Sentinel vs Landsat vs Planet vs Maxar: earth observation platforms for climate analytics compared

The earth observation market is projected to exceed $8.6 billion by 2027 (Euroconsult, 2025), yet over 60 percent of climate researchers still rely on a single satellite platform for their analytics pipelines. Choosing the wrong data source can mean the difference between catching illegal deforestation in near real time and discovering it months after the damage is done. With four dominant platforms covering different price points, resolutions, and revisit cadences, sustainability teams need a structured way to evaluate trade-offs before committing budgets and engineering resources.

Why It Matters

Earth observation (EO) satellites generate the foundational datasets that drive climate policy, carbon market verification, disaster response, and biodiversity monitoring. The European Space Agency (ESA, 2025) estimates that Copernicus Sentinel data contributed over €5.5 billion in economic value across Europe in 2024 alone, while NASA's Landsat archive remains the longest continuous record of land surface change, stretching back to 1972. On the commercial side, Planet Labs images the entire landmass daily, and Maxar delivers sub-meter imagery that can resolve individual buildings and infrastructure.

For sustainability professionals, the platform choice determines what questions you can answer. A 10-meter pixel from Sentinel-2 can detect broad deforestation fronts, but it cannot identify selective logging at the individual-tree level. A 30-centimeter image from Maxar can pinpoint illegal mining pits, but tasking that satellite over an entire biome is prohibitively expensive. Understanding each platform's strengths, spectral capabilities, and cost structures prevents wasted spend and ensures that monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) frameworks rest on defensible data.

Key Concepts

Spatial resolution refers to the size of each pixel on the ground. Sentinel-2 captures multispectral data at 10, 20, and 60 meters. Landsat 9 operates at 30 meters for most bands and 15 meters in panchromatic mode. Planet's SuperDove constellation delivers 3 to 5 meter imagery, while Maxar's WorldView Legion achieves 30 centimeters in panchromatic and 1.2 meters in multispectral.

Temporal resolution (revisit rate) defines how often a satellite images the same location. Sentinel-2's twin constellation achieves a 5-day revisit at the equator (ESA, 2025). Landsat 9, paired with Landsat 8, provides an 8-day combined revisit. Planet captures every point on Earth daily. Maxar satellites can be tasked on demand, but routine global coverage is not part of its operating model.

Spectral bands determine which environmental phenomena a sensor can detect. Sentinel-2 carries 13 spectral bands including red edge bands critical for vegetation health assessment. Landsat 9 offers 11 bands with a thermal infrared sensor for land surface temperature. Planet SuperDoves have 8 bands, and Maxar WorldView-3 provides 29 bands including shortwave infrared (SWIR) for mineral and moisture mapping.

Analysis-ready data (ARD) and cloud-native access are increasingly important. Sentinel and Landsat data are freely available on platforms like Google Earth Engine, Microsoft Planetary Computer, and Amazon's Earth on AWS. Planet offers an API-accessible archive, and Maxar distributes through SecureWatch and partner platforms.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Cost Analysis

Free-tier platforms. Sentinel and Landsat data carry zero acquisition cost for any user globally. The real expenses lie in cloud compute, storage, and analyst time. A typical Sentinel-2 processing pipeline on Google Earth Engine for a national-scale deforestation monitor costs roughly $2,000 to $8,000 per year in compute credits (Google Cloud, 2025). Landsat pipelines carry similar processing overhead.

Mid-tier commercial. Planet's standard monitoring plans range from $5,000 to $15,000 per year depending on area of interest size and temporal depth. Enterprise agreements for global basemap access can reach $50,000 to $200,000 annually. Planet also offers a free tier for academic and humanitarian users through its Education and Research Program.

Premium commercial. Maxar imagery is priced per square kilometer, typically $15 to $25 per km² for archive imagery and $25 to $50 per km² for fresh tasking. A single 100 km² tasking order therefore costs $2,500 to $5,000. For large-area climate projects, costs escalate rapidly, making Maxar best suited for targeted, high-value site monitoring rather than wall-to-wall coverage.

