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Google Maps vs OpenLayers: 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; OpenLayers: A high-performance, feature-packed library for all your mapping needs. An opensource javascript library to load, display and render maps from multiple sources on web pages.
Google Maps and OpenLayers belong to "Mapping APIs" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Google Maps are:
- Maps Image APIs
- Places API
- Web Services
On the other hand, OpenLayers provides the following key features:
- Tiled Layers - Pull tiles from OSM, Bing, MapBox, Stamen, MapQuest, and any other XYZ source you can find. OGC mapping services and untiled layers also supported.
- Fast & Mobile Ready - Mobile support out of the box. Build lightweight custom profiles with just the components you need.
- Vector Layers - Render vector data from GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, GML, and a growing number of other formats.
"Free" is the primary reason why developers consider Google Maps over the competitors, whereas "Flexibility" was stated as the key factor in picking OpenLayers.
OpenLayers is an open source tool with 5.17K GitHub stars and 1.97K GitHub forks. Here's a link to OpenLayers's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Google Maps has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1975 company stacks & 1093 developers stacks; compared to OpenLayers, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.
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 OpenLayers
- Flexibility14
- Maturity11
- Open Source8
- Incredibly comprehensive, excellent support7
- Extensible4
- Strong community4
- Choice of map providers4
- Low Level API3
- OpenStreetMap1
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Cons of Google Maps
- Google Attributions and logo4
- Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete1
