The Startup I'm working for hasn't moved from Google Maps & Places APIs yet. This is why I'm currently in the middle of a thorough research and I figure that the end result might be beneficial to others as well.
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I was using google places API for a bit, but realized it is WAAAAYYY TOO EXPENSIVE to start with, so I looked for alternatives.
I really like TomTom's search API and docs. The results are not the most accurate, but fine for my purposes at the moment. However, I like how easy they make it to try out the API from the docs. I don't have to open up insomnia/postman and import a collection, I can just do everything from their site. I thought that was really neat.
If you have iOS you can use Spotlight for that: search a business name and get the same place info you get in Maps, it’s pretty convenient (I think it’s new in iOS 8).
It sounds like you're looking for a crude substitute for a places API ([location + type] yields list of matching results). We don't currently support that, but we would be happy to build that if someone would use the feature (I have been thinking that that would be a natural extension of our offerings). I'll follow up with you via the e-mail address in your profile.
True. Also, Google has a great Places Search API. You can build so many more things with the Google maps libraries, unlike with other maps. For example just built https://stayintech.com/ with Google Maps API, after considering all the available options.
Factual provides an API for businesses in the US and around the world. In fact, SimpleGeo partnered with us for some of their data. Other alternatives you can consider are FourSquare, Google Places, etc. Each alternative has it's own pricing structure and terms and conditions.
Any good alternate to google Places API. I need a kind of places name autocomplete to make sure users are able to look up something by landmark/location names. Google places autocomplete is very pricy. Is there any open database for such use case. I can have own look up around this data.
This seems like a reasonable place to ask this: Is there an alternative available to Google Places Text Search? E.g., I provide a query that's something like "hardware stores" and a location and I get back a list of hardware stores within the location?
As far as I can tell, the geocoding APIs from stuff like MapBox or Pelias aren't intended for this use case (more like finding a specific hardware store).
>I'm currently using the Google Places API, but it doesn't seem to retreive all locations.
>>Are there any other map APIs for venues that you've found to be more robust and accurate?
It’s been a minute since I looked at the docs, but could you use the Google Maps API for this (or perhaps OpenStreetMap)? You could query all of the POI categories for a city/state/country and save the addresses and names. Might be something, unless you need the legal name of the business rather than whatever they make public.
So, to get location, I looked at each entry and typed in the city name, then ran those locations through the Google Maps geocoding API. To get more specific locations, I would have to get the address of each company, which generally isn't posted. Maybe LinkedIn API to grab the address, based on company name? Haven't played with that one yet.
Often the google-places-API returns something like this:
> "types" : [ "point_of_interest", "establishment" ]
This is not exact enough. Is there a possibility to gain better information of a company by API? Thanks a lot.
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