Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Geocoding and Map Tiles SaaS
Hi everyone, We at NetToolKit are launching a new geocoding and map tile service and we would love your help. You can compare the accuracy of our geocoders against several others at https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/demo and you can find out more about the service at https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/landing. We’re looking for help primarily in two areas: assessing the accuracy of our geocoder and figuring out what it would take to sign up customers. For the first area, anyone who is familiar with US addresses can help by visiting…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Geocoding and Map Tiles SaaS launched in 2019; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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- 2

For the uninitiated, a geocoder is maps-tech jargon for a search engine for addresses and points of interest. Geocoders are expensive to run. Like, really expensive. Like, $100+/month per instance expensive unless you go for a budget provider. I've been poking at this problem for about a month now and I think I've come up with something kind of cool. I'm calling it Airmail. Airmail's unique feature is that it can query against a remote index, e.g. on object storage or on a static site somewhere. This, along with low memory requirements mean it's about 10x cheaper to run an Airmail…
2024 · blog.ellenhp.me · its alternatives →
- 3

We built Maptoolkit.org - a free, production-grade vector maps service built on OpenStreetMap and MapLibre. Map rendering and tile hosting have historically been either expensive (Google, Mapbox) or complex to maintain yourself. (Plus: Their maps are car-focused.) Our maps feature max data zoom 15, global hill-shading, 3D terrain, contour lines, water depths, and specialized styles (like Hiking, Cycling, Winter). No sign up or API keys required. You can use it like this: ``` const map = new maplibregl.Map({ container: 'map', style: 'https://styles.maptoolkit.org/summer.json',…
Jul 2026 · maptoolkit.org · its alternatives →
- 4
EarthGuessr▲192I built it as a way to practice programming. There are probably much better alternatives out there.
2025 · earthguessr.com · its alternatives →
- 5M1
2018 · geonames.tile38.com · its alternatives →
- 6

For the past few months, I've been working on a website that answers two different questions: - Where in my city have the best travel times to all the things and people I care about? - Given a listing, how far is it from all the things and people I care about? Personally this was fueled by my own frustrations when I was apartment hunting in NYC. I was frustrating to have to juggle so many Google Maps tabs when I was evaluating a listing, and it was also annoying to not have full confidence that I was even searching in the right places. I wanted to be close to work, a Trader Joe's, and a…
2025 · theretowhere.com · its alternatives →
- 7LW
Hi HN, I made a web game to practice country locations a while ago and HN liked it, so I thought I'd post my updated version as well. As for how the game works and feels, I'd really recommend you checking it out for yourself, it's free, no signup, no ads. The tech stack is Vue + ts + Tailwind/Daisy for the looks. The learning algorithm is a slight modification of the ts version of FSRS. If you have anything to add, it's open source as well (https://github.com/koljapluemer/learn-worldmap), although not well documented yet. In the end it's just a little sideproject,…
2025 · map.koljapluemer.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Hi HN, I’m building Corviont, a self-hosted offline maps appliance (tiles + routing + search) for edge/on-prem devices. Hosted demo (no install): https://demo.corviont.com/ Self-host (Docker Compose repo): https://github.com/corviont/monaco-demo Docs: https://www.corviont.com/docs What’s inside: - Vector tiles served locally (PMTiles) - Routing served locally (Valhalla) - Offline geocoding/search + reverse (SQLite Nominatim-based index) - MapLibre UI wired to the local endpoints After the initial image + data pulls, it runs fully…
Jan 2026 · corviont.com · its alternatives →
- 9

Geocoding and data enrichment for North America that just works
2014 · geocod.io · its alternatives →
- 10

