10 Best Google Maps APIs and Alternatives for Local Business Data [2026]

September 1, 2026 21 min read 0 Views

The best Google Maps API alternative in 2026 depends on the job. CUFinder wins for local business data you can store and act on, Google Places API wins for in-app display and raw POI accuracy, and Outscraper wins for cheap bulk extraction. Price and license decide the rest.

I’m going to be honest with you.

Back in 2021, in Hamburg, I built a little tool for an agency client that mapped restaurants around their locations. The prototype ran on the Google Places API and cost nothing. Then it went to production. Month one landed at about 1,400 euros, because every map view quietly fired Place Details calls with premium fields.

Finance asked me what a “SKU” was. That was a long week.

And the bill wasn’t the worst part. Legal review later flagged that storing Google’s place data in the client’s CRM broke the license. So we rebuilt the whole table from a licensed data source. Twice the work.

One thing before the list. This is an honest comparison, not an ad. CUFinder is our product and it sits on this list, so every tool gets real pros AND real cons, including ours. Let’s get into it.

🔍 Did You Know? In March 2025, Google replaced the famous $200 monthly credit with free monthly calls per SKU: 10,000 for Essentials SKUs, 5,000 for Pro, and 1,000 for Enterprise, plus a $300 trial credit for new customers. (Source: Google Maps Platform pricing)

TL;DR: The Best Google Maps APIs and Alternatives in 2026

We tested 10 APIs on 1,500 local listings across three cities in August 2026. The winners by use case:

Best overall for local business data: CUFinder. 87% usable records, and the only API here returning outreach fields (emails, direct phones) you may legally store. From $49/mo.
Best for in-app maps and display: Google Places API. 91% usable records and the freshest POI index on earth. Just don’t try to keep the data.
Best Google-free POI database: Foursquare Places. $15 per 1,000 Pro calls and first-party data.
Best budget bulk extraction: Outscraper. $3 per 1,000 records after 500 free every month.
Best free tier: Geoapify. 3,000 credits per day, commercial use allowed with attribution.

Before you compare prices, decide which JOB you’re hiring the API for. That one decision sorts this whole market.

First, Which Job Are You Hiring the API For?

There are two jobs: showing places to users inside an app, and building a local business dataset you keep. Different jobs, different tools, different contracts.

Job one is display. A store locator, a delivery map, an autocomplete box. Google, TomTom, and Geoapify shine here, and the license works because the data stays inside the map view. Map tiles and rendering? That’s Mapbox, MapTiler, Radar, and HERE territory. Fine tools. Not this article’s topic.

Job two is data. You want 5,000 plumbers with phones, websites, and categories sitting in YOUR database, feeding a sales team or a marketplace. That’s a local business data API job. And it’s exactly where display APIs break down, legally and financially.

Most of the pain comes from mixing up the two. So this list scores everything through the job-two lens: local business data for B2B use.

💡 Pro Tip: Most B2B teams don't need tiles at all. They need clean place data. Unbundle the two and buy data separately. That single change usually cuts the Google Maps bill to near zero.

The Google Maps API Cost Problem, Honestly

Let me say something nice first. Google’s data quality is excellent. In our test it had the highest share of still-open, correct listings of anyone. That’s why Google Places is the incumbent every alternative gets compared against.

But the pricing model punishes data collection. Here are the August 2026 list prices from Google’s own pricing page. Text Search Pro costs $32 per 1,000 calls after 5,000 free per month. Place Details Pro costs $17 per 1,000. Place Details Enterprise + Atmosphere, the SKU you need for ratings and reviews fields, costs $25 per 1,000 after just 1,000 free.

So let’s do real math. Say you want 50,000 local listings with full details. The search side is fine: about 2,500 Text Search calls fit inside the free cap. The details side is not. Around 49,000 billable Enterprise + Atmosphere calls cost roughly $1,225. Every refresh, you pay again.

And here’s the part that stings. After paying, you still don’t own anything. Google’s terms are blunt about it:

“Customer will not export, extract, or otherwise scrape Google Maps Content for use outside the Services,” and “Customer will not cache Google Maps Content except as expressly permitted,” reads Google’s own Maps Platform terms, which specifically forbid copying and saving business names, addresses, or user reviews.

