OpenStreetMap APIs (Overpass + Nominatim)
Open-source, community-maintained world map with a suite of free APIs. Overpass API enables complex geospatial queries against OSM data (find all hospitals within a bounding box, get all cycleways in a city). Nominatim provides geocoding (address to coordinates) and reverse geocoding (coordinates to address). The main OSM API allows reading and editing map data.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
No API keys means no secret management burden. All data is public by design — no user PII is stored in queries to public servers. OSM editing API uses OAuth2. Self-hosted instances are fully under operator control. The lack of auth means no per-client tracking or rate enforcement.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You need free, open geospatial data without licensing restrictions, are building open-source applications, or need to query for specific map features that commercial geocoding APIs do not expose.
Avoid When
You need guaranteed uptime, fast latency, address data accuracy competitive with Google Maps, or global completeness — OSM data quality varies significantly by region.
Use Cases
- • Geocoding addresses to coordinates and reverse geocoding coordinates to human-readable addresses without per-request costs
- • Querying for specific map features (restaurants, parks, transit stops, road types) within geographic regions using Overpass QL
- • Building applications on top of open map data without commercial licensing constraints or per-tile fees
- • Extracting bulk geographic datasets for analysis — e.g., all fire hydrants in a city, all post codes in a country
- • Self-hosting a geocoding stack using Nominatim on your own infrastructure for high-volume or private use
Not For
- • Applications requiring SLA guarantees — public Overpass and Nominatim servers are community-operated with no uptime commitment
- • Commercial applications with high query volumes using the public servers (usage policy requires self-hosting at scale)
- • Real-time traffic, satellite imagery, or business data — OSM is community-maintained and may lack completeness in sparse regions
Interface
Authentication
Nominatim and Overpass public servers require no API key but enforce strict usage policies — a valid `User-Agent` and `email` query parameter are required by policy for Nominatim. The OSM editing API requires OAuth2 for write operations. Commercial Overpass providers (