Question

I have been working on a concept for a while for a sports related website where users can record a location on a map and put that location into a category for a sport and then rate it by a metric or two. I want these metrics displayed on the map but then I want a link or button to view a full page description.

I know that this is possible with Google Maps but I don’t know a lot about Open Street Maps or other options. I am expecting around 50,000 views a day and am curious as to what the best option would be.

Answer 1

Both frameworks work well, and from your use case you should be able to work with either one. There are some things to keep in mind:

• Datasets: Google Maps may look more “familiar” to users
• Usage limits: Google maps has a usage limit of 25000 map loads per day, 1000 map loads afterwards cost 0.5$
• The leaflet library is a good library when using OSM and is under active developement. And it is free, as well as the OSM tiles
• Depending on your tile provider, the tile loading speed from Google might be better – probably due to their CDN.
• …but of course you can use other custom tiles, for example from Mapquest, or you can roll your own tiles for example via TileMill

In the end we decided to use Leaflet together with Mapquest tiles and are quite happy so far. We needed some additional features in Leaflet for more advanced tasks, but we developed them and supplied patches to Leaflet. The tile loading speed of Mapquest is not quite as good as from Google, but our users got used to the look and feel of Leaflet and Mapquest.