Alternatives to OpenStreetMap logo

Alternatives to OpenStreetMap

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

OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the world created by volunteers. It provides detailed, up-to-date geographic information that can be used for various purposes such as navigation, research, and urban planning. Users can contribute data, view maps offline, and create custom maps with specific features. However, OpenStreetMap may lack some of the advanced features and data accuracy found in commercial mapping services. It also requires a certain level of expertise to contribute effectively.

  1. Google Maps: Google Maps is a widely used mapping service with detailed street views, real-time traffic updates, and business listings. It offers seamless integration with other Google services, but some users may have privacy concerns due to data collection practices.
  2. Mapbox: Mapbox is a platform that allows users to design custom maps with a variety of styles and layers. It offers powerful geolocation tools and intuitive design options, but it may have a learning curve for beginners.
  3. Here Maps: Here Maps provides detailed, interactive maps for navigation, transportation, and logistics. It offers real-time traffic information and transit options, but some features are limited to certain regions.
  4. TomTom Maps: TomTom Maps offers high-quality mapping data for navigation, location-based services, and fleet management. It provides accurate traffic updates and route planning features, but it may require a subscription for full access.
  5. Bing Maps: Bing Maps is a mapping service by Microsoft that offers aerial imagery, bird's eye view, and 3D maps. It integrates well with Microsoft products, but it may have limited coverage compared to other mapping services.
  6. Leaflet: Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for interactive maps that can be easily customized and integrated into web applications. It is lightweight, fast, and highly customizable, but it may lack some of the advanced features found in other mapping services.
  7. MapQuest: MapQuest provides detailed maps, driving directions, and local search features. It offers customizable maps and route planning options, but it may not have the same level of data accuracy as other mapping services.
  8. ArcGIS Online: ArcGIS Online is a mapping and analysis platform by Esri that provides powerful geospatial tools for businesses and organizations. It offers advanced mapping capabilities and data visualization tools, but it may be more complex and expensive than other mapping services.
  9. CARTO: CARTO is a cloud-based mapping platform that allows users to create and share interactive maps with spatial analysis tools. It offers advanced data visualization options and location intelligence features, but it may require a subscription for full access.
  10. Citymapper: Citymapper is a navigation app that provides real-time transit information, route planning, and multimodal transportation options. It offers detailed public transportation data for major cities worldwide, but it may not have the same level of mapping detail as other services.

Top Alternatives to OpenStreetMap

  • 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. ...

  • Mapbox
    Mapbox

    We make it possible to pin travel spots on Pinterest, find restaurants on Foursquare, and visualize data on GitHub. ...

  • OpenLayers
    OpenLayers

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

  • 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. ...

  • 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. ...

  • Stack Overflow
    Stack Overflow

    Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming. ...

OpenStreetMap alternatives & related posts

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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.

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    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.

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          Stephen Gheysens
          Lead Solutions Engineer at Inscribe · | 7 upvotes · 471K 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
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          Noah Zoschke
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          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
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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