--- title: "FleetSQL vs Wialon Reports: When SQL Is Worth It" url: https://fleetsql.app/vs-wialon-reports/ description: "An honest comparison of Wialon's built-in reports and a PostgreSQL copy of the same data — what each does well, and when moving to SQL pays for itself." --- Comparison # Wialon reports are not the problem. Their ceiling is. Wialon's reporting is good at what it was built for: showing a fleet manager what happened today, to a specific vehicle or driver, right now. This page is about the questions that sit past that ceiling — and about being clear that plenty of fleets never hit it. **Wialon wins** Live operational answers **SQL wins** History, joins, custom grain **The tell** A recurring CSV export **Not a migration** Both keep running ## Where each one is the right tool This is not a replacement. Wialon stays the system of record for operations and keeps every real-time workflow: positions, alerts, dispatch. The database answers the questions that need history, arbitrary grouping, or data Wialon does not hold. | Question | Wialon reports | PostgreSQL copy | | --- | --- | --- | | Where is unit 42 right now? | Yes — this is what it is for | No, and it should not be | | What did this driver do yesterday? | Yes, in seconds | Also yes, but no advantage | | Fuel per 100 km by vehicle class, by quarter | Not without exporting | One query | | Cost per delivery per customer | No — the cost data is elsewhere | A join with your own table | | Rolling 30-day average, year over year | No | A window function | | Three years of history in one view | Bounded by retention and report caps | Whatever was backfilled | | A metric defined once for every team | Per report template | One SQL definition under review | ## The three limits people actually hit None of these are faults in Wialon — they are the shape of a platform that was built to show you today rather than to be queried about last year. They are worth naming because each one is the moment a fleet finds out the copy should have been running already. - **400 days.** Wialon Hosting's default retention. The period can be extended on request, but whatever has already aged out is gone from the only place it existed. - **Five minutes and 400,000 rows.** The budget one report execution runs to. Past either limit the run comes back empty rather than failing loudly, which downstream reads as a quiet week. - **No connector to buy.** Fivetran, Stitch, Airbyte and Hevo carry no Wialon source, so a database copy is something you build, or something you buy from someone who did. ## The symptom that decides it There is a simple test, and it is not about fleet size. Does someone in your organisation export a Wialon report to CSV on a schedule, reshape it in a spreadsheet, and send the result to someone else? If not, you do not need this product. If yes, count the hours that cycle takes in a year — that number is the entire business case, and it usually surprises people. The second cost of that cycle is not time but trust. Because the transformation lives in one person's workbook, two versions of the same number disagree, nobody can reproduce last quarter's figure, and the analysis stops being evidence. A query in version control does not have that failure mode. Today Wialon report run by hand CSV export one period Spreadsheet reshape, VLOOKUP The chart emailed on With a copy PostgreSQL history already there One query in version control The chart refreshed by the tool The same monthly number, both ways. The top row is repeated by a person every month and lives in a workbook; the bottom row is written once and re-run by anyone. ## What you give up Honesty about the trade matters more than a feature grid, so: the database is a copy, synced on a schedule — as often as every 15 minutes, but still a copy. It is not live. If your question is "where is that vehicle now", Wialon answers it and this does not — by design, since chasing real time here would add cost and still lag the source. You also take on something. SQL is a skill your team needs, or a BI tool that hides it. A database is a thing with credentials, access rules and a bill. For a fleet whose questions are fully answered by the built-in reports, that is overhead bought for nothing, and we would rather say so before an invoice than after one. ## What it does not change Nothing about how your fleet is operated. FleetSQL reads with a token you can revoke, never writes back, and adds no configuration inside Wialon — no notifications registered, no report templates created, no unit properties touched. Dispatchers keep working exactly as they do today and never see the difference. It also does not lock the data up again. It is your database, exportable and replicable with standard tools, which is precisely the property that was missing when the data lived only behind someone else's reporting screen. ## Frequently asked questions ### Does FleetSQL replace Wialon? + No, and a setup that tried to would be worse at both jobs. Wialon remains the operational system and the source of truth; the database is a queryable copy for analysis. Fleets run both, with a simple routing rule: happening now goes to Wialon, happened before goes to SQL. ### How current is the data? + As current as the cadence you set — every 15 or 30 minutes, hourly, or once a day — so figures are as of the last run rather than live. That suits the weekly and monthly decisions analytical questions inform, and a fleet can run a frequent light schedule alongside a heavier nightly one. Anything needing sub-minute freshness belongs in Wialon. ### Can we not just export Wialon reports on a schedule? + You can, and for a handful of vehicles and one recurring report that may genuinely be enough. It stops scaling when the follow-up question arrives, because each new question means another export and another spreadsheet — with no history to compare against and no way to join the numbers to your own cost data. ### What about Wialon's report limits? + They apply to the extraction as much as to a manual run, which is why the sync is scheduled and incremental rather than pulling everything at once. Once a period is in the database, though, it is queryable without touching those limits again — the constraint applies to getting data out, not to using it. ## Worth reading ### Wialon data extraction: working within the limits How to pull years of fleet history out of Wialon Hosting without hitting its rate limits, concurrency caps, or report timeouts. [Wialon data extraction: working within the limits](https://fleetsql.app/blog/wialon-api-limits-data-extraction/) ### Why and how to extract your Wialon fleet data Four reasons to get telematics data out of Wialon — and three ways to do it: by hand, a custom ETL pipeline, or FleetSQL straight to PostgreSQL. [Why and how to extract your Wialon fleet data](https://fleetsql.app/blog/extract-wialon-fleet-data/) Contact ## Interested in FleetSQL? Why FleetSQL Your telematics data in a PostgreSQL database you control — queryable, joinable, and yours. **Managed, not installed** We run the extraction and the database. You get a connection string. **One database per client** Your own PostgreSQL, hosted in the EU, TLS required. **Your tools, unchanged** Power BI, Grafana, Metabase, psql, pandas — anything that speaks Postgres. **An evaluation first** A trial database on your own fleet before anything is signed. Or write to us directly: [fleetsql@theassettrack.com](mailto:fleetsql@theassettrack.com)