Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Leaflet vs Mapbox: What are the differences?
What is 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.
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.
Leaflet and Mapbox belong to "Mapping APIs" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Leaflet are:
- Tile layers
- Drag panning with inertia
- Scroll wheel zoom
On the other hand, Mapbox provides the following key features:
- 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.
"Light weight" is the primary reason why developers consider Leaflet over the competitors, whereas "Best mapping service outside of Google Maps" was stated as the key factor in picking Mapbox.
Leaflet is an open source tool with 25.2K GitHub stars and 4.1K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Leaflet'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 Leaflet, which is listed in 75 company stacks and 36 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."
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 Leaflet
- Light weight32
- Free28
- Evolutive via plugins12
- OpenStreetMap10
- Strong community9
- Choice of map providers7
- Easy API6
- Alternative to Google Maps3
Pros of Mapbox
- Best mapping service outside of Google Maps28
- OpenStreetMap22
- Beautifully vectorable15
- Fluid user experience11
- Extensible8
- React/ RNative integration7
- 3D Layers5
- Low Level API4
- Affordable4
- Great customer support3
- Custom themes3
- High data volume rendering2
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
What is Leaflet?
What is Mapbox?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use Leaflet?
What companies use Mapbox?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Leaflet?
What tools integrate with Mapbox?
Blog Posts
+26