For display, fair deal. For dataset building, you’re renting data you may not keep. That’s the honest core of the “Google Maps API alternatives” conversation, and why this market exists.

What Makes a Good Local Business Data API? (the 7 things I check)

A good local business data API returns accurate, fresh, storable records at a predictable price. Seven criteria decide it, and they’re our seven scoring pillars.

Accuracy and liveness (22%): is the business open, does the phone connect? Closed-business rates ran 9% to 26% across providers.
Usable-field coverage (20%): phones, websites, categories, and above all, contact fields you may store. Only three of ten APIs returned any.
Freshness (13%): live-scraped or daily-refreshed beats quarterly dumps. OSM-based sources lagged by months in our sample.
Pricing transparency and value (15%): can you predict a 50,000-record bill without a spreadsheet? Quote-only pricing gets a fixed 5.5.
Docs and developer experience (12%): time from API key to first clean JSON. The range was 4 minutes to over an hour.
Rate limits (10%): published, sane, and honest about throughput. A 5-requests-per-second cap changes a 50K job’s timeline.
Support (8%): a human who answers before your credits expire.

Those are the criteria. Here’s how we turned them into scores.

How We Tested 10 Google Maps APIs and Alternatives

Full disclosure: CUFinder is our product. Same sample, same rules for everyone, and I’d still tell you to re-run this test on your own city before you spend a cent.

The setup. In August 2026 we pulled dentists, plumbers, and coffee shops in Berlin, Austin, and Manchester: 500 listings per city, 1,500 per provider. Then the boring part. We checked whether each business was still open and its website loaded, and we called a 100-listing sample per provider.

We also tracked one metric nobody else scores: does the record include an outreach field (business email or direct phone) the license lets you STORE? For B2B teams, that’s the whole point.

Each API then got a 0-10 score per pillar, and the composite is simple:

Overall = Σ (PillarScore × Weight) → FinalScore/100 = round(Overall × 10, 1)

A worked example so you can check my math. CUFinder: (9.2×.22)+(9.0×.20)+(9.5×.13)+(9.0×.15)+(8.5×.12)+(8.5×.10)+(9.0×.08) = 9.00 → 90.0/100.

Two honest limits. Three cities is not the world, so treat regional numbers as directional. And we didn’t test navigation, routing, or rendering at all. For those jobs, Google or TomTom wins and this scorecard doesn’t apply.

Quick Comparison: 10 Google Maps APIs and Alternatives

Here’s the shortlist view, with our first-party test numbers front and center.

Rank	API	Best for	Usable-record rate (our test)	Storable outreach fields	Composite /100
1	CUFinder	Local business data for sales and marketing	87%	Yes, 71% of records	90.0
2	Google Places API	In-app display, raw POI accuracy	91%	No (license forbids storing)	83.9
3	Foursquare Places	Google-free POI database	84%	No	82.8
4	Outscraper	Budget bulk extraction	86%	Partial, 28% via add-on	82.2
5	SerpApi	Real-time Maps results	88%	No	82.0
6	ScrapingDog	Cheapest bulk requests	85%	No	80.9
7	Apify	Scraping workflows and scheduling	84%	Partial, 24% via add-on	79.2
8	Geoapify	Free tier and OSM data	74%	No	76.4
9	TomTom	EU display and routing stacks	78%	No	74.8
10	Yelp Places API	Ratings and reviews depth (US)	81%	No	72.1

Pricing Models Compared: What You Actually Pay

Ten APIs, five pricing models. So compare per record, not per plan. Every figure was checked in August 2026 against the pages in the References.

API	Pricing model	Entry price	Free tier	Notes (Aug 2026)
CUFinder	Flat credit plans, unlimited seats	$49/mo Lite (1,000 credits)	15 credits, no card	$49/$129/$299/$449; Not Found rows never charged
Google Places API	Pay as you go per SKU, 3 tiers	$32/1K Text Search Pro; $17/1K Details Pro; $25/1K Details Ent.+Atmosphere	10K/5K/1K calls per SKU monthly + $300 trial	Replaced the $200 credit in March 2025; volume discounts past 100K
Foursquare Places	Pay per call (CPM)	$15/1K Pro calls	First 500 calls	Premium-field calls $18.75/1K; $12 then $9 at volume
Yelp Places API	Plan tiers (Base/Enhanced/Premium)	Not published (sales-led)	300 calls/day trial	66 attributes on Premium; 150K calls/mo cap before Enterprise
TomTom	Freemium per API + volume steps	Published EUR rate card	5K Discover, 10K Suggest, 20K geocoding calls/mo	Strong display and routing; thinner POI attributes
Geoapify	Credit plans	$109/mo (25K credits/day)	3,000 credits/day	Commercial use OK with attribution; $299/mo for 100K/day
Outscraper	Pay as you go per record	$3/1K records (501-100K)	500 records/mo	Async jobs; email and contacts enrichment add-ons
SerpApi	Monthly search quota	$25/mo (1K searches)	Limited free searches	Up to 20 places per search; Legal Shield on paid plans
ScrapingDog	Credit plans	$40/mo Lite (200K credits)	200 credits	Maps request = 5 credits, so Lite covers 40K requests
Apify	Pay per result + add-ons	$1.50/1K places	Free trial credits	Extra place details billed as add-ons

Two model quirks worth naming. SerpApi bills per search, and one search returns up to 20 places, so $25 can buy up to 20,000 place rows. And ScrapingDog bills five credits per Maps request, roughly $1 per 1,000 requests on Lite. Cheap, if you build the pipeline yourself.

📌 Example: The same 50,000-listing project, priced at August 2026 list rates: Google Places about $1,225/mo in Details calls, Outscraper about $150 one-off, ScrapingDog about 12,500 credits (a small slice of the $40 Lite plan), CUFinder a flat credit plan with emails included. Same city. Same businesses. Wildly different bills.

The 10 Best Google Maps APIs Reviewed

1. CUFinder: Best Overall for Local Business Data

CUFinder 9.0/10: the only API here built for keeping the data, not just viewing it.

Pricing: flat credit plans at $49 (Lite, 1,000 credits), $129, $299, and $449 a month, unlimited seats, 15 free credits to test. Not Found results are never charged.

Who it’s for: sales, marketing, and product teams that want storable, outreach-ready local business data without SKU math.

The good and the not-so-good:

+ 71% of returned records carried a storable outreach field (email or direct phone). Nobody else came close.
+ Records carry phones, emails, ratings, social profiles, and NAICS codes with 95% confidence scores.
+ Licensed for storage and CRM use, so legal review takes minutes, not weeks.
– Input is country plus industry, not radius-around-a-point; hyper-local filtering happens on your side.
– It will not draw a map. No tiles, no rendering, data only.
– The consumer long tail (the food truck that opened last week) is thinner than Google’s live index.

Quick reminder: CUFinder is our product, so read this card with that in mind, then test it yourself on the free credits. Here’s what our test showed anyway. On the 1,500-listing pull, 87% of records were open, live, and callable. The Local Business Search API endpoint takes a country plus industry POST and returns contact-ready JSON. Time from API key to first usable list: four minutes. And my Berlin dentist sample included owner emails I could actually keep.

Behind it sits a 260M+ company database with GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2 Type II compliance, and the same key opens the rest of the 36-endpoint suite. So when your local list needs firmographics later, you’re one call away, not one vendor away.

Best for: building local business lists that feed real outreach.

Limitation: if you need a rendered map or block-by-block radius search, pair it with a display API. It won’t do that half of the job.

2. Google Places API: Best for In-App Display and Raw Accuracy

Google Places API 8.4/10: the best POI data on earth, rented by the view.

Pricing: per SKU. Text Search Pro $32/1K, Details Pro $17/1K, Details Enterprise + Atmosphere $25/1K, with 10K/5K/1K free monthly calls by tier and a $300 trial.

The good and the not-so-good:

+ 91% usable-record rate in our test, the best raw accuracy of the ten.
+ Excellent docs and the deepest global coverage, including that brand-new food truck.
+ Free per-SKU calls cover small display workloads entirely.
– The license forbids exporting, storing, or caching place data, including business names and addresses.
– No email fields at any tier, at any price.
– Predicting a bill across Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise SKUs takes a spreadsheet and patience.

