Hopp vs Urban Sharing
An independent comparison of two fleet management platforms to help you choose the right fit for your business.
Hopp
Reykjavik, Iceland
Urban Sharing
Oslo, Norway
Hopp vs Urban Sharing: What You Need to Know
Hopp and Urban Sharing are both European micromobility platforms with hardware included, yet they serve almost opposite ends of the market spectrum. Urban Sharing, founded in Oslo in 2015, is a city-government platform — its Oslo Bysykkel and other Nordic deployments operate at 500 to 10,000+ vehicle scale, require public tender procurement, and feature ML-powered demand prediction, dynamic crew rebalancing via Urban Crew, and MaaS integration with transit authorities. Hopp, launched from Reykjavik in 2019, was designed for private entrepreneurs investing $25,000 to $100,000 to operate 52 to a few hundred scooters in cities like Limassol, Gdansk, or Bonaire that no city government is actively subsidizing. Urban Sharing's pricing is only accessible through RFP — a mechanism that categorically excludes private operators — while Hopp's $5,000 franchise fee structure is designed to be accessible to individual founders. The product philosophies mirror this divide: Urban Sharing invests heavily in ML-based scheduling and Google Cloud infrastructure, while Hopp invests in automatic accounting and employee shift logging that matter to a sole proprietor running a lean team.
Bottom Line
Urban Sharing is built exclusively for municipalities and transit authorities deploying 500+ vehicles through formal procurement, whereas Hopp is designed for private entrepreneurs launching 52–300 vehicle operations in underserved small cities.
Key Differences
Procurement Model
Urban Sharing is only available via municipal RFP or public tender. Hopp is available to private entrepreneurs via a $5,000 franchise fee with up to 80% financing support.
Fleet Scale
Urban Sharing scales from 500 to 10,000+ vehicles and powers city-wide bike-share systems. Hopp's typical franchise runs 52–300 scooters in small to mid-size cities.
Technology Sophistication
Urban Sharing uses ML algorithms for demand prediction and dynamic crew rebalancing via Urban Crew. Hopp offers automated demand analysis but does not publish ML capabilities at equivalent depth.
Vehicle Type
Urban Sharing focuses on city bikes, e-bikes, and cargo bikes for station-based and dockless municipal systems. Hopp provides its own branded scooter hardware.
Transit Integration
Urban Sharing offers MaaS integrations with transit ticketing systems and data-sharing dashboards for city authorities. Hopp has no published transit authority integration.
Platform Overview
About Hopp
Hopp is an Icelandic micromobility franchise, not a SaaS platform. Instead of licensing software, entrepreneurs buy into the Hopp brand: they pay a franchise fee, purchase Hopp-branded scooters, and run a Hopp-branded operation in their city while Hopp collects an ongoing royalty on net revenue. Hopp supplies the rider app, an operator dashboard, the hardware, and onboarding support in return. Founded in 2019 and running a franchise program since 2020, Hopp lists 60+ locations across 12 countries, concentrated in small and mid-size European towns (20,000 to 150,000 residents) with expansion into the Caribbean and Bahrain. It has no US operations. A separate, unrelated US service also uses the name Hopp (gethopp.com); the Icelandic Hopp at hopp.bike is a different company with zero US presence.
About Urban Sharing
Urban Sharing is a Norwegian SaaS platform that spun off from Oslo City Bike, now powering major city bike systems including Oslo (3,000 bikes, 250 stations), Milan BikeMi (5,000+ mechanical bikes and 1,000 e-bikes across 325 stations -- the fourth largest in Europe), Bergen, Trondheim, Verona, Rouen, and Tampere. The platform specializes in software migrations, upgrading existing bike-share infrastructure to modern cloud-based systems without replacing hardware. Backed by the Selvaag family with NOK 220M+ in funding.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Category | Hopp | Urban Sharing |
|---|---|---|
| Company | ||
| Headquarters | Reykjavik, Iceland | Oslo, Norway |
| Founded | 2019 | 2015 |
| Website | https://hopp.bike | https://urbansharing.com |
| Pricing | ||
| Pricing Model | Franchise: one-time franchise fee plus mandatory hardware purchase plus an ongoing royalty on net revenue | Enterprise municipal contracts via RFP |
| Starting Price | From ~$5,000 franchise fee + ~$25,000 hardware (financing available) | RFP / public tender required |
| Scale & Hardware | ||
| Fleet Size Range | About 16 to a few thousand scooters per franchise (small-town deployments up to the Reykjavik flagship) | 500-10,000+ vehicles |
| Hardware Provided | Yes — bundled | Yes — bundled |
| IoT Approach | Hopp supplies its own branded scooters with built-in IoT for location tracking, remote lock and unlock, and battery monitoring. The scooter manufacturer is not publicly disclosed. Franchisees must run Hopp hardware; there is no hardware-agnostic or multi-vendor option. | Full-stack platform with hybrid locks supporting both traditional docking stations and virtual geofenced parking. Specializes in migrating legacy systems to cloud-based infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform without replacing existing hardware. |
How Does Levy Fleets Compare to Both?