Total cost of ownership. Organizations frequently underestimate downstream costs. Training machine learning models on higher-resolution commercial data requires more labeled samples and GPU compute. The World Resources Institute (WRI, 2025) found that switching from Landsat to Planet imagery for their Global Forest Watch alerts reduced detection latency from 16 days to under 5 days but increased annual data procurement costs by approximately $1.2 million.

Use Cases and Best Fit

Deforestation and land-use change. Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) uses Landsat and Sentinel-2 as the backbone of its PRODES and DETER deforestation monitoring systems (INPE, 2025). For near real-time alerts, Planet's daily coverage allows organizations like Global Forest Watch to detect clearing events within days. Maxar is reserved for enforcement-grade evidence when sub-meter proof is needed for legal proceedings.

Methane emission detection. Sentinel-5P's TROPOMI instrument, part of the broader Copernicus program, maps methane concentrations at 5.5 by 7 kilometer resolution globally. GHGSat, a commercial operator, achieves 25-meter methane plume detection. Neither Planet nor Maxar directly measures atmospheric methane, though Planet's SkySat constellation can provide visual context for ground-level leak investigations.

Urban heat island monitoring. Landsat's thermal infrared bands make it the standard choice for mapping urban surface temperatures at 100 meters (resampled to 30 m). Sentinel-2 lacks thermal capability but contributes vegetation indices that correlate with cooling effects. Maxar's high resolution can map individual rooftops for targeted cool-roof interventions, as demonstrated by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group's heat mapping program (C40 Cities, 2024).

Agricultural monitoring and carbon MRV. The European Commission's Common Agricultural Policy uses Sentinel-2 for crop identification and compliance monitoring across 27 member states. Planet's daily cadence is preferred for precision agriculture applications where cloud-free composites are needed within narrow phenological windows. Indigo Agriculture and Nori rely on satellite-derived crop health indices for soil carbon credit verification pipelines.

Disaster response. The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters activates both Sentinel and commercial providers for flood, fire, and earthquake response. Maxar's rapid tasking and 30-centimeter resolution make it the preferred source for damage assessment, as seen in its response to the 2024 Valencia floods (Maxar, 2024).

Decision Framework

Step 1: Define the spatial scale. If your area of interest exceeds 10,000 km², start with Sentinel-2 or Landsat. For areas under 1,000 km² requiring frequent monitoring, evaluate Planet. For site-specific assessments under 100 km², consider Maxar.

Step 2: Determine the revisit requirement. Weekly or monthly monitoring is well served by Sentinel-2. If you need daily observations to capture rapid change or minimize cloud interference, Planet is the strongest option. For on-demand, event-driven imaging, Maxar's tasking model applies.

Step 3: Assess spectral needs. Thermal analysis requires Landsat. Red edge bands for vegetation stress detection favor Sentinel-2. SWIR for mineral mapping is available from both Sentinel-2 and Maxar WorldView-3. Basic NDVI and visible-band analysis works across all four platforms.

Step 4: Evaluate budget constraints. Government agencies and NGOs with limited budgets should maximize free Sentinel and Landsat data before adding commercial layers. Well-funded corporate MRV programs may justify Planet subscriptions for the latency reduction. Maxar should be treated as a targeted supplement, not a primary monitoring source.

Step 5: Check ecosystem integration. Verify that your analytics platform (Google Earth Engine, Microsoft Planetary Computer, custom stack) supports the data format and API. Sentinel and Landsat have the broadest third-party tooling support. Planet's API is well documented but proprietary. Maxar integration typically requires enterprise-level agreements.

