maplibre-gl-leaflet VS Leaflet

At my day job we’re heavily invested in Leaflet for historical reasons, but toward the end of last year added Maplibre as a layer on top of it via the excellent https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet. This has allowed us to begin transitioning gradually instead of being forced to jump all at once.

It’s hard to beat the simplicity of Leaflet, but neither it nor OpenLayers can handle Mapbox Vector Tiles in a performant enough manner, so Maplibre is the future for us.

On the Leaflet front, if you look at the plugins list, you'll see Leaflet.VectorGrid (made a long time ago by yours truly). And if you search for a bit, you'll find maplibre-gl-leaflet, which places a Maplibre instance inside a Leaflet map pane.

https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet exists!

It's not perfect, and you don't see the full benefit of a WebGL renderer, but if you want to keep using a Leaflet API, it's great.

Seems like MapTiler is maintaining an open source full stack vector alternative, and OpenLayers[0] looks good as well, so maybe it's time for legacy libraries to add vector support, or for users to switch libraries? There's even bindings from Maplibre GL to Leaflet [1].

I at least would find it interesting to see the two compared by someone other than me ;).

[0] https://openlayers.org/

[1] https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-leaflet

9. Leaflet

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:

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.

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

For a personal project, I had to use Leaflet with Svelte, and I faced some problems during development.

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/

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

I have a special place in my heart for Leaflet and it’s documentation: https://leafletjs.com

Its suppose to be free: like with map data providers there's Leaflet, OpenStreet Maps and many more which are all for free.