Sentinel Hub vs USGS EarthExplorer

Verdict

These solve different problems for someone who needs satellite imagery. USGS EarthExplorer is a free, registration-only search-and-download portal, most notably for the full Landsat archive back to 1972 at 30m resolution (15m panchromatic) with roughly 16-day revisit — you draw a search area, filter by date and cloud cover, and download or bulk-order raw scenes yourself. Sentinel Hub, owned by Planet Labs, is a cloud API that skips the download-and-process-locally step: its evalscript language runs band math, cloud masking and index calculations like NDVI server-side, returning ready-to-use images or statistics through a REST API, and it draws on Sentinel, Landsat, MODIS and commercial Planet imagery rather than one archive alone.

Choose USGS EarthExplorer if

• You need the specific, unmatched depth of the Landsat archive back to 1972 for long-term land-cover change work.
• You want to inspect and download raw scenes yourself rather than pay for processing.
• Cost needs to stay at zero — EarthExplorer has no paid tier at all.

Choose Sentinel Hub if

• You are building a geospatial application or pipeline that needs repeatable, scripted access to processed imagery, not raw scenes.
• You want a single API spanning multiple source archives (Sentinel, Landsat, Planet) instead of querying each separately.
• Server-side processing (cloud masking, index calculation, mosaicking) would save meaningful engineering time versus writing that logic yourself.

The honest caveat

Sentinel Hub's own pricing page redirects to Planet's site and could not be confirmed at the time of review — plan to check current processing-unit costs directly before committing a production pipeline to it. EarthExplorer's Landsat imagery, by contrast, is entirely free but comes with a real trade-off: 30m resolution and a roughly 16-day revisit are coarser and slower than Sentinel-era or commercial imagery, so it is the better fit for long time series, not for the sharpest recent snapshot.