planetiler VS maplibre-gl-leaflet

Worth mentioning this project (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) that lets you create osm mbtiles and pmtiles pretty easy!

For a self-hosted vector tile stack you can have a look into https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler I found it very easy to get started and when you know the other stacks it is also very fast to create these vector tiles even for planet-scale.

(note, that I'm not affiliated with them, but they use some source code from us for the efficient import and also contributed to GraphHopper, but this did not influence my experience ;) )

> I wonder why so many seem to be moving away from raster tiles to vector data.

The flexibility of styling. And you can easily serve customers that need different default languages. This makes maps also more accessible for countries without Latin alphabet.

I used https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler and https://download.geofabrik.de, maybe it helps.

I spent a while optimizing sqlite inserts for planetiler, this is what I came up with:

https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/blob/db0ab02263baaa...

It batches inserts into bulk statements and is able to do writes in the 500k+ per second range, and reads are 300-400k/s using those settings.

Checkout https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler.

Super easy way to generate a MBTiles, which you can then serve directly, or further convert to PMTiles, which can be used to host vector tiles for client-side rendering using MapLibre (or other renderers).

Raster tiles are a lot harder because you have to generate them on the server, and that's a lot more resource intensive.

I built planetiler (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) for this purpose. The output up to z14 is ~80gb and depending on how big of a machine you have it takes from 30 minutes up to a few hours - no DB required, just java or docker. If you are only going to z11-12, it should be quite a bit faster/smaller.

Brandon from Protomaps is also helping add pmtiles output natively to planetiler, so you won't need a conversion step afterwards!

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.

I recently left Twitter after 9 years, most recently serving as tech lead for the knowledge graph group (was 45 people). I helped apply the KG to drive a large portion of Twitter’s revenue and new product launches. In my spare time I do data visualization and web mapping, most recently https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler

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