Free Commercial Mapping Services

Question

Anybody had experience using either of the following;

MapQuest platform: http://platform.mapquest.com

OpenLayers: http://openlayers.org

Which of the above would you recommend, any feedback from use of the service?

Or do you think it is worth paying for a commercial license from either Virtual Earth or Google Maps, get more available documentation online and more users to get knowledge and help from with the API?

Cost is an obvious issue hence why we are looking at the free commercial options.

Many Thanks

Answer 1

When my company evaluated this, we eventually ended up buying Google Maps.

• Mapquest, in my biased opinion, looks like crap.
• Google Maps everyone is already familiar with, works well, and has a large enthusiast community
• We could afford it

That said, Google Maps is expensive, starts at 10K. We never got into contract discussions for VE so I don't know what they charge.

Another thing you need to consider is if you're going to be putting hundreds or thousands of markers on the map. If so, no solution will work out of box for you - they'll all run too slow in javascript. In that case you'll need to add the markers in a custom tileset or tile overlay on the server. And I suspect there are a lot of latency issues that go hand in hand with that.

OpenLayers coupled with OpenStreetMap may be sufficient for your needs.

Answer 2

OpenLayers isn't directly comparable to the other mapping providers. It is only a front end script to display various maps, it doesn't include any maps of it's own. There are various free and commercial maps you can use with it (for example OpenStreetMap.org), and it is also capable of embeding things like Yahoo maps or Google maps and providing the same APIs for all of them.