The short honest version
If you want to look up one specific thing properly — one flight, one ship, one satellite, one street — the dedicated commercial tool is better than we are. Flightradar24 knows a great deal about any individual aircraft. MarineTraffic knows about individual vessels. That is what they are built for.
If you want to see many unrelated datasets together on one planet and understand how they relate to each other, that is what this does instead, and nothing else does it in a browser without install.
Against dedicated flight trackers
Flightradar24, FlightAware, ADS-B Exchange
They are better at: individual aircraft. Registration-to-owner lookup, full flight history, historical playback, engine-out detection, approach and runway data, alerts, and much wider receiver coverage in some regions. Flightradar24 in particular is years ahead on per-aircraft detail.
We are better at: everything else, simultaneously. An aircraft over the Pacific next to the undersea cables serving it, next to the earthquakes that week, next to the satellites overhead, on one globe, with no tab switching.
Coverage caveat: honest comparison matters here. Our default live flight feed without an OpenSky key is a bounded fallback and is not as complete as Flightradar24's global picture. If tracking aircraft specifically is what you care about, use theirs.
Against vessel trackers
MarineTraffic, VesselFinder
They are better at: vessel identity. Ship name, IMO number, flag, cargo type, draught, destination, port calls and long-term history. Our AIS layer needs an API key and covers the same underlying broadcast, so when it is enabled it is not more complete — just shown differently.
We are better at: seeing ships in the context of naval installations, cables and land infrastructure on the same view. MarineTraffic is a vessel tool with a map, not a planetary model.
Against satellite tools
Heavens-Above, N2YO, Space-Track
They are better at: pass predictions for a specific satellite, TLE management, and historical orbital data. N2YO's telemetry for amateur radio satellites is genuinely something we cannot match.
We are better at: satellites as part of a planetary picture rather than an isolated orbital diagram, with no key required for the standard groups.
Against geospatial and satellite imagery
Google Earth, Sentinel Hub, Copernicus Browser
They are better at: actual satellite imagery, and this is not close. Google Earth has decades of high-resolution imagery with historical dates. Copernicus Sentinel gives free, current, very high resolution imagery that we do not attempt to compete with at all. If you want to look at what a place actually looks like from orbit, use them.
We are better at: live signals rather than imagery. We plot positions and events as they are transmitted. Imagery is something we consume as a basemap; the data layers are the point.
Against other OSINT dashboards
Sophia's Project, Liveuamap, specialized dashboards
They are better at: depth in one domain. A dedicated seismology dashboard has richer event metadata and better analysis tools. Liveuamap's incident aggregation is a different and useful product.
We are better at: breadth in a single view, offline availability for several layers, and the fact that it is one MIT-licensed codebase you can read, fork and self-host with no vendor.
Where this is honestly the wrong choice
Being straight about this is more useful than a table where we win every row:
- You need legally reliable flight or vessel records. This is a visualisation of public broadcasts, not a system of record.
- You need real satellite imagery analysis. Use Sentinel Hub or Google Earth.
- You are on a slow connection or an old device. A 3D globe with several thousand objects is heavy. A flat dashboard is lighter.
- You need guaranteed uptime. Our live layers depend on volunteer-run upstream APIs that rate-limit and occasionally go down. For operational use, that is a real limitation.
- You want history. We show current state and recent windows. We are not an archive.
- You need satellite imagery alerts or specific pass predictions. Dedicated tools do this properly.
God’s Eye View is not for navigation, emergency response, medical, investment or any other safety-critical decision. Live AIS coverage reflects who is broadcasting, not who exists. Road traffic is simulated unless a TomTom key is configured. Mapped installations and ALPR camera locations come from community-tagged open data and are neither verified nor authoritative.
Where it genuinely wins
- One globe, many datasets. No tab switching, no separate accounts, no separate logins.
- Nothing to install. It runs in a browser tab. No Electron, no Docker, no Python environment.
- No account, no tracking, no paywall on the core app.
- 22 layers, most of them keyless. Most of this runs with zero API keys at all.
- Real 3D depth and altitude, not symbols on a flat map. This matters most for earthquakes and aircraft.
- Open source under MIT. Read it, fork it, self-host it, extend it.
- Six bundled datasets work offline, so the app is still useful without a connection.
- Optional voice control, with 28 tools that actually steer the globe rather than just answering questions.
Common questions
Is God's Eye View a replacement for Flightradar24?
No. For looking up one specific aircraft's history and registration details, Flightradar24 is better. This is for seeing many datasets together on one globe.
Why use a 3D globe instead of a flat map?
Depth is invisible on a flat map. Plotting earthquakes at true depth reveals subduction geometry, and aircraft altitude is readable when the camera is near the horizon. A flat map has to encode both of those into colour or size.
Can I self-host it?
Yes. It is MIT licensed, runs from source with npm, and the whole backend can be run locally. Several features that need server-side API keys work fully in a self-hosted install.
Does it work offline?
Partly. Six layers including submarine cables, datacenters, dams and astronomy are bundled and always render. Live layers need a network connection.
Open the globe
No signup, no installation. It loads in your browser and starts streaming.
Launch God's Eye View