Nominatim VS TileServer GL

Compare Nominatim vs TileServer GL and see what are their differences.

TileServer GL

Vector and raster maps with GL styles. Server side rendering by MapLibre GL Native. Map tile server for MapLibre GL JS, Android, iOS, Leaflet, OpenLayers, GIS via WMTS, etc. (by maptiler)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
Nominatim TileServer GL
35 12
2,828 2,021
3.1% 2.9%
9.5 9.5
10 days ago 4 days ago
Python JavaScript
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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.

Nominatim

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nominatim. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-05.

TileServer GL

Posts with mentions or reviews of TileServer GL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-23.
  • Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Oct 2023
    I've been using TileServer GL for a while and it looks like there is support for pmtiles coming soon.

    https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl/pull/1009

  • Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2023
    Firstly, I just want to say thanks for the reply, but more so thanks for your work, its moving opensource mapping forward.

    In my work we are looking at switching from mbtiles hosted with tilserver-gl(https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) to pmtiles to remove a server process. But we we self host already and we are already using maplibre-gl 2.

    I can see why the implementation in the blog post would be better for high traffic deployments (ours isn't). It also points out to me I don't understand how a CDN would handle range request for hosting the pmtiles file directly, it probably doesn't?

    As far as the mapbox stuff,in my mind, pmtiles is a direct competitor (successor) to the mbtiles format, which was a revolution in comparison to everything that came before it. A successor I welcome because it makes it even easier for me as a developer to self host and not be dependent on a SaaS to run my maps.

    The modern opensource map stack wouldn't exist without mapbox and I'm personally grateful to them for that. Most people who use pmtiles will use mapbox's opensource style spec to style them, and descendants of their open source code to render them. But as a developer now its an obvious choice to not use their services after years of using them.

    However I'm not doing high traffic stuff and they never made much money off me anyway.

  • How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2023
    https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl makes it really easy. I have a pretty simple pipeline set up to download an OSM extract, convert it to MBTiles, host it in CloudFlare, and render raster tiles with this software.
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2023
    I've switched over a fairly large transit client to PMTiles hosted on CloudFlare for their dynamic map and am switching another large transit client to using https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl with MBTiles and the same style.json to generate static maps. It's all gone swimmingly and we've cut costs by about $1,000 a month.
  • Does anyone know where to find the global raster set of buildings??
    4 projects | /r/gis | 25 Jan 2023
    It's not raster directly, but you could use planetiler ( https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler ) to build a full planet vector map . Then you could use something like TileServer-GL to server the vector map with a style. TileServer-gl ( https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) would provide a raster source that displays in the style you set on your vector map.
  • Self Hosting a Google Maps Alternative with OpenStreetMap
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Nov 2022
  • Shade Map Pro
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Mar 2022
  • XYZ Vector tile server
    3 projects | /r/openstreetmap | 6 Oct 2021
  • Offline Map Tiles
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 3 Jul 2021
    You could host something like tileserver-gl (https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) and use the pre-generated vector tiles from https://archive.org/details/osm-vector-mbtiles Add some map styles and you have your own offline map service. Here are some good starters for styles: https://github.com/openmaptiles/osm-bright-gl-style

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Nominatim and TileServer GL you can also consider the following projects:

TileServer PHP - MBTiles and MapTiler folder hosting with TileJSON, OGC WMTS, UTFGrid interaction and web interface. QGIS & ESRI ArcGIS compatible. Runs on any Apache+PHP webhosting. MapBox Studio Vector Tiles hosting.

photon - an open source geocoder for openstreetmap data

Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) - Open Source Routing Machine - C++ backend

OsmAnd - OsmAnd

openstreetmap-tile-server - Docker file for a minimal effort OpenStreetMap tile server

OpenTripPlanner - An open source multi-modal trip planner

InterpolateHeatmapLayer - Minimalist JavaScript library for rendering temperature maps (or interpolate heatmaps) with Mapbox GJ JS

Hauk - Open-source realtime location sharing

μlogger - μlogger • web viewer for tracks uploaded with μlogger mobile client

osm-bright-gl-style - OSM Bright GL Style using OpenMapTiles