Before deciding between Hopp and Urban Sharing, consider Levy Fleets — a turnkey platform that delivers enterprise-grade features at a fraction of the cost, with no tiered feature gates on any plan.
| Category | Levy Fleets | Hopp | Urban Sharing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | $250/mo | From ~$5,000 franchise fee + ~$25,000 hardware (financing available) | RFP / public tender required |
| Pricing Model | Revenue share, per-vehicle, or self-managed — your choice | Franchise: one-time franchise fee plus mandatory hardware purchase plus an ongoing royalty on net revenue | Enterprise municipal contracts via RFP |
| Feature Gating | None — full features on every plan | Varies by tier | Varies by tier |
| Minimum Fleet Size | No minimum | About 16 to a few thousand scooters per franchise (small | 500 |
| Setup Fees | $0 (white-label optional at $2,750) | Varies | Varies |
| Support | 24/7 US-based, included on all plans | Varies by plan | Varies by plan |
| Hardware Included | Yes — IoT pre-installed on all vehicles | Yes | Yes |
Levy Fleets includes payment processing, chargebacks, rider support, ID verification, push notifications, and marketing analytics on every plan — features that Hopp and Urban Sharing either gate behind premium tiers or charge extra for.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Hopp | Urban Sharing |
|---|---|---|
| Hopp Features | ||
| Rider app to find, unlock, ride, pause, and pay | ||
| Single app serving both riders and operations staff | ||
| Operator dashboard for fleet management and inventory | ||
| Employee shift logging and hour tracking | ||
| Repairs and maintenance logging | ||
| Automated demand analysis with heat maps | ||
| Real-time redistribution recommendations | ||
| Automatic accounting | ||
| Built-in IoT for location tracking, locking, and battery monitoring | ||
| Hopp-branded scooter hardware with wholesale parts pricing | ||
| Brand licensing plus ready-made marketing collateral | ||
| Regulatory assistance and franchise onboarding | ||
| Up to 80% hardware financing via the Start-Hopp program | ||
| Urban Sharing Unique Features | ||
| City-scale bike system management | ||
| Urban Fleet: vehicle history, real-time status, financial management | ||
| Urban Crew: dynamic rebalancing and task optimization for field staff | ||
| Dispatcher tools for daily operations planning | ||
| Maintenance scheduling and predictive maintenance via ML | ||
| Demand prediction using machine learning algorithms | ||
| Station-based, dockless, and hybrid lock support | ||
| Rider app with subscription and day-pass support | ||
| Transit authority and MaaS integrations | ||
| Software migration for legacy bike-share systems | ||
| Google Cloud Platform infrastructure | ||
| Full GDPR compliance | ||
| Data sharing dashboards for city authorities | ||
| E-bike and cargo bike support | ||
| Scalable from 500 to 10,000+ vehicles | ||
Pricing Breakdown
Hopp Pricing
Franchise directories such as topfranchise.com list a one-time franchise fee of about $5,000 and a minimum investment of about $25,000 to buy Hopp scooters, plus an ongoing royalty on net revenue reported at 18%. Hopp's own franchise page does not publish the royalty rate; it frames the entry as roughly EUR 31,250 for a 100+ scooter fleet, or about EUR 9,375 down through the Start-Hopp financing program (minimum 25% down payment, up to 80% financed, repaid as a percentage of monthly revenue). Hopp cites turnover of $162 to $247 per scooter per month and claims most franchisees reach ROI within a year. Hardware, the rider and operator apps, the dashboard, onboarding, and support are bundled into the franchise. Because the royalty is deducted for the life of the franchise on top of the hardware already purchased, the total cost of entry stacks a franchise fee, a hardware buy-in, and a perpetual revenue cut.
Urban Sharing Pricing
Works exclusively with municipalities and transit authorities through multi-year contracts awarded via public tender (RFP) procurement. Not available for private operators. End-user pricing examples: Oslo 499 NOK (~$47)/year annual pass, Bergen ~EUR39/year, day passes ~EUR5. Platform revenue ~$4M annually. Primarily funded by municipal contracts and advertising partnerships.
When to Choose Each Platform
Choose Hopp if you...
- You are a private entrepreneur looking to launch a scooter franchise in a small European or Caribbean city
- You need a $5,000 entry point with hardware included and financing options for the rest of the investment
- You want automatic accounting and employee shift management built into your operations software
- You are entering a market that lacks existing public bike-share infrastructure
- You want the operational support of a franchise network rather than managing a standalone deployment
Choose Urban Sharing if you...
- You are a municipality, transit authority, or city government issuing a formal bike-share procurement tender
- You are deploying 500+ bikes in a Nordic or European city and require ML-based demand prediction
- You need to migrate a legacy bike-share system to modern cloud infrastructure without replacing existing hardware
- You require MaaS integration with existing public transit ticketing and data sharing with city authorities
- You need dynamic crew rebalancing tools (Urban Crew) and dispatcher planning for a large field operations team
Looking for an Alternative to Both Hopp and Urban Sharing?
Levy Fleets offers a turnkey fleet management solution with flexible pricing — revenue share (20% of GMV (15% at 100-249 vehicles, annual terms)), per-vehicle ($14/mo for 100-249 vehicles), or self-managed — and the same full feature set on every plan. No tiered feature gates, no minimum fleet sizes, and US-based 24/7 support included.