Datadory notebook
Free Ais Ship Position Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage
Datadory delivers free ais ship position data covering comprehensive field definitions, entity mappings, and historical time series — structured for direct analytics and delivered on demand.
1,744 datasets. Pick your catch.
Can you stream live positions without paying?
AISStream.io takes the opposite approach: one free WebSocket subscription to the whole world, pushing roughly 300 decoded AIS messages per second as JSON, with generated client libraries for Python, Java, Go and TypeScript behind a free integration key. The publisher states its land-station network reaches roughly 200 km off the majority of the world's coastlines. Its catches are structural - the service is explicitly in beta with no uptime guarantee and object models declared unstable, keys can be revoked, and no historical archive is offered. Pair it with MarineCadastre whenever the question reaches backward in time.
Pick up where this leaves off
Every one of these ships with sample rows before you commit to anything.
MarineCadastre AIS Vessel Traffic Data (USCG Nationwide AIS)
EMODnet Vessel Density Maps (EU Waters)
density · ship_type_code · month_layer …+1 more
BarentsWatch Open AIS API (Norwegian Coastal Administration)
AISStream.io Live AIS WebSocket API
Global Fishing Watch AIS Datasets and APIs
mmsi · imo · shipname …+4 more
Want rows instead of a pitch? Name the datasets.
API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.
Get a sampleQuestions worth asking
What is the closest free equivalent for European waters?
EMODnet Human Activities publishes AIS-derived vessel density rasters for all EU sea basins: 1x1 km monthly layers plus yearly averages and seasonal composites from 2017 to 2024, split into 13 ship-type layers and downloadable directly as GeoTIFF under commercial delivery terms 4.0. It aggregates positions into intensity surfaces rather than distributing per-vessel points.