- 11MA
Hello HN! I’m excited to share this open-source community mashup showing the power and possibility of combining 3D Gaussian splat scans with traditional mesh-based 3D tiles maps in the browser. As you've probably seen on HN a bunch lately, Gaussian splats are a new method to allow custom 3D scans of scenes and objects [1] and Google Maps 3D Tiles API are the same 3D buildings and street views your familiar with in Google Earth or Google Maps, and recently they’ve been made available for inclusion in web apps. Combining splats + 3d map mixes highly detailed real-world custom micro-scans with…
2024 · maps-and-splats.glitch.me · its alternatives →
- 12

Real-time Geospatial and Geofencing. Contribute to tidwall/tile38 development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13

Google released an API in May to get fetch 3D Tiles of anywhere on Earth. Using this in standard 3D engines like Blender is tricky because (1) the tiles are in a geographic coordinate system (2) you get a lot of little tiles at varying quality levels I wanted to simplify this so all you need to do is get an API key, select a map region and a zoom level, and get one combined glTF file that you can throw into any engine. Especially if you're just prototyping and want to see how this data looks in your engine before investing in figuring out all the nuances of the API & coordinate system. (Note…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14

Flexible tool to build planet-scale vector tilesets from OpenStreetMap data fast - onthegomap/planetiler
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

We’re thrilled to announce PlaceKit, a worldwide geocoding API and toolkit! It’s the successor of Algolia Places, a discontinued product. Nico (my co-founder) and I worked at Algolia for 3 and 6 years respectively before launching PlaceKit. Unlike big competitors Google Places and Mapbox, it’s a single REST API, with a unique and transparent per-request pricing. PlaceKit combines OpenStreetMap, local datasets and the Algolia engine into a unique sub 50ms worldwide address search. We’ve made our JS libraries from scratch to make them lightweight, customizable, and compatible with any stack.…
2023 · placekit.io · its alternatives →
- 16G3
I made a web app to generate 3D models of real places on earth from land cover and elevation data. Click anywhere on the map to get a polygon, and then click "generate". It should work at most scales, but if your watershed or region selection is too large, the result can be less exciting because it's so flat. As a warning, the 3D models can sometimes be too much for my phone. It's nicer on desktop. I'm still working better on mobile support. The land cover data I'm using gives a cool effect, but at some point I'd like to add in global imagery and clouds. The backend is a Python thread…
2025 · topography.jessekv.com · its alternatives →
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Real-time Geospatial and Geofencing. Contribute to tidwall/tile38 development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19GC
Hi folks! I'm excited to show you gis.chat, a geospatial chat platform in both senses: a platform about geospatial topics and a geospatial platform itself, referencing the location of our communities. The setup is fairly simple and reproducible: a plain Zulip instance and a homepage with geospatial search capabilities. It seems almost trivial but it has some very nice features. I guess you should be familiar with Zulips stream/topic model to follow along (https://zulip.com/help/streams-and-topics). The core idea is that there are city-specific streams (currently…
2023 · gis.chat · its alternatives →
- 20IM
Hi HN, I built a little tool to help me get better at remembering country locations on the map: https://learn-worldmap.netlify.app/ It's made from plain HTML/CSS/JS, and not intended to make any money or anything. Just thought that maybe someone else may enjoy it. Also of course happy about any feedback! Cheerz.
2023 · learn-worldmap.netlify.app · its alternatives →
- 21FP
Just a fun hack I did while bored over the weekend. My wife was busy shopping, it got me thinking that can VLMs solve the indoor location problem in a mall? Can I just show a VLM a map and an image and have it doa good enough job locating me? I hacked this P.O.C and it seems to work.
2025 · arjo129.github.io · its alternatives →
- 22

An API to convert coordinates to and from places.
2016 · opencagedata.com · its alternatives →
- 23

- 24AO
I've recently been working with real-time geoJSON data at a rate of 50+ queries per second. SaaS solutions can be prohibitively expensive at this rate, thus, I created go-reverse-geo. Data is pulled from geonames.org and is stored in MongoDB (a requirement of my current project). It is very much a work-in-progress (I wrote it this morning). Hope someone finds it useful. https://paranoia.dev/vivi/go-reverse-geo
2020 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →