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Comment by freyfogle

5 days ago

Hi, Ed here, one of the founders of OpenCage. This comparison is a bit shallow to be honest, as it basically just looks at price. Of course price is important, but as someone who has worked on geocoding for 10+ years and helped literally thousands of customers there are many more factors to consider depending on your needs.

For example: quality (not generally, but versus your actual input data), terms & conditions of what you can do with the data, support, data enhancements (things like timezones, etc, etc), ease of use, documentation, terms of payment, and more.

The only real answer to "which geocoding service is best" is "it depends".

We have a comprehensive geocoding buyer's guide on our site: https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-compare-and-test-geoc...

Please get in touch if you need geocoding, hapyp to tell you if your needs are a good match for our service. Happy also to tell you if not.

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freyfogle

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_hl_  5 days ago

Hey, I’m acutely in the market (considering moving away from Google)

2 Qs:

1. How does OpenCage correctness/completeness compare to Google Maps API, especially in rural and industrial regions where you have addresses like “AcmeCo Industries, 234-XY Unit C, Jebel Ali Free Zone, Dubai”? I’d like to confidently query the most precise location that still matches/contains my query.

2. Do you support querying by business names? Google’s geocoding doesn’t return the business name in the result (that’s a separate API), but it does use business names to resolve queries.

  • freyfogle  5 days ago

    Hi,

    Great. The only real answer is you should sign up for a free trial (takes 2 min, requires just an email address) and test with your actual input data. Which language are you working in? We have SDKs for almost all (30+) and detailed tutorials for many: https://opencagedata.com/sdks

    You can also test manually on our demo page: https://opencagedata.com/demo

    You can do a lot to help us by formatting the input data well: https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-format-your-geocoding...

    re: company names, it is a real challenge as they introduce a lot of noise.

    Please can you follow up by email with specific questions: support @ opencagedata.com

    I hope we have the chance to work with you

  • anubis0505  5 days ago

    Hi there, this is Sarthak from the Google maps Devrel team. I would love to understand what challenges you faced while using the APIs and what can we do better in the future. If you are interested to talk, please drop me a DM?

awongh  5 days ago

The comparison page link is comprehensive, nice!

To summarize the main point of roll-your-own vs. a pay-per-request api the main point seems to be updating with updated/new OSM data.

In terms of comparing Google Maps vs. Open Cage vs. roll your own OSM / Nominatim what would you say are the main features that are different? (not dev time or infra stuff- just what's different about the request/result)