Flightradar24 for Ships

3/1/2026 at 4:16:41 PM

This only covers container ships btw. For full coverage of all vessels, try the 'vessel presence' layer in Global Fishing Watch's interactive map, based on a feed from Spire: https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/

by ltrg

3/1/2026 at 9:52:54 PM

https://www.marinetraffic.com has most AIS transponders, I use it to track friends on commercial and private vessels.

by nehal3m

3/1/2026 at 7:58:02 PM

https://aisvesseltracker.com/ is a good one too. Shows a LOT more, including cruise ships and pleasure craft.

by joezydeco

3/1/2026 at 9:31:14 PM

It's also a bit limited. The gold standard is still kpler.

by landl0rd

3/1/2026 at 4:59:29 PM

Thanks for the recommendation, looks interesting. I've used Vessel Finder due to something being a nuisance with Marine Traffic.

https://www.vesselfinder.com/

by cess11

3/1/2026 at 6:23:56 PM

Years ago I used to subscribe to a service that did this for oil tankers and tried to estimate oil to each route, they wrote a weekly summary. Eventually they decided they only wanted enterprise clients and not people like me who, working in devops, had no need for this service at all and only paid the $20 a month out of some weird fascination

by dwedge

3/1/2026 at 8:47:15 PM

It almost seems like I could have lived life as a trader and traveled the seas. Don’t know the type of money involved, and I guess I wouldn’t even know where to begin doing that in real life. So much easier in video games.

I’d just be a simple TEMU hauler, no fuss, simple life. Travel the world, catch some fish.

by general_reveal

3/1/2026 at 1:19:38 PM

What is different from marinetraffic?

by victorbjorklund

3/1/2026 at 2:13:32 PM

Marinetraffic is a good example of enshittification. Started well, now it's heavy and ad-laden, practically useless without a paid account.

by n2j3

3/1/2026 at 2:26:42 PM

Sounds like Flightradar24

by dry_soup

3/1/2026 at 2:40:26 PM

In case anyone isn't aware:

https://globe.adsbexchange.com

– is an alternative to FlightRadar24 with more data.

by jen729w

3/1/2026 at 8:43:51 PM

ADSBX used to be volunteer ran until JETNET paid the guy who controlled the domain name $20 million dollars to "sell" it to them and steal everyone else's source code and data. They now do selective filtering to appease their commercial clients.

Everyone has moved to https://globe.airplanes.live/ and https://app.airframes.io/flights now.

Here is the lawsuit from one former group of contributors: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23963235-golden-hamm...

by mike_d

3/1/2026 at 4:21:06 PM

Unfortunately adsbexchange does not allow you to see the source/destination of flights

by oncallthrow

3/1/2026 at 7:13:02 PM

Untrue

Click on the aircraft, then click on Flight Activity.

by esseph

3/1/2026 at 2:34:04 PM

At least for FR24 you get a "Gold" account (no longer business) simply for running a feed.

by rustyhancock

3/1/2026 at 2:45:44 PM

Nitpick: It's called Contributor and supposedly has the same features of the previous subscription. It still feels like a setup for future degradation by some marketing genius.

by tappaseater

3/1/2026 at 2:38:21 PM

I find Marinetraffic is fine without an account.

Here is a link to oil tankers anchored around the Strait of Hormuz. It has much better filters:

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:56.8/cente...

by Noaidi

3/1/2026 at 8:47:45 PM

Any of these provide satellite data without charge?

Also - is there any sites that publish parsed data from SAR sats?

by dzhiurgis

3/1/2026 at 1:26:34 PM

And what’s the similarity to flight radar?

by wodenokoto

3/1/2026 at 1:32:59 PM

A real time visualization using AIS instead of ADS-B feeds, presumably

by notahacker

3/1/2026 at 2:39:22 PM

as opposed to the dozens of other flight tracker sites?

by wodenokoto

3/1/2026 at 7:13:36 PM

This is ships not aircraft

by esseph

3/1/2026 at 3:15:59 PM

Meta: I like the use of an actual globe when zoomed out. Wish more things would do this.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall–Peters_projection

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylindrical_equal-area_project...

by throw0101c

3/1/2026 at 8:02:49 PM

[dead]

by twocommits

3/1/2026 at 7:51:01 PM

I once worked on a problem: GPS tracking shipping containers, since one company had almost 1% lost/stolen each year. I had an idea of using AIS with Si4362 to get positioning data from the container ship itself, but it was nearly impossible to get access to reefer monitoring systems. We ended up just using 4G NB-IoT for coastal tracking and it did solve the problem

by urba_

3/1/2026 at 11:33:46 AM

Seems to only have a tiny amount of ships compared to marinetraffic.com ?

by sgt

3/1/2026 at 2:40:53 PM

Seems regionally biased. This map makes it look like the Americas barely see any ship traffic, while the South China Sea is paved with ships from shore to shore.

by jameshart

3/1/2026 at 7:28:46 PM

The way I understand marinetraffic works is by having AIS receivers near shores and sending any received contacts to an API. If this works the same way then there's probably a lot fewer receivers so far.

by moffkalast

3/1/2026 at 9:43:00 PM

I don't see any of the American destroyers in Hormoz

by 0dayman

3/1/2026 at 10:01:09 PM

This is only for container ships.

by enraged_camel

3/1/2026 at 2:54:24 PM

Seems like it's just cargo ships? And presumably not even all of them.

I'll prefer vesselfinder for marinetraffic.

by Levitating

3/1/2026 at 3:57:10 PM

Interesting, a cool resource for an API endpoint for AIS data so aisstream.io. Seems quite solid. Any one any idea of a good resource for satellite AIS data - I feel like the EU probably funded it and I can’t find anything on capricious etc.

by gehsty

3/1/2026 at 3:19:03 PM

I tried posting ais-catcher.org but it got ignored

by dmarinus

3/1/2026 at 3:59:49 PM

Doman needs to be www.ais-catcher.org

by gerry_shaw

3/1/2026 at 5:39:56 PM

Did anyone spot the USS Abraham Lincoln?

by amelius

3/1/2026 at 8:19:49 PM

Military ships don't run their radio beacons in combat zones. (There was an incident last year where the USS Theodore Roosevelt collided with a civilian cargo ship at night at least partially because it tried to approach the Suez canal with it's beacon off.)

by appointment

3/1/2026 at 7:43:24 PM

Off topic, but I hope the UX improves. It's almost unusable.

Clicking on anything is an error-prone mess and then it hijacks the back button by changing the URL. That would be better off as a simple "share" link somewhere in the popup.

by sublinear

3/1/2026 at 5:30:24 PM

This seems useful speculating on short term oil prices. I believe the straight of hormuz may be closed or rumor of closing. Every expert seems to think that will spike oil prices.

by nodesocket

3/1/2026 at 4:03:59 PM

These tools went mainstream when the Houthis started hitting container ships. Watching AIS transponders go dark or vessels suddenly diverting around the Cape was something you just couldn't get from news coverage. And with Hormuz tensions right now, the real-time value is even higher.

by newzino

3/1/2026 at 7:01:39 PM

[dead]

by ConanRus

3/1/2026 at 1:25:17 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

3/1/2026 at 2:20:26 PM

Looking good! Thanks for sharing

by vldszn