Best Google Maps APIs in 2026: 8 Tested and Compared

Quick Answer: Best Google Maps APIs at a Glance

Prices are what each provider published on September 5, 2026, monthly billing. "Per 1K places" is the cost of 1,000 businesses returned by a local search on the entry paid plan, assuming the 20 results per page that Google Maps serves (100 for DataForSEO). Per-request providers are divided by 20; per-record providers are quoted as is.

The official route gets its own section below: Google Places API (New), billed per SKU from $32 per 1,000 Text Search Pro requests, with reviews only at the $25 per 1,000 Enterprise + Atmosphere tier of Place Details.

Same Query, Five Different Top Results

What each provider returned for "coffee shops in New York" on September 5, 2026, from the exact code shown in each section below. Bright Data is listed for the place lookup it does synchronously.

Same query text, five different top results. Google Maps ranks by map viewport, and each provider centers that viewport somewhere different when you give it only a text query: OpenWeb Ninja's response echoes default coordinates in the middle of the US at zoom 13, DataForSEO's check_url shows the same centroid at zoom 4, SerpApi used the Manhattan coordinates we passed, and Apify placed itself inside the New York location polygon. None of these is wrong; Google resolves "in New York" from the query text and then ranks by distance and prominence from wherever the map sits. If you need a reproducible list, pass latitude, longitude, and zoom explicitly on every provider that accepts them, or use a radius or bounding-box endpoint.

Best for: teams already on SerpApi who want Maps search, place, reviews, photos, and autocomplete on one account

SerpApi's Google Maps API is one google_maps engine with type=search or type=place, plus separate google_maps_reviews, google_maps_photos, and google_maps_autocomplete engines. The ll parameter (latitude, longitude, zoom) is optional and applies only to searches; pagination is a start offset in steps of 20, and the docs recommend stopping at 100. Reviews take num from 1 to 20 (default 10) and a next_page_token; photos return 20 per page.

Every engine costs one search. The free plan is 250 searches a month at 50 an hour. Starter is $25 for 1,000 searches (200 an hour), Developer $75 for 5,000, Production $150 for 15,000, Big Data $275 for 30,000, Searcher $725 for 100,000, and the ladder continues to $106,050 for 54 million. Only successful searches count; cached, errored, and failed searches do not, and a response with 100 results and an empty result set both count as one.

Python example: local search

Response (trimmed)

20 results, 30 fields on the first result, with ready-made reviews_link and place_id_search URLs for the follow-up calls. The place lookup returned 35 fields including hours, popular times, images, and a sample of user reviews. Search median 1.6 seconds, though two of the five searches took 8.9 and 11.6 seconds; place lookups were the fastest in the test at 0.75 seconds median, one of them a 0.18-second cache hit on a place we had fetched minutes earlier. Reviews came back 8 to a first page with rating, date, snippet, likes, and user profile.

Best for: the lowest cost per place, with 100 results per task and a queue for bulk jobs

DataForSEO splits Google Maps across two products. The SERP API's serp/google/maps endpoint returns the Maps result list and is billed per SERP page of up to 100 results: $0.0006 on the Standard queue, $0.0012 Priority, $0.002 Live, with a documented depth up to 700. The Business Data API adds Google My Business Info ($0.0015 Standard, $0.0054 Live per profile), Google Reviews ($0.00075 per 10 reviews on Standard, $0.0015 Priority, depth up to 4,490), GMB Updates for owner posts ($0.0015 per task plus $0.00075 per 10 updates), and Google Q&A. Pricing is pay as you go with a $50 minimum payment; we found no free tier listed.

Python example: Maps SERP, Live mode

Response (trimmed)

100 places for $0.002, 32 fields on the first result, and the only provider that returns hours as a numeric timetable rather than a display string. The rating histogram, claimed flag, borough-level address, and CID are all in the search result. The GMB Info lookup returned 42 fields including attributes, popular times, and a Q&A count; the Google Reviews endpoint is queue-based (post the task, poll for the result), and our 10-review task completed in under 90 seconds with 25 fields per review including an owner-answer field. Live search median 3.8 seconds, GMB Info 3.3 seconds.

Best for: a simple three-endpoint Maps API that stores the HTML and JSON of every request

HasData exposes GET /scrape/google-maps/search (q, optional ll, and a start offset that requires ll), /scrape/google-maps/place by placeId, and /scrape/google-maps/reviews by dataId or placeId, all with an x-api-key header. We found no photos endpoint. Each successful request costs 5 credits and failed requests are free.

The free plan is 1,000 credits a month (200 Maps requests, concurrency 1). Startup is $49 for 200,000 credits ($1.23 per 1,000 Maps requests, concurrency 5), Basic $99 for 1 million ($0.50, concurrency 15), Growth $208 for 3 million ($0.35, concurrency 50), and Enterprise is custom from 20 million credits.

Python example: local search

Response (trimmed)

20 results, 19 fields on the first result: the slimmest record in the test. The first result had no phone or website; across the page, 13 of 20 carried a phone and 16 a website (the place endpoint returned 22 fields including website, user reviews, and images). Every response links to the stored HTML and JSON of the request. Reviews came 8 to a page with 9 fields and no owner-response field. Search median 2.1 seconds, place lookups 3.1 seconds with two of five at 10 seconds.