In practice, Google is the right answer for job one and the wrong answer for job two. The data is superb, the meter never stops, and the terms mean your CRM keeps none of it.

Best for: display, autocomplete, and live POI lookups inside your app.

3. Foursquare Places API: Best Google-Free POI Database

Foursquare Places 8.3/10: first-party POI data with the friendliest per-call pricing.

Pricing: pay per call. Pro endpoints $15/1K after 500 free calls, then $12 and $9 at volume. Premium-field calls $18.75/1K.

+ First-party data heritage (years of check-ins), not just aggregation.
+ Roughly half Google’s price for comparable search and details calls.
+ Released an open ~100M-place dataset (FSQ OS Places) in late 2024 that’s free to download.
– No outreach fields, so it feeds analytics better than sales.
– Consumer-category skew and US strength; our Manchester plumber sample thinned out.

Foursquare scored 84% on liveness, solid for the price. And the open dataset is a useful sandbox before you pay.

Best for: POI search and details when you’re leaving the Google ecosystem.

4. Outscraper: Best Budget Bulk Extraction

Outscraper 8.2/10: Google Maps data by the pound.

Pricing: pay as you go. First 500 records free monthly, then $3/1K up to 100K, cheaper past that. No monthly fee.

+ 86% liveness in our pull, because it scrapes Google’s live index.
+ Filters like “only places with phones” plus email enrichment add-ons (28% of our records got one).
+ Exports straight to CSV, Excel, or JSON.
– Async job model, not real-time lookups, so it’s a batch tool.
– Scraping-based, which parks you in the terms-of-service gray zone described below.

My Austin coffee-shop batch came back in 20 minutes as a tidy spreadsheet. But plan around the queue, and read the legality section first.

Best for: cheap, large, occasional extractions.

5. SerpApi: Best Real-Time Maps Results

SerpApi 8.2/10: live Google Maps results as clean JSON, with lawyers on retainer.

Pricing: search quotas: $25/mo for 1,000 searches, $75/mo for 5,000, $150/mo for 15,000, plus a small free allowance.

+ 88% usable-record rate, second only to Google itself, because it IS Google’s live index.
+ Ratings, reviews, photos, and popular-times data parsed for you.
+ A U.S. Legal Shield program that indemnifies scraping-related claims up to $2M on paid plans.
– Per-search pricing climbs fast on full-coverage crawls of a big metro.
– Hourly throughput caps meter how fast big jobs finish.

Each search returns up to 20 places, so dense queries are the trick to good per-record economics. For monitoring jobs, it was the most pleasant tool in the test.

Best for: real-time lookups and listing monitoring.

6. ScrapingDog: Cheapest Bulk Requests

ScrapingDog 8.1/10: the budget answer, if you bring your own pipeline.

Pricing: from $40/mo (Lite, 200,000 credits), 200 free credits to start. Maps requests cost 5 credits, so Lite covers about 40,000 requests.

+ The cheapest bulk Maps scraping in the test by a wide margin.
+ 85% liveness, since results come from the live index.
+ One credit pool spans all their APIs (SERP, LinkedIn, and more).
– Fewer parsed fields than Outscraper or Apify; you build pagination, dedupe, and storage.
– Same scraping gray zone as the rest of this group.

Full transparency: we use ScrapingDog ourselves at CUFinder for SERP research. The price is unbeatable. The polish is not the point.

Best for: high-volume request budgets and DIY pipelines.

7. Apify Google Maps Scraper: Best for Scraping Workflows

Apify 7.9/10: scraping with scheduling, storage, and a no-code face.

Pricing: from $1.50/1K scraped places, pay per result, free trial credits. Extra detail fields bill as add-ons.

+ 4.7/5 from 1,800+ reviews on the actor, and it earns it: scheduling, monitoring, and integrations included.
+ Rich output: hours, ratings, review counts, images, plus contact add-ons (24% of our records).
– Add-on billing surprises; the advertised $1.50 grows as you switch on fields.
– Single-URL scrapes cap around 120 results, so location strategy matters.

My scheduled Manchester run just kept working for three weeks, which is the nicest thing you can say about a scraper.

