Compare
Accurint for Law Enforcement vs SoundThinking
Accurint is an audited public-records search tool for finding people; SoundThinking pairs gunfire detection with an overlapping investigative-data suite.
Side by side
| Accurint for Law Enforcement | SoundThinking | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | LexisNexis Risk Solutions | SoundThinking, Inc. |
| Pricing model | Quote only | Quote only |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud |
| Open source | No | No |
| Best for | Investigators who need fast identity and address lookups to locate suspects or missing persons. | City police departments wanting gunfire alerting and cross-source investigative data aggregation. |
| Pricing | Subscription licensed to agencies on a per-seat or per-agency basis; pricing requires a sales quote. Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site. | Sold as municipal contracts (historically priced per square mile of sensor coverage per year); no public pricing page. Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site. |
| Features |
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Verdict
Accurint for Law Enforcement and SoundThinking (formerly ShotSpotter) both sell investigative data to police agencies, but they started from opposite ends of the problem. Accurint is a subscription search platform over billions of aggregated public records — addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations, associates — built to help investigators locate a suspect, witness or missing person faster than manual record requests. SoundThinking began as a physical sensor network that detects and triangulates gunfire in real time, then expanded into its own investigative-data suite, including CrimeTracer, which searches cross-agency records for leads in a way that functionally overlaps with what Accurint does.
The two increasingly compete on that overlapping ground, but SoundThinking's core technology carries something Accurint does not: public and political scrutiny. Its use in policing has been publicly disputed in some deployment cities, with disagreements over detection accuracy and community impact. This listing describes both vendors' stated capabilities rather than adjudicating that dispute.
Choose Accurint if
- The core need is fast, audited identity and address lookups to locate a person connected to a case.
- You want an established LexisNexis Risk Solutions product within a broader law-enforcement data line (Accurint LE Plus, Virtual Crime Center, TraX), with Accurint One — an AI-driven successor combining these — expected in 2026.
- Permissioned, audited access to sensitive identity data is a hard requirement your procurement process will check closely.
Choose SoundThinking if
- Real-time gunfire detection and location — including incidents no one calls 911 about — is the primary requirement, not just records search.
- You want gunfire detection, cross-agency record search (CrimeTracer), license-plate analytics (PlateRanger) and weapons screening (SafePointe) from one vendor's suite.
- You have budgeted time to work through the public and oversight-body scrutiny this technology has drawn in some cities before deployment, not just the technical evaluation.
What they share
Both are sold under quote-based agency contracts with no public pricing, both are restricted to authorized law-enforcement use, and both now offer cross-agency investigative record search as a core capability — Accurint as its original purpose, SoundThinking's CrimeTracer as an extension of a product line that began with acoustic sensors.
The honest caveat
If your agency's need is purely investigative record search, evaluate both on that ground directly rather than assuming SoundThinking's broader suite is the more complete answer — you may be paying for sensor infrastructure you do not need. If gunfire detection specifically is the requirement, budget for community and city-council engagement as part of the timeline, and ask SoundThinking directly for independent, third-party accuracy data rather than internal figures.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026