Convek vs meteoblue
A clean comparison for pilots and developers evaluating soaring weather options.
meteoblue is one of the most respected weather services in Europe and the closest direct overlap with Convek: they have a developer API and they expose soaring-relevant fields including updraft (w*), boundary layer height, CAPE and a soaring index. The difference is in approach. meteoblue is a general-purpose multimodel weather product with soaring as one slice; Convek is a soaring-specific WRF run with a narrower job.
What Convek is
Convek is a REST JSON API backed by our own WRF model, run 4x daily on GFS data, downscaled to 4 km for specific regions. The output is RASP-style soaring fields - wstar, BL height, BL top, soaring ceiling, cloudbase, convergence - delivered as structured JSON with corridor sampling along a route and a flat-rate monthly price.
What meteoblue is
meteoblue is a Swiss weather company with a polished consumer site (including the point+ aviation/soaring product for pilots) and a substantial developer API. Their forecast API blends multiple global NWP models via their Learning MultiModel (mLM) post-processing and exposes derived fields including updraft velocity, PBL height, CAPE and soaring/thermal indices.
Facts here were accurate at time of writing. If something is out of date or wrong, please let us know.
Which should you pick?
Pick Convek if
You're building something soaring-specific and want native RASP fields, predictable flat pricing, and a free tier you can use in production.
Pick meteoblue if
You need a broad, mature global weather API and soaring is one of several use cases the same key needs to cover.
In short
If you want a broad, global weather API with soaring fields included and you're fine with credit-based prepayment, meteoblue is a strong, mature option. If you want a dedicated soaring model with native RASP fields, time-aware corridor sampling, flat monthly pricing and a free tier you can actually build on, Convek is built for that.