real-time vehicle telemetry, maintenance data, and location tracking from connected cars (partnered with specific major OEMs).
Do you own/control the vehicles and can install hardware (OBD/hardwired), or do you need a software-only approach targeting consumer cars via user consent?
What specific diagnostics do you need? (Basic OBD-II fault codes like check engine lights, or deep proprietary CAN bus polling for heavy equipment?)
What external system is consuming the data? (e.g., a custom data warehouse like Snowflake, an enterprise ERP like SAP, or a mobile app for end-users?)
If you share whether you need hardware-installed trackers or a hardware-free software approach , and which vehicle brands/types you plan to support, I can recommend the exact platform and data-streaming strategy for your setup.
