MapQuest offers a geocoding service which doesn't tie you to MapQuest's maps the way Google does. It's free up to some usage amount (I think it's 5k requests a day). You can see more here:
There are 3 broad groups of geocoding services out there.
1. Free tier with only a few allowed uses (and enterprise access starting in the 5 figures). Google maps falls into this category as in the free tier you can only use the geocoding results to display points on a Google Map that is freely accessible. Google obviously has great results and is worldwide.
2. Open to everyone but rate limited. This is where Nominatim/Open Street Map falls. They have coverage worldwide and you can freely access the API, but with only 1 request per second. I also found that they could not find results for quite a few addresses I tested which were returned easily by other services.
3. Paid API with no restrictions on use. This is where LatLon.io falls and Opencage as well. They look to have a pretty good product and will be a good competitor!
I'm an ex-Mapzen teammember, and we've set up a new, paid, geocoding service called https://geocode.earth. I suspect we can give you what you need around geocoding, especially autocomplete, for much less than Google. Feel free to request an invite or reach out to me personally.
I used it for a personal project recently and it really easily allows you to switch between geocoders, which was useful for the edge case that Google didn't get.
We're currently using Google's Geocoder and Yahoo's Placefinder, which work okay, but they both have numerous flaws and various TOS policies we're ignoring for the moment.
I've been looking at the CloudMade Geocoding API for a side project and they return good results in the UK. The POI search might also be helpful but I haven't tried it yet.
You get 100k free requests per month and then it's $15 per 100k.
Their APIs are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.
I'll tag on to Nelson's post to plug a new geocoding service two of us ex-Mapzen folks started called https://geocode.earth.
We offer geocoding, especially autocomplete, with much more liberal usage restrictions than either Mapquest or Google, and some pretty powerful features like address interpolation.
As we're still really getting the platform around the geocoder off the ground, we don't have a permanent free tier, but I'd be happy to set anyone up with a demo key if they are looking for something new.
For those looking to roll your own, the Ruby implementation of a TIGER geocoder released by GeoIQ a while back is a pretty solid starting point: https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder/
We ended up using that as a base and then making some customizations for our US-based geocoding solution. As these guys are figuring out, there's no great int'l option. Google is bad from a licensing perspective (but their tech is fantastic). MapQuest is great but can get really expensive. We've had decent luck with TomTom I think, but if I remember correctly there are a lot of caveats.
I'm biased (I help with the development and build my latest project on top of it), but I love mimirsbrunn https://github.com/CanalTP/mimirsbrunn. Mostly because it is fast, small and relatively easy to deploy (courtesy to Rust). It uses an old (2.x) elasticsearch as backend, so that is a major downside.
What do you use for Geocoding?
(for use in a web app that isn't open, so can't use Google etc.)
MapBox does a great job of the maps but the very next thing I want is to search for an address. Back to square one.
OSM uses MapQuest but I'm unsure how licensing and quality affects real-world apps. Is the open data good enough? Is there a sub-$2500 commercial offering that doesn't suck?
Geocoding usage in the Community Edition on Licensed Data is limited to only the locations entered by an end user or that you have uploaded through our Data Manager tool. Geocodes under the Community Edition on Licensed Data cannot be stored for use outside the MapQuest service. If you would like more flexible options for geocode use, please contact MapQuest Platform Services to learn more about our extended rights geocoding product. Geocoding on Open Data has different terms, please check the Terms of Use for details.
Hmmm I evaluated a lot of those (mainly OSM-based) geocoders recently. Unfortunately the quality of results is orders of magnitude worse than Google. The only ones that even came close were Mapbox, Mapquest and Here.
Interesting projects! I have tried to use the Mapquest geocoder API but for anything outside the US it's worse than useless. Will definitely check those out. It's great that they're based on Elastic Search since obviously geocoding is about full text search more than it is about "geo".
arcgis has a free place suggestions API: https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/geocode/api-reference/geo...
OpenCageData is pretty good for geocoding with a good free tier.
My company https://stadiamaps.com does map tiles at very generous tiers.
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