What's the difference between Zoning Radar and Shovels Decisions?

Shovels Decisions is a national dataset of rezonings and entitlements, built for people who want permits, contractors, and a warehouse. Zoning Radar is email, the day a Rhode Island planning or zoning application hits an agenda. If you need both, they are not substitutes.

Shovels bought ReZone in January 2026. The Decisions product takes city council agendas, planning commission meetings, and meeting minutes and turns them into structured records: the decision, the vote, the parties, the location. They say they create a record once the minutes are posted, so it matches the official record. Updates are twice a month. You can pull the data through Shovels Online, the API, or Snowflake. Decisions link forward to permits and contractors. The enterprise pitch is the complete story from first proposal to certificate of occupancy. They are SOC 2. They claim they are the only ones unifying meeting records with permit data. That is their site, not ours.

That is a serious product if you are a data team. National coverage, a warehouse, a permit spine, contacts on the record. If you are trying to see where multifamily is getting entitled across metros, or you want a rezoning to show up next to the building permit that follows, Shovels is in that business.

Zoning Radar is not. Zoning Radar emails you when a matching zoning or planning board application appears on a Rhode Island agenda, the same day that agenda shows up in the Secretary of State's Open Meetings system. All 39 municipalities. Applicant, address, plat and lot, a short summary, a link to the source document. You set a town, a board, an applicant, a parcel, or a keyword. Pro is $99 a month or $990 a year at the early-adopter price.

Two clocks.

Shovels is honest about theirs. Minutes are accurate. In a lot of places they also arrive weeks after the meeting. An application on the agenda is earlier than a posted decision. The hearing has not happened yet. Comment windows are still open. That is the window a land-use attorney, a surveyor, or a small developer actually uses. A structured "decision" that waits for minutes is a different object. Useful. Later.

We do not know which Rhode Island towns Shovels actually covers. They publish a coverage dashboard and they talk about hundreds of cities. We are not going to invent a Tiverton row. What we do know is the shape: national, built for data teams, twice-monthly, minutes-backed. Not a Warwick lawyer who wants Tiverton in the inbox the day the agenda posts.

The split is clean if you let it be. Shovels wins if you need permits plus many states plus a warehouse. Zoning Radar wins if you need every Rhode Island planning and zoning application when it first hits an agenda, in email, for $99. A national decisions API will not replace reading Little Compton's packet. An inbox of RI applications will not replace a Snowflake table of entitlements linked to C of O.

If you already pay for Shovels, keep it for the permit spine and the states that are not Rhode Island. Use Open Meetings or Zoning Radar for the local docket. They do not cancel each other out.