Best for: the largest free tier and per-record billing on asynchronous bulk collection

Bright Data lists six Google Maps scrapers: full information by URL, discover records by location search, collect by place ID, discover by customer ID, Google Maps reviews, and Google Maps images. All bill per record: the free tier is 5,000 records a month with no card, pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000 records, and Scale is $499 a month for 384,000 records with $1.30 per 1,000 beyond. You pay only for successful records.

Calls go through /datasets/v3/scrape, which waits up to about 60 seconds for a synchronous answer and otherwise returns a 202 with a snapshot ID to poll. In our tests, place-URL lookups on the "Google Maps full information" dataset (gd_m8ebnr0q2qlklc02fz) completed synchronously four times out of five, in 14 to 40 seconds; keyword discovery runs as an asynchronous snapshot, which is why Bright Data sits out the search bench.

Python example: place by URL

Response (trimmed)

One record, 38 fields, including popular times by hour, the "people also search" carousel with ratings, a review histogram, claimed status, and every Google identifier. Phone number was null for this bakery on Bright Data while OpenWeb Ninja also returned null for it, so that is the listing, not the scraper. Median 38.5 seconds across the four synchronous lookups.

Measured Response Time (Same 5 Searches, Same 5 Places):

Wall-clock seconds from a single client on September 5, 2026, one request per query, no retries. Search: "coffee shops in New York", "dentists in Austin TX", "plumbers in Chicago", "italian restaurants in Boston", "gyms in Denver". Details: the first result of each search, by Google place ID. Small sample; use it as a rough ordering.

The Official Route: Google Places API (New)

Google's own Places API (New) is the compliance-safe option and, for some field sets, competitive on price. This section is built from Google's published pricing and documentation as read on September 5, 2026; we did not run it in this comparison. It requires a Google Cloud project with billing enabled, and every request must carry a field mask: the Text Search documentation states that "If you omit the field mask, the method returns an error."

Pricing is per request, in tiers by the fields you ask for, and the usage-and-billing page is explicit: "You are then billed at the highest SKU applicable to your request. That means if you select fields in both the Essentials and the Pro SKUs, you are billed based on the Pro SKU." For Place Details, Essentials covers address, location, and types; Pro adds display name, business status, and Maps URI; Enterprise adds phone numbers, rating, review count, website, opening hours, and price level; Enterprise + Atmosphere adds reviews, editorial and generative summaries, and amenities. Since March 1, 2025, per-SKU monthly free caps replace the old $200 credit, and volume discounts apply automatically.

USD per 1,000 requests, from Google's Maps Platform pricing table as rendered on September 5, 2026. Additional discounts above 10 million events a month are negotiated.

Result limits are tighter than the scrapers. Text Search returns at most 20 results per page and, per the documentation, "a maximum of 60 results across all pages, although this limit is subject to change." Nearby Search takes a maxResultCount between 1 and 20 with no pagination. Reviews are not an endpoint; they are a Place Details field in the Enterprise + Atmosphere SKU, so $25 per 1,000 requests buys the handful Google chooses to show. There is no owner-posts, bulk-area, or contact-enrichment capability.

Where it wins: a Text Search Pro request that returns 20 places costs $1.60 per 1,000 places up to 100,000 requests a month, in line with OpenWeb Ninja and SerpApi at entry, and the free caps (5,000 Pro searches, 10,000 Essentials details, 10,000 autocomplete requests a month) are generous for a small app. Where it loses: phone, hours, rating, and website push every search to the $35 Enterprise SKU, reviews push details to $25, and the 60-result ceiling rules out the area sweeps that lead-generation and local-SEO work depend on.

Pricing Sources

All pages read on September 5, 2026. JavaScript-rendered pricing tables were loaded in a browser before reading. Prices change; check the source before you commit.

• OpenWeb Ninja Local Business Data: openwebninja.com/api/local-business-data (plans, per-object billing FAQ). Endpoint list from the API's OpenAPI specification.
• SerpApi: serpapi.com/pricing, serpapi.com/google-maps-api, serpapi.com/google-maps-reviews-api
• SearchAPI: searchapi.io/pricing, searchapi.io/docs/google-maps, searchapi.io/docs/google-maps-reviews
• DataForSEO: dataforseo.com/pricing/google-serp/google-maps-serp-api, dataforseo.com/pricing/business-data/business-data-api, dataforseo.com/pricing/business-data/google-reviews-api, docs.dataforseo.com/v3/serp/google/maps/live/advanced
• Scrapingdog: scrapingdog.com/pricing (5 credits per Google Maps request), scrapingdog.com/documentation/google-maps-api
• HasData: hasdata.com/pricing, docs.hasdata.com/apis/google-maps/search (5 credits per request)
• Apify: apify.com/compass/crawler-google-places/pricing, apify.com/compass/google-maps-reviews-scraper/pricing, apify.com/pricing
• Bright Data: brightdata.com/products/web-scraper/google-maps, brightdata.com/pricing/web-scraper
• Google Places API (New): developers.google.com/maps/billing-and-pricing/pricing, developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/web-service/usage-and-billing, developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/web-service/text-search