Strengths
What .id does well
.id's free tools for councils include Community Profile, used by more than 300 councils, Population Forecast, used by more than 130, and Social Atlas. Councils commission them and publish them for anyone to use with a free .id account. They're very good. Councils can split their area into local small areas that match how residents think about it, the charts come with written commentary, and the forecasts come from .id's forecasting experts and its National Forecasting Program.
For businesses, .id sells demand data through its platform or as a data feed, catchment and hotspot reports, consulting, and Placemaker, a forecasting platform in early access with drive-time catchments, SA1 forecasts to 2046 and more than 57,000 development sites tracked. If you need a defensible forecast for a site, or an expert to stand behind the numbers, .id is a strong choice.
Limitations
What .id isn't built for
The free tools are organised council by council. Each council chooses which tools to commission, so not every area has every tool, and comparing suburbs in different councils, or a set of places across a whole city, means moving between separate sites.
.id's strength is depth and expertise, and its business products are built around that, with onboarding and consulting. If you want to look up and compare places yourself, today, across all of Australia, that's a different job.
How Censible differs
Every place, self-serve
Censible doesn't make bottom-up forecasts, model local economies or write commentary for each area. What it does is put every suburb, postcode, council and statistical area in Australia on the ABS's 2026 boundaries, with the 2011, 2016 and 2021 censuses lined up and 618 metrics for each. You can compare places regardless of council, rank them, draw a catchment, set a radius or a drive or walk time around a site, and find places that look like your best sites.
The same figures come through a JSON API and a connection for AI assistants. Our projections to 2026 and 2031 are simpler than .id's: ABS estimates and Geoscience Australia projections, labelled as projections wherever they appear.