Comparison
LocationIQ's center of gravity is addresses: geocoding, reverse geocoding, autocomplete. Ours is places: what's near a coordinate, from open Overture data, with your own layers merged in. Plenty of products need both halves, so here's where the line actually sits.
| Need | Open Places API | LocationIQ |
|---|---|---|
| Address autocomplete | No, by design. | Yes, a core feature. |
| Geocoding / reverse geocoding | No. | Yes, the flagship. |
| Place search near a point | Yes: the entire product, with relevance ranking and distances. | Nearby POI lookup is available alongside the geocoding APIs. |
| Base data | Overture Places, monthly refresh, published schema. | Primarily OpenStreetMap. |
| Your own place records | Account-owned layers: corrections, suppressions, private records. | Not a first-class API concept. |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly plans, hard caps, no overages. | Free daily tier with attribution; paid plans start higher; see current pricing. |
Any time the input is an address or the output should be one: checkout forms, address validation, "enter your ZIP" flows, turning coordinates back into street addresses. That's their lane and they're good in it.
Once you hold a coordinate and the question becomes "what's around here" (store finders, travel features, delivery zones, AI agent tools), that's the product we built. Relevance-ranked results with distances, the open Overture base underneath, and your corrections or private records composited on top. The two services chain cleanly: geocode with them, search with us.
Only for nearby place search. LocationIQ's core strengths, forward and reverse geocoding and address autocomplete, are things Open Places API deliberately does not do. Many stacks would sensibly use both: LocationIQ to turn an address into a coordinate, Open Places API to search places around it.
LocationIQ offers a free tier of 5,000 requests per day with attribution and paid plans starting around $49 per month. Open Places API plans are flat monthly quotas with hard caps: $0 for 10,000 searches, $19 for 100,000, $99 for 1 million, no overage billing. Check current LocationIQ pricing before deciding.
LocationIQ builds primarily on OpenStreetMap. Open Places API serves the Overture Maps Foundation Places dataset with monthly refreshes, plus account-owned layers for your corrections and private records on top.
When the job is addresses: autocomplete in a form, geocoding street addresses, or reverse geocoding coordinates. If that's your need, we'll say it plainly: we're the wrong API for it.
Google Places · Foursquare · Geoapify · HERE
Open Places API