Alternatives to Mapbox logo

Alternatives to Mapbox

Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, CARTO, Leaflet, and ArcGIS are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Mapbox.
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What is Mapbox and what are its top alternatives?

Mapbox is a popular platform for custom online maps that offers flexible APIs, SDKs, and data visualization tools. Its key features include customizable map styles, geocoding and routing services, and real-time location data. However, Mapbox can be expensive for large-scale use and may have limitations in terms of certain advanced mapping functionalities. 1. Leaflet: Leaflet is a lightweight JavaScript library for interactive maps that works well with both desktop and mobile platforms. Key features include easy integration, custom map designs, and support for various plugins. Pros: Simple to use, customizable, open-source. Cons: Limited built-in functionality compared to Mapbox. 2. OpenLayers: OpenLayers is a high-performance library for creating interactive maps on the web. It supports a wide range of mapping sources and formats, with features like layer switching, styling, and editing capabilities. Pros: Great for complex mapping needs, open-source, powerful. Cons: Steeper learning curve, can be challenging for beginners. 3. Google Maps Platform: Google Maps offers a suite of APIs for mapping, geocoding, routing, and location-based services. Its features include detailed map data, Street View imagery, and integration with other Google services. Pros: Extensive documentation, smooth integration with Google services. Cons: Limited free usage, dependency on Google ecosystem. 4. HERE Technologies: HERE Technologies provides a variety of mapping and location-based services for businesses. Key features include accurate geocoding, routing, and fleet management tools. Pros: Precise location data, reliable routing services. Cons: Costly for large-scale use, complex pricing structure. 5. CARTO: CARTO is a cloud-based platform for mapping, analysis, and data visualization. It offers tools for creating interactive maps, spatial analysis, and sharing geospatial insights. Pros: User-friendly interface, powerful geospatial analysis capabilities. Cons: Pricing can be a barrier for small businesses. 6. MapTiler: MapTiler is a mapping solution that focuses on creating custom maps from various data sources. It supports vector and raster tiles, WebGL rendering, and advanced styling options. Pros: Fast map rendering, versatile styling capabilities. Cons: May require technical expertise for customization. 7. Thunderforest: Thunderforest provides a range of map styles and APIs for creating custom maps. It offers detailed map designs, geocoding services, and tile hosting. Pros: Beautiful map designs, flexible pricing options. Cons: Limited free tier, fewer features compared to Mapbox. 8. TomTom Maps API: TomTom offers mapping and navigation services for businesses, with features like routing, traffic information, and location insights. Pros: Accurate map data, reliable navigation services. Cons: Pricing can be high for extensive usage, limited customization options. 9. esri ArcGIS: esri ArcGIS is a comprehensive mapping platform with tools for spatial analysis, data visualization, and collaboration. It is widely used in the GIS industry for its advanced mapping capabilities. Pros: Robust geospatial analysis tools, extensive data support. Cons: Complex interface, costly for large organizations. 10. Stamen Maps: Stamen Maps offers a collection of unique map styles for different use cases, such as terrain, watercolor, and toner maps. It provides custom map designs and a creative approach to mapping visuals. Pros: Creative map styles, open-source design. Cons: Limited customization options, may not suit all business needs.

Top Alternatives to Mapbox

  • Google Maps
    Google Maps

    Create rich applications and stunning visualisations of your data, leveraging the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of Google Maps and a modern web platform that scales as you grow. ...

  • OpenStreetMap
    OpenStreetMap

    OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world. ...

  • CARTO
    CARTO

    The CARTO platform empowers everyone, from business analysts to data scientists, to turn location data into business outcomes. We accelerate innovation, power new use cases and disrupt business models through Location Intelligence. ...

  • Leaflet
    Leaflet

    Leaflet is an open source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. It is developed by Vladimir Agafonkin of MapBox with a team of dedicated contributors. Weighing just about 30 KB of gzipped JS code, it has all the features most developers ever need for online maps. ...

  • ArcGIS
    ArcGIS

    It is a geographic information system for working with maps and geographic information. It is used for creating and using maps, compiling geographic data, analyzing mapped information, sharing and much more. ...

  • OpenLayers
    OpenLayers

    An opensource javascript library to load, display and render maps from multiple sources on web pages. ...