Key Players

Established Leaders

• European Space Agency (ESA) — Operates the Copernicus Sentinel constellation, the world's largest free EO data program
• NASA / USGS — Manages the Landsat program with over 50 years of continuous earth observation
• Maxar Technologies — Operates the highest-resolution commercial optical constellation (WorldView Legion, launched 2024)
• Planet Labs — Largest commercial constellation with over 200 satellites providing daily global coverage

Emerging Startups

• GHGSat — Satellite-based methane and CO2 monitoring at facility-level resolution
• Pixxel — Hyperspectral imaging constellation targeting agriculture and environmental monitoring (first satellites launched 2025)
• Satellogic — Sub-meter multispectral and hyperspectral imaging with an open data model
• Muon Space — Building satellites specifically designed for climate monitoring with weather and greenhouse gas payloads

Key Investors/Funders

• Google (Alphabet) — Funds Google Earth Engine and provides free cloud compute for EO analytics
• Microsoft — Operates the Planetary Computer platform with free access to petabytes of EO data
• European Commission — Funds the Copernicus program at over €2 billion per year through 2027
• Breakthrough Energy Ventures — Invested in GHGSat, Pixxel, and other climate-focused EO startups

FAQ

Which platform is best for a first-time EO user focused on climate analytics? Sentinel-2 is the recommended starting point. It offers free data, a 5-day revisit cycle, 13 spectral bands including vegetation-sensitive red edge channels, and seamless integration with Google Earth Engine and Microsoft Planetary Computer. Most open-source climate analytics tutorials and libraries are built around Sentinel-2 data products, reducing the learning curve significantly.

Can I combine data from multiple platforms? Yes, and multi-source fusion is increasingly common. WRI's Global Forest Watch blends Landsat and Planet data to balance historical depth with near real-time detection. The key challenge is harmonizing spatial resolutions, spectral responses, and atmospheric corrections. ESA's Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset, produced in partnership with NASA (Claverie et al., 2024), provides analysis-ready 30-meter data from both programs with consistent radiometric calibration.

How does cloud cover affect platform choice? Cloud contamination is the single largest source of data loss in optical EO. Planet's daily revisit dramatically increases the probability of obtaining cloud-free pixels within any given week. Sentinel-2's 5-day cadence works well in arid regions but struggles in persistently cloudy tropics. For tropical forest monitoring, pairing optical data with Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which penetrates clouds, is a proven strategy used by the EU's Joint Research Centre (JRC, 2025).

Is sub-meter resolution necessary for carbon MRV? In most cases, no. Verra and Gold Standard methodologies for forest carbon projects typically require 10 to 30 meter resolution for land-cover classification and change detection. Sub-meter imagery from Maxar is useful for validation and ground-truthing, but processing costs and data volumes make it impractical for wall-to-wall MRV. Sentinel-2 and Landsat remain the standard for registry-compliant carbon monitoring.

What about radar and hyperspectral alternatives? Sentinel-1 provides C-band SAR data that is free and cloud-penetrating, ideal for flood mapping and forest structure monitoring. NISAR, a joint NASA-ISRO L-band SAR mission launching in 2025, will provide unprecedented deformation and biomass measurements. Hyperspectral missions like ESA's CHIME (expected 2028) and Pixxel's commercial constellation will unlock new capabilities in soil health, water quality, and mineral detection that multispectral sensors cannot match.

Sources

• European Space Agency. (2025). Copernicus Sentinel-2 Mission Performance and Economic Impact Assessment. ESA.
• NASA / USGS. (2025). Landsat 9 Mission Status and Data Continuity Report. United States Geological Survey.
• Planet Labs. (2025). SuperDove Constellation: Technical Specifications and Coverage Statistics. Planet Labs PBC.
• Maxar Technologies. (2024). WorldView Legion: Constellation Performance and Tasking Capabilities. Maxar.
• Euroconsult. (2025). Earth Observation Market Prospects: 2025–2027 Revenue Projections. Euroconsult.
• World Resources Institute. (2025). Global Forest Watch: Multi-Source Satellite Integration and Alert Latency Analysis. WRI.
• Claverie, M. et al. (2024). Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) Product: Radiometric Consistency and Climate Applications. Remote Sensing of Environment.
• C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. (2024). Urban Heat Island Mapping Using Satellite Thermal Data: Program Results. C40 Cities.
• Joint Research Centre. (2025). Tropical Forest Monitoring with Combined Optical and SAR Data. European Commission JRC.
• INPE. (2025). PRODES and DETER: Satellite-Based Deforestation Monitoring in the Brazilian Amazon. Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais.