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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.
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."
Google MapsGoogle 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!
OpenStreetMapI use OpenStreetMap because that has a strong community. It takes some time to catch up with Google Maps, but OpenStreetMap will become great solution.
OpenStreetMapI use OpenStreetMap because i have the control of the environment, using Docker containers or bare-metal servers.
Google MapsI 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.
Pros of Google Maps
- Free250
- Address input through maps api136
- Sharable Directions81
- Google Earth47
- Unique45
- Custom maps designing3
Pros of Leaflet
- Light weight31
- Free24
- Evolutive via plugins12
- OpenStreetMap10
- Strong community9
- Choice of map providers6
- Easy API6
- Alternative to Google Maps3
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Cons of Google Maps
- Google Attributions and logo3
- Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete1
Cons of Leaflet
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What is Google Maps?
What is Leaflet?
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