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

Mapbox alternatives & related posts

Google Maps logo

Google Maps

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567
Build highly customisable maps with your own content and imagery
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PROS OF GOOGLE MAPS
  • 253
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  • 136
    Address input through maps api
  • 82
    Sharable Directions
  • 47
    Google Earth
  • 46
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  • 3
    Custom maps designing
CONS OF GOOGLE MAPS
  • 4
    Google Attributions and logo
  • 1
    Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete

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Tom Klein

Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

See more

A huge component of our product relies on gathering public data about locations of interest. Google Places API gives us that ability in the most efficient way. Since we are primarily going to be using as google data as a source of information for our MVP, we might as well start integrating the Google Places API in our system. We have worked with Google Maps in the past and we might take some inspiration from our previous projects onto this one.

See more
OpenStreetMap logo

OpenStreetMap

253
58
The free editable map of the whole world
253
58
PROS OF OPENSTREETMAP
  • 23
    Simple
  • 17
    Free
  • 9
    Open-Source
  • 8
    Open-Data
  • 1
    React/ RNative integration
CONS OF OPENSTREETMAP
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    Adam Abdelmoula
    CPO at Split Mobile Software · | 6 upvotes · 486.7K views

    We need some advice about the map services provider. We are a mobility app that just launched 5 months ago in Tunisia offering P2P carpooling. We are currently using Google Maps API for maps (Places API, Geocoding API, Directions API & Distance Matrix API). Thus, we received expensive bills from Google Cloud following the number of requests we are using. We are looking forward to reduce the number of requests in general because we can't afford these large bills at this stage, knowing that they are going to increase proportionally to the active users of the app. We tried to optimize multiple times but it isn't enough. We are searching for optimization advice or ideas on how we use the APIs, or other map providers (like OpenStreetMap or similar) that offers free or cheaper options than Google Maps, without lacking quality of information (we are in Tunisia and we have to choose options that have enough data about Tunisia). Thanks!

    See more

    Which will give a better map (better view, markers options, info window) in an Android OS app?

    Leaflet with Mapbox or Leaflet with OpenStreetMap?

    See more
    CARTO logo

    CARTO

    39
    3
    The CARTO platform empowers business analysts, data scientists and more, to turn location data into business outcomes.
    39
    3
    PROS OF CARTO
    • 1
      Crisp UI
    • 1
      Great customer service
    • 1
      Comprehensive platform
    CONS OF CARTO
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      Leaflet logo

      Leaflet

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      108
      JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps
      1.4K
      108
      PROS OF LEAFLET
      • 33
        Light weight
      • 28
        Free
      • 12
        Evolutive via plugins
      • 10
        OpenStreetMap
      • 9
        Strong community
      • 7
        Choice of map providers
      • 6
        Easy API
      • 3
        Alternative to Google Maps
      CONS OF LEAFLET
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        Which will give a better map (better view, markers options, info window) in an Android OS app?

        Leaflet with Mapbox or Leaflet with OpenStreetMap?

        See more
        ArcGIS logo

        ArcGIS

        136
        20
        A geographic information system for working with maps
        136
        20
        PROS OF ARCGIS
        • 7
          Reponsive
        • 4
          A lot of widgets
        • 4
          Data driven vizualisation
        • 2
          Easy tà learn
        • 2
          3D
        • 1
          Easy API
        CONS OF ARCGIS
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          Stephen Gheysens
          Lead Solutions Engineer at Inscribe · | 7 upvotes · 473.1K views

          Google Maps lets "property owners and their authorized representatives" upload indoor maps, but this appears to lack navigation ("wayfinding").

          MappedIn is a platform and has SDKs for building indoor mapping experiences (https://www.mappedin.com/) and ESRI ArcGIS also offers some indoor mapping tools (https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/indoor-gis/overview). Finally, there used to be a company called LocusLabs that is now a part of Atrius and they were often integrated into airlines' apps to provide airport maps with wayfinding (https://atrius.com/solutions/personal-experiences/personal-wayfinder/).

          I previously worked at Mapbox and while I believe that it's a great platform for building map-based experiences, they don't have any simple solutions for indoor wayfinding. If I were doing this for fun as a side-project and prioritized saving money over saving time, here is what I would do:

          • Create a graph-based dataset representing the walking paths around your university, where nodes/vertexes represent the intersections of paths, and edges represent paths (literally paths outside, hallways, short path segments that represent entering rooms). You could store this in a hosted graph-based database like Neo4j, Amazon Neptune , or Azure Cosmos DB (with its Gremlin API) and use built-in "shortest path" queries, or deploy a PostgreSQL service with pgRouting.

