maplibre-gl-leaflet VS qwantmaps

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

I found https://www.qwant.com/maps pretty decent and comparable to Google Maps, especially for the ease to switch between pedestrian/biking/car directions. They don't have an app though.

Organic Maps OsmAnd Qwant Maps

You could try Qwant Maps for online and as application Organic Maps.

https://www.qwant.com/maps nice front-end. https://openstreetmap.org The boring techy website. https://www.where2.cash Simple web-app for BCH merchants.

It is a reduced version of Apple Maps, so only looking and navigation, unfortunatelly. I'd recommend Qwant Maps for that.

If you go to "edit" mode on the openstreetmap.org website, you'll see aerial/satellite imagery too, licensed for free from bing and others. AFAIK, that license is only for editors, thus they can't have it on the main website (and that wouldn't be a showcase of OSM data anyway).

I agree it's a bit of a shame that the openstreetmap.org doesn't do a better job of showcasing the wealth of data, and it could be more user friendly. There are a lot of other websites that provide the same data, represented differently. https://osmand.net/map for instance. https://www.qwant.com/maps has vector maps and is quite good too!