maplibre-gl-leaflet VS TileServer GL

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'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

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.

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.

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.

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

This server is intended to be a tile server, taking vector data and rendering it to rasterized tile images via tileserver-gl (which uses OpenGL)