Best for: recurring scrapes with light engineering.

8. Geoapify: Best Free Tier

Geoapify 7.6/10: the honest free lunch, with OSM’s limits attached.

Pricing: free at 3,000 credits/day (commercial use allowed with attribution), then $109/mo for 25,000/day and $299/mo for 100,000/day.

+ A real free tier you can ship on, not a 14-day teaser.
+ Clean docs, quick start, sane credit math.
– OpenStreetMap-based freshness: 74% liveness in our test, the lowest of the ten.
– Many records lack phones, and none carry emails.

In Berlin, Geoapify listed a dentist that’s been a nail salon since 2024. Not Geoapify’s fault, just OSM edit lag. Budget a verification pass.

Best for: free-tier prototyping and attribution-friendly projects.

9. TomTom: Best for EU Display and Routing Stacks

TomTom 7.5/10: a serious European alternative for the display half of the problem.

Pricing: freemium per API, published EUR rate cards: 5,000 free Discover calls, 10,000 Suggest, 20,000 geocoding monthly, then volume steps.

+ Generous per-API free tiers, no credit card required.
+ Strong geocoding and routing; a real Google substitute for job one.
– POI attributes are thinner for B2B: 78% liveness, no outreach fields.
– EUR volume pricing takes math to compare against USD rivals.

Best for: European display and routing stacks that occasionally need places.

10. Yelp Places API: Best Ratings and Reviews Depth (US)

Yelp Places API 7.2/10: unmatched review richness, frustrating packaging.

Pricing: not published. Base, Enhanced, and Premium attribute tiers via a sales flow, a 300-calls-per-day starter trial, and a 150,000-calls-per-month cap before Enterprise.

+ Up to 66 attributes on Premium, including review excerpts and 12 photos per business.
+ 81% liveness overall, with Austin notably strong.
– Berlin was thin in our test; international coverage trails badly.
– Unpublished pricing lands it in our fixed 5.5 transparency band.

Best for: US apps that live and die on review content.

How to Choose the Right Google Maps API Alternative

Match the API to the job, then to the budget. The short version by situation:

If you’re building a customer-facing map

Stay with Google Places or TomTom. Free per-SKU calls cover most small apps, the licensing fits display, and users know the experience. This is the job Google prices fairly.

If you’re building a sales list from local businesses

Start with CUFinder, because storable emails and phones are the entire game. When those records later need employee counts or revenue bands, extend them with a firmographic source from our best company data APIs comparison.

If you need one-off bulk exports

Outscraper or Apify. Pay per record, get a spreadsheet, move on. Just verify the numbers before anyone dials; our best phone number APIs comparison covers that side.

If you’re on a zero budget

Geoapify’s 3,000 daily credits are real and commercial-friendly. Accept the freshness gap, and clean what you collect. Address quality goes first, so an address validation API is the cheapest fix in that stack.

If you need reviews and ratings data

Google’s Enterprise + Atmosphere SKUs or SerpApi deliver it, and Yelp goes deepest in the US. Mind the storage terms in every case.

Can You Legally Scrape Google Maps?

Courts have generally not treated scraping public data as a crime, but Google’s terms forbid it, so the risk is contractual and it sits with you.

Here’s the landscape in plain words. The hiQ v. LinkedIn litigation pushed back on the idea that scraping public data violates hacking law. But it never rewrote anyone’s terms of service. Google’s terms, quoted above, ban scraping and caching, and accounts get closed over it. Scraper vendors argue they only touch public data, and some, like SerpApi, sell legal indemnification. Both things can be true at once.

So the practical read: occasional research pulls are a judgment call many teams accept. A product built on scraped Google data carries real contractual risk. Licensed local business data APIs make that question boring. I’m a marketer, not your lawyer. At scale, ask a real one.

How to Pull Local Business Data with CUFinder in 5 Steps

Zero to a stored, contact-ready local business list in about ten minutes:

Create a free account and copy your x-api-key from the dashboard. The 15 trial credits need no card.
POST to /v3/local-businesses/search with a two-field JSON body: {“country”: “germany”, “industry”: “dentists”}.
Read back businesses with phones, emails, ratings, social profiles, and NAICS codes, each carrying 95% confidence scores.
Filter and dedupe in your pipeline. Country plus industry is the input granularity, so city-level slicing happens on your side.
Push the file to your CRM, or run it through enrichment for firmographics. Storage is what the license is FOR here.

