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Google Maps vs Leaflet: What are the differences?
Google Maps: Build highly customisable maps with your own content and imagery. 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; Leaflet: JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. 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.
Google Maps and Leaflet can be categorized as "Mapping APIs" tools.
Some of the features offered by Google Maps are:
- Maps Image APIs
- Places API
- Web Services
On the other hand, Leaflet provides the following key features:
- Tile layers
- Drag panning with inertia
- Scroll wheel zoom
"Free" is the top reason why over 239 developers like Google Maps, while over 22 developers mention "Light weight" as the leading cause for choosing Leaflet.
Leaflet is an open source tool with 25.1K GitHub stars and 4.09K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Leaflet's open source repository on GitHub.
Lyft, PedidosYa, and Movielala are some of the popular companies that use Google Maps, whereas Leaflet is used by Foursquare, DNT, and Arabiaweather Inc.. Google Maps has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1964 company stacks & 1074 developers stacks; compared to Leaflet, which is listed in 73 company stacks and 35 developer stacks.
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!
Besides OSM and Valhalla, you can also look into a combination of Google ORTools and OSRM. I personally haven't used Valhalla but OSM and ORTools is a powerful combination that can solve for use cases beyond routing, distance, and duration.
I would like to input a spreadsheet with names and associated addresses into a map program to; pinpoint all of the locations on a map. How can I do that? On which map? Are there field size limitations? All help would be appreciated.
There is a subdivision that is about one(1) mile by 3/4 mile in size. Is there a map program that would create the most efficient way to drive all of the streets in the subdivision without a lot of doubling back?
You could use a low-code platform to read the spreadsheet and use them as input for the pin pointing. The most expert provider would HERE or TomTom for the best routing algoritmes. Input parameters would be dependent on the chosen provider.
I see your stack is mostly Google and I am not familiar with that. But we have implemented this through the M365 Teams/SharePoint, Excell, MS PowerPlatform, our WMS and Azure.
From a StackShare Community member: "We're a team of two starting to write a mobile app. The app will heavily rely on maps and this is where my partner and I are not seeing eye-to-eye. I would like to go with an open source solution like OpenStreetMap that is used by Apple & Foursquare. He would like to go with Google Maps since more apps use it and has better support (according to him). Mapbox is also an option but I don’t know much about it."
I use OpenStreetMap because that has a strong community. It takes some time to catch up with Google Maps, but OpenStreetMap will become great solution.
Google Maps is best because it is practically free (they give you $300 in free credits per month and it's really hard to go over the free tier unless you really mean business) and it's the best!
I use Mapbox because We need 3D maps and navigation, it has a great plugin for React and React Native which we use. Also the Mapbox Geocoder is great.
I use Google Maps because it has a lot of great features such as Google's rich APIs, geolocation functions, navigation search feature, street map view, auto-generated 3D city map.
I use OpenStreetMap because i have the control of the environment, using Docker containers or bare-metal servers.
Pros of Google Maps
- Free253
- Address input through maps api136
- Sharable Directions81
- Google Earth47
- Unique46
- Custom maps designing3
Pros of Leaflet
- Light weight32
- Free28
- Evolutive via plugins12
- OpenStreetMap10
- Strong community9
- Choice of map providers7
- Easy API6
- Alternative to Google Maps3
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Cons of Google Maps
- Google Attributions and logo4
- Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete1
Cons of Leaflet
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