          • Add two properties to each edge: one property for the distance between its nodes (libraries like @turf/helpers will have a distance function if you have the latitude & longitude of each node), and another property estimating the walking time (based on the distance). Once you have these values saved in a graph-based format, you should be able to easily query and find the data representation of paths between two points.

          • At this point, you'd have the routing problem solved and it would come down to building a UI. Mapbox arguably leads the industry in developer tools for custom map experiences. You could convert your nodes/edges to GeoJSON, then either upload to Mapbox and create a Tileset to visualize the paths, or add the GeoJSON to the map on the fly.

          *You might be able to use open source routing tools like OSRM (https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/issues/6257) or Graphhopper (instead of a custom graph database implementation), but it would likely be more involved to maintain these services.

          See more
          OpenLayers logo

          OpenLayers

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          57
          A high-performance, feature-packed library for all your mapping needs
          594
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          PROS OF OPENLAYERS
          • 15
            Flexibility
          • 11
            Maturity
          • 8
            Open Source
          • 7
            Incredibly comprehensive, excellent support
          • 4
            Extensible
          • 4
            Strong community
          • 4
            Choice of map providers
          • 3
            Low Level API
          • 1
            OpenStreetMap
          CONS OF OPENLAYERS
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            Postman logo

            Postman

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              Great interface that magically predicts your needs
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              Awesome customer support
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              Great integration with newman
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              Documentation
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              Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
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            Noah Zoschke
            Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 3M views

            We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

            Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

            Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

            This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

            Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

            Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

            Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

            See more
            Simon Reymann
            Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5.1M views

            Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

            • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
            • npm as package manager
            • NestJS as Node.js framework
            • TypeScript as programming language
            • ExpressJS as web server
            • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
            • Postman as a tool for API development
            • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
            • JSON Web Token for access token management

            The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

            • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
            • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
            • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
            • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
            See more
            Postman logo

            Postman

            94.5K
            1.8K
            Only complete API development environment
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            PROS OF POSTMAN
            • 490
              Easy to use
            • 369
              Great tool
            • 276
              Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
            • 156
              Easy setup, looks good
            • 144
              The best api workflow out there
            • 53
              It's the best
            • 53
              History feature
            • 44
              Adds real value to my workflow
            • 43
              Great interface that magically predicts your needs
            • 35
              The best in class app
            • 12
              Can save and share script
            • 10
              Fully featured without looking cluttered
            • 8
              Collections
            • 8
              Option to run scrips
            • 8
              Global/Environment Variables
            • 7
              Shareable Collections
            • 7
              Dead simple and useful. Excellent
            • 7
              Dark theme easy on the eyes
            • 6
              Awesome customer support
            • 6
              Great integration with newman
            • 5
              Documentation
            • 5
              Simple
            • 5
              The test script is useful
            • 4
              Saves responses
            • 4
              This has simplified my testing significantly
            • 4
              Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
            • 4
              Easy as pie
            • 3
              API-network
            • 3
              I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
            • 3
              Mocking API calls with predefined response
            • 2
              Now supports GraphQL
            • 2
              Postman Runner CI Integration
            • 2
              Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
            • 2
              Continuous integration using newman
            • 2
              Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
            • 2
              Runner
            • 2
              Graph
            • 1
              <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
            CONS OF POSTMAN
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              Bloated features and UI
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              Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
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              Poor GraphQL support
            • 5
              Expensive
            • 3
              Not free after 5 users
            • 3
              Can't prompt for per-request variables
            • 1
              Import swagger
            • 1
              Support websocket
            • 1
              Import curl

            related Postman posts

            Noah Zoschke
            Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 3M views

            We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

            Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

            Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

            This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

            Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

            Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

            Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

            See more
            Simon Reymann
            Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5.1M views

            Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

            • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
            • npm as package manager
            • NestJS as Node.js framework
            • TypeScript as programming language
            • ExpressJS as web server
            • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
            • Postman as a tool for API development
            • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
            • JSON Web Token for access token management

            The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

            • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
            • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
            • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
            • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
            See more