It is mostly dependent on what you feel comfortable working with (or, if you are unfamiliar with either - whether you will better connect with either one, which is not easy to predict).

I personally prefer PHP as the language is more complete and has more robust runtimes platforms. Node.js can be problematic and the NPM.js ecosystem is much more problematic than even PHP's. That being said, each have their strengths and weaknesses and one of Node.js strongest appeal is that you can use more modern languages that build on top of Javascript - such as TypeScript and still use all the existing Javascript APIs.

Now regarding the Google Maps API - Google offers a Javascript API but not a PHP API, so please note that. Its important to understand what you are getting here - the Google Maps Javascript library is meant for frontend development - i.e. to run in the browser. You didn't explain what you expect to use the Google Maps API for, but if its for displaying a map on the website and letting users click that and interact with the map, then you'd need to use the Google Maps Javascript API, but it doesn't require any specific server implementation - even if you use the server Google API SDK with Node.js, it will still look and behave differently than the frontend API, because they are meant to do different things.

If you want to use the Google Maps API on the server - for example to updates places or get routing directions, you'd need to look at the Google API HTTP examples (here's the one for routing: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/directions/get-directions#maps_http_directions_toronto_montreal-txt ) and figure out how to use these in your server. The Google documentation has samples for Javascript but not for PHP, but the official Google PHP client library has documentation that explains how to use these examples with the PHP library: https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-php-client#making-http-requests-directly .