Leaflet author here! Just wanted to note that if you haven't looked into OpenLayers in a few years, you absolutely should — it's astonishing how much it progressed: from something that I was so frustrated with that it prompted me to write Leaflet in the first place (11 years ago) to a modern, fast, well-engineered and lovingly maintained library.<p>It's especially great when you're doing complex GIS stuff and need a ton of features and formats supported out of the box. As for other libraries, I'd recommend Leaflet for simple maps, and Mapbox GL for rich, highly interactive apps that benefit from vector rendering tech (I'm biased since I contributed to both), but it's great to have OpenLayers in the mix — there's a library for anyone's needs, cross-inspiration moves all three forward, and the mapping software landscape in general is greater than it has ever been.
When compared to the other two major OSS libraries I would say:<p>- Leaflet. Widely known, suitable for mostly simple use cases.<p>- Mapbox GL JS. State of the art library based on WebGL. Mapbox started off with a fork/extension of Leaflet called Mapbox.js but over time has moved on and created the Mapbox GL JS library from the ground up. Very fast, but requires a GPU due to WebGL.<p>- OpenLayers. Often used by more professional users. Probably the most features complete library. Also usable without a GPU.
Speaking of, does anyone know a cheaper service than Mapbox and Google Maps for raster tiles?<p>I have an app that uses Leaflet for rendering, and Mapbox purely for its raster tiles (both plain maps and satellite required). Mapbox has been cheap for us, at about $50/mo. But with the new pricing structure taking effect in December, it's now about $450/mo. I believe Google and Bing are both more expensive than that.<p>I've been considering setting up OSM, but I'd like to avoid having to run and maintain it.
OpenLayers was one of the first open source libraries of this kind; sadly it's lost some development momentum back when everyone was using it in 2008 or so, and nearly everyone switched to (then faster) alternatives like Leaflet.
We use OpenLayers extensively in my company (<a href="https://www.podaris.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.podaris.com</a>), and we push it really, <i>really</i> hard. It's the basis for a parametric CAD system, a bunch of GIS tools, and most recently, transport micro-simulation. It had a steep learning curve, but has held up remarkably well over the years, with remarkably few instances where it's been the bottleneck.<p>Definitely recommended!
Some time ago I checked out three libraries for my amateur small navigation app:<p>Leaflet - it doesn't have map rotation, so it was a dealbraker for me. People on Stack Overflow were talking about ugly hacks, I didn't want to go into the rabbit hole.<p>Mapbox - I found docs little clunky (again, I'm amateur so it may be the reason I didn't get it) and couldn't really work out what's paid and what's free. Didn't spend a lot of time on them, though.<p>OpenLayers - I think it's the best one feature-wise, but documentation is rather for more advanced developers. I struggled a lot before finally grasping how it works and still, it's not easy. Getting started guide like Vue.js has would be immensely helpful.<p>I ended up with OpenLayers and I'm pretty satisfied for now, despite needing fairly long time to actually implement features properly.
What a coincidence! I discovered OpenLayers yesterday when looking for a way to display a 1 Terapixel image. I got it up and running in a few hours. Kudos to the developers!
I like OpenLayers. We built a rather complex image annotation tool around it and OpenLayers worked well with all the features we added over the years, recently even a full-blown video annotation tool. The community is nice and active, too. Best of all: It's still compatible with our old school way of JS development. The only thing I'm missing is the API documentation of older versions which they seem to have dropped at some point.
We use OpenLayers at our company. We are building an interactive map with a bunch of tools for measuring distance, calculating routes, drawing features, displaying diagrams right on top of the map, and OpenLayers is doing wonders for us. It has a steep learning curve but once you grasp the fundamentals, you can figure out how to do all kinds of magic tricks with it.
What is the advantage of having the documentation CC-BY 3.0 licensed ? In cases where documentation is generated from the code it seems more convenient to use the same license for both.
I used OpenLayers back in 2008-2011 for mapping-heavy web application. It was of very high quality, and had great API documentation (using DoxyGen, iirc). Taught me some things about pre-modern-craze Javascript programming (i.e. how to correctly implement inheritance in JS)