Smappen is for drawing. You drop a pin, pick a drive time or a radius, and the tool traces the reachable area — an isochrone — then populates it with population, income and socio-professional data. It is a geomarketing tool: it answers "what does this territory look like".
The common confusion, and the reason many people go looking for an alternative, comes from a different expectation: what they wanted was the named list of businesses inside the area, not its statistical portrait. These are two different jobs, and almost no tool does both well.
Two questions people constantly conflate
The first is "which territory?". You answer it with an isochrone, population layers, movement flows. The deliverable is a map and aggregates.
The second is "who, inside that territory?". You answer it with a list: trading name, address, phone, activity, website. The deliverable is a file.
Choosing a tool before settling that question guarantees disappointment with any of them. A beautiful map does not fill a CRM; a 400-row list does not tell you whether the area is worth it.
If you want to map the territory
Isochrone tools — Smappen, or the equivalent functions in geomarketing suites — remain the right choice. Their value is the demographic layer and the accuracy of the travel-time computation.
QGIS, free and open source, does all of it and more, at the cost of a real learning curve. Paired with open national statistics it offers freedom no closed tool matches — but it is not something you open for a one-off question.
Google My Maps is still unbeatable for roughly outlining an area and sharing it. No statistics, no serious isochrone, but zero friction.
If you want the list of businesses in the area
This is no longer a mapping problem. Two families of sources exist, and they do not say the same thing.
Legal registers — in France, the Sirene repository and the national business register — list registered entities with their declared address and activity code. Exhaustive and official. Also sometimes disconnected from the ground: a registered-office address is not a storefront, and an activity code declared eight years ago may no longer describe the actual trade.
Local listings — what a customer searching a map sees — describe the business as it presents itself today: real trading name, opening hours, venue phone number, website. That is the photograph of the ground, without the register's exhaustiveness.
The two complement each other more than they compete: the local listing gives the usable contact, the legal register gives the legal form and the identifier. That is exactly what a chain does when it starts from a Google Maps scraper with CSV export and completes each row with its legal company data.
The compliance question specific to geographic targeting
Targeting an area raises no issue in itself: a perimeter is not personal data. What changes is what you attach to each point. As long as you handle establishments — trading name, address, venue phone — you are on company data.
The moment a director's name, a nominative email or a personal mobile appears, the GDPR applies, including when the data came from a public source. Having obtained it lawfully says nothing about your right to process it afterwards: you still need a legal basis, you must inform the person, and you must be able to honour an objection.
FAQ — Smappen alternatives
Does Smappen give the list of businesses in an area?
That is not its primary function: it characterises a territory through aggregated data. To get a named list of establishments you need a company-data source, either a legal register or local listings.
What is the difference between an isochrone and a radius?
A radius is a straight-line distance, indifferent to the terrain. An isochrone is the set of points reachable within a given time, accounting for the road network. On a territory cut by a river or a motorway, the two draw very different areas.
Are legal register data enough for local prospecting?
They give exhaustiveness and the official identifier, but rarely a directly usable contact, and the declared address may be a registered-office service. Crossing them with local listings fixes both blind spots.
Can you build a catchment area for free?
Yes: QGIS with open statistical data covers most of the need, in exchange for learning time. Online tools trade that freedom for immediacy.
How do you check that a business list really matches the area?
Plot a sample of addresses on a map before using the file. The classic errors come from head offices located outside the area and from registered-office addresses shared by dozens of entities.