Comparison

This page gives a brief comparison between maplibre and similar solutions.

Similar Packages​

maplibre_gl​

The maplibre_gl package, or flutter-maplibre-gl on GitHub, is a fork of mapbox_gl, a community effort to provide Mapbox bindings for Mapbox SDKs whose development has stopped in favor of the first-party Mapbox package mapbox_maps_flutter. maplibre_gl was initially maintained by @m0nac0 and was eventually transferred to the MapLibre organization as a hosted project, " a project that the MapLibre Organization does not allocate any resources to."

New collaborators joined but later became inactive again. I became a collaborator of the maplibre_gl package myself in 05/2024 as part of a team of two. While we had different ideas about the long-term goals of the package, we maintained a good collaboration. We managed to publish two releases before development slowed down and eventually stopped again.

In my opinion, maplibre_gl had, and still has to this day, several issues:

• Lack of Stability: When I tried to include maplibre_gl in a project, I experienced a variety of bugs and even app crashes. A more recent User Survey showed that 44% of package users experienced app crashes using maplibre_gl.
• Platform-specific Behavior: When including the package in a project myself, I noticed different behaviors across iOS and Android. As a Flutter developer, I'd prefer to write code once and have the same behavior across all targeted platforms. The User Survey mentioned earlier revealed that 46% of package users experience platform-specific behavior.
• Legacy Code and Workarounds: Like most libraries, maplibre_gl contains workaround code that sometimes isn't needed anymore. These workarounds are often not well-documented and date back to the early days of Dart-JavaScript interoperability or from before null safety was added to Dart.
• WebAssembly: As Flutter for Web can now be compiled to WebAssembly, its web interoperability has changed, requiring the web implementation to be revised and partially rewritten.
• License Compliance: 31 files in maplibre_gl contain a copyright header mentioning "The Chromium Authors" with a "BSD-style license." However, this license isn't included in the LICENSE file. Looking at the Git history reveals that these files were merged in along with code years ago.
• Example App: Some sample implementations in the example app are broken or don't work across all platforms.
• Performance: As maplibre_gl relies solely on platform channels, sending or receiving large objects and data can lead to bottlenecks and performance issues.

Considering all these problems and the cumbersome development of maplibre_gl, I decided to adopt a greenfield approach with a clean migration guide. I started a new package and announced it in a discussion thread.

• maplibre is a completely new package, built from the ground up to eliminate licensing issues and legacy implementations (with the risk that some fixes are not yet included).
• It uses the new JavaScript interoperability to ensure compatibility with WebAssembly.
• To ensure greater stability, maplibre aims to reduce platform-specific code and employs code generation for better type safety. It uses a combination of unit tests, widget tests, and integration tests.
• Like the package, the example app is written from scratch with a responsive design and a hosted example application.
• To avoid bottlenecks caused by platform channels, the package utilizes FFI interoperability with Objective-C and Swift, as well as a combination of JNI and FFI for Java and Kotlin. Many of these interop features are still considered experimental by the Dart Native team but are a focus for 2025. When interop is unsuitable, the package falls back to generated method channels.

flutter_map​

flutter_map likely offers the best cross-platform experience and is published under a permissive license. Written in pure Dart, it can be used on every platform supported by Flutter and has an active community on GitHub and Discord. I am joined the flutter_map team as a maintainer myself in 05/2023.

The package has seamless integration into Flutter and a plugin system to extend its functionality through other plugin packages. However, this sometimes limits the package’s capabilities, as a built-in feature might offer better integration than relying on third-party plugin authors. Vector tile support is not built-in but basic support can be added using the vector_map_tiles package.

The advantage of being 100% written in Dart can sometimes be a drawback, as it is not as performant as a lower-level renderer. This limitation is especially noticeable when rendering large amounts of data or using vector tiles.

Learning from flutter_map, the maplibre package aims a have a similar integration into Flutter and allows to set and update map annotations in a declarative way, just like any other Flutter widget. Additionally, maplibre has a similar plugin system, where plugin authors can enhance the functionality in an easy way.

Features​

Legend​

• ✅ Completely Supported
• ⚠️ Supported with Limitations
• ❌ Not Supported
• No icon: Unknown (open a pull request to fill in the blanks)

Footnotes​

1. Only with third party extensions
2. Performance implications
3. Not on all platforms

General​

Core Functionality​

Annotation Layers​

Platform Support​