One honest note, again: hyper-local long-tail coverage has limits, and misses happen. But Not Found rows never cost a credit, so testing your niche is free by design.

🧠 Fun Fact: Foursquare open-sourced roughly 100 million places as the FSQ OS Places dataset in late 2024. Data that once cost enterprise money is now a free download. The catch? You become the data engineer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a free API for Google Maps?

Yes, Google gives free monthly calls per SKU: 10,000 on Essentials, 5,000 on Pro, 1,000 on Enterprise. Past the caps, the meter runs. For a fully free route, Geoapify gives 3,000 credits daily.

Is the Google Maps API still free?

Partly. The old $200 monthly credit ended in March 2025, replaced by per-SKU free calls plus a $300 new-customer trial. Small display apps often stay free. Data-heavy workloads do not.

How much does the Google Maps API cost?

Between $5 and $40 per 1,000 calls, depending on the SKU. Place Details Essentials runs $5/1K, Details Pro $17/1K, Text Search Pro $32/1K, and Enterprise + Atmosphere SKUs reach $40/1K, with volume discounts past 100,000 calls.

What is the best free alternative to the Google Places API?

Geoapify, for a working free tier with commercial use allowed. Foursquare’s 500 free calls plus its open FSQ OS Places download come second. Both trade away freshness, so verify first.

Is it legal to scrape data from Google Maps?

Scraping public data is generally not a crime, but it breaches Google’s terms. The exposure is contractual: account bans and legal pressure. Licensed data APIs avoid the question entirely. Not legal advice.

Which Google Maps scraper API is best?

Outscraper for cheap records, SerpApi for real-time results with legal cover, ScrapingDog for the lowest bulk request price, and Apify for scheduled workflows. Pick by whether you need batches, live lookups, or automation.

What is a local business data API?

It’s an endpoint that returns structured records about local businesses: names, categories, phones, websites, sometimes emails. Unlike a maps display API, the data is licensed for you to store, enrich, and act on.

Can I store Google Places data in my CRM?

No. Google’s terms forbid exporting, caching, or storing Maps content, including business names and addresses. Licensed local business data APIs exist for exactly that job. My 2021 legal-review rebuild taught me this the slow way.

Can I use OpenStreetMap data for a commercial project?

Yes. OSM data is free under the ODbL license, with attribution and share-alike duties. Quality varies block by block, though. Providers like Geoapify wrap it in a supported API, which is usually worth it.

How hard is it to migrate off the Google Maps API?

Display migration means swapping SDKs and re-testing UI, typically weeks. Data migration is easier: re-source records from a licensed API and re-map fields. Run a 100-record parallel test, and the decision makes itself.

References and Sources

Every price above was checked in August 2026 against these pages. Vendors change plans faster than articles change, so click through before you buy.

Google Maps Platform core services pricing list. developers.google.com
Google Maps Platform pricing overview and March 2025 free-calls change. mapsplatform.google.com
Google Maps Platform Terms of Service (scraping and caching clauses). cloud.google.com
Foursquare Places API pricing. foursquare.com
Geoapify API pricing. geoapify.com
Outscraper Google Maps scraper pricing. outscraper.com
SerpApi plans and pricing. serpapi.com
ScrapingDog pricing and per-API credit costs. scrapingdog.com

Pick the API for the Job, Not the Logo

Listen. You don’t need the most famous maps API. You need the one whose data, license, and bill fit YOUR job.

So do the boring thing that wins. Pull 100 listings in your city and category from your top two picks. Call ten businesses from each list. Check the price math at your real volume, and read the storage terms. Two afternoons, one clear winner.

You’ve got this. The expensive mistake isn’t picking the wrong API. It’s building for six months on the wrong license. I did that version so you don’t have to.

Want the storable version of local business data? Run one industry through the Local Business Search API on free credits and see what comes back. And for the wider stack, our API comparison guides cover every category, one honest test at a time.