Leaflet VS Cesium

Compare Leaflet vs Cesium and see what are their differences.

Leaflet

🍃 JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps 🇺🇦 (by Leaflet)

Cesium

An open-source JavaScript library for world-class 3D globes and maps :earth_americas: (by CesiumGS)
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Leaflet Cesium
219 10
39,937 11,821
0.9% 1.8%
8.9 9.8
9 days ago 7 days ago
JavaScript JavaScript
BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Leaflet

Posts with mentions or reviews of Leaflet. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-19.
  • JavaScript Libraries That You Should Know
    8 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2024
    9. Leaflet
  • Animated traveling map with Leaflet
    4 projects | dev.to | 10 Mar 2024
    Leaflet is the most famous open-source map library, with lots of plugins. 2 of them are used to animate a marker on the map:
  • 5 JavaScript mapping APIs compared
    4 projects | dev.to | 13 Feb 2024
    Leaflet stands out as one of the top open source JavaScript libraries for crafting interactive maps. Optimized for both mobile and web devices, it is relatively small (around 42KB) and offers a ton of features, plugins, and a straightforward API. It works across all browsers and platforms.
  • 2024: The year of the OpenStreetMap vector maps
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2024
  • Shots: Create Mockups
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2024
    Finding maplibre 'better' was more valid at the time than today, and is also subjective. The creators and maintainers of both libraries have done some great work (and are still doing so).

    Back in January 2022, the stable version of leaflet, v1.7.1, was from September 2020, and was affected by some small bugs degrading the user experience. Although the release of following version seemed close, there was no clear schedule for it, and I had concerns about how maintained the library would remain.

    As of today, the bug from 2015 where there is some white space between map tiles on fractional zoom levels [0] is still open.

    Also, leaflet was a pain to integrate in Svelte Kit framework, because it depended on `window` and-or `document`, not available at server side.

    Maplibre, on the other hands, with a feature set roughly equivalent to Leaflet, benefited from much more frequent releases, and seemed more stable across browsers and devices. It was also easier to make it work in Svelte kit.

    [0]: https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet/issues/3575

  • 🌲Svelte + 🍃Leaflet + 📍 Clusters
    3 projects | dev.to | 24 Sep 2023
    For a personal project, I had to use Leaflet with Svelte, and I faced some problems during development.
  • Embed leaflet JS maps in notion?
    1 project | /r/Notion | 12 Sep 2023
    Do anyone have any workaround on how to get leaflet js to work inside notion, either as an embed or as code, or widget? https://leafletjs.com/
  • Ask HN: When building with complex maps do you go with GMaps, Mapbox, OSM?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2023
    None of those things are what most in the GIS space would consider "complex", so you could go with any of the options you selected. For lightweight maps, I like Leaflet

    https://leafletjs.com

  • What’s the most beautifully documented project you’ve seen?
    1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 9 Jul 2023
    I have a special place in my heart for Leaflet and it’s documentation: https://leafletjs.com
  • Who wants to collab for a Grab-clone or Angkas-clone web app?
    1 project | /r/PinoyProgrammer | 27 Jun 2023
    Its suppose to be free: like with map data providers there's Leaflet, OpenStreet Maps and many more which are all for free.

Cesium

Posts with mentions or reviews of Cesium. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-09-27.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Leaflet and Cesium you can also consider the following projects:

maplibre-gl-js - MapLibre GL JS - Interactive vector tile maps in WebGL2

mapbox.js - Mapbox JavaScript API, a Leaflet Plugin

OpenLayers3 - OpenLayers

folium - Python Data. Leaflet.js Maps.

terriajs - A library for building rich, web-based geospatial data platforms.

maplibre-native - MapLibre Native - Interactive vector tile maps for iOS, Android and other platforms.

polymaps - Polymaps is a free JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps in modern web browsers.

gmaps - the easiest way to use Google Maps

leaflet-geoman - 🍂🗺️ The most powerful leaflet plugin for drawing and editing geometry layers