Leaflet vs OpenLayers: What are the differences?

Developers describe Leaflet as "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. On the other hand, OpenLayers is detailed as "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.

Leaflet and OpenLayers can be categorized as "Mapping APIs" tools.

Some of the features offered by Leaflet are:

• Tile layers
• Drag panning with inertia
• Scroll wheel zoom

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.

"Light weight" is the top reason why over 22 developers like Leaflet, while over 8 developers mention "Flexibility" as the leading cause for choosing OpenLayers.

Leaflet and OpenLayers are both open source tools. Leaflet with 25.2K GitHub stars and 4.1K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than OpenLayers with 5.17K GitHub stars and 1.97K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Leaflet has a broader approval, being mentioned in 75 company stacks & 36 developers stacks; compared to OpenLayers, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.