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Mapbox vs OpenLayers: What are the differences?
What is Mapbox? Design and publish beautiful maps. We make it possible to pin travel spots on Pinterest, find restaurants on Foursquare, and visualize data on GitHub.
What is 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.
Mapbox and OpenLayers belong to "Mapping APIs" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Mapbox are:
- Develop mobile and web applications with Mapbox.js, our open-source JavaScript library.
- Build native applications on iOS with the Mapbox iOS SDK or on iOS and OS X with MBXMapKit.
- Build native applications for Android. Use Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, and other tile sources in your app, as well as overlays like GeoJSON data and interactive tooltips.
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.
"Best mapping service outside of Google Maps" is the primary reason why developers consider Mapbox 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, Mapbox has a broader approval, being mentioned in 83 company stacks & 28 developers stacks; compared to OpenLayers, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 4 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.
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.
OpenStreetMapI use OpenStreetMap because i have the control of the environment, using Docker containers or bare-metal servers.
Pros of Mapbox
- Best mapping service outside of Google Maps27
- OpenStreetMap21
- Beautifully vectorable15
- Fluid user experience11
- React/ RNative integration7
- Extensible7
- 3D Layers5
- Low Level API4
- Affordable4
- Great customer support3
- Custom themes3
- High data volume rendering2
Pros of OpenLayers
- Flexibility13
- Maturity10
- Incredibly comprehensive, excellent support7
- Open Source7
- Choice of map providers4
- Low Level API3
- Extensible3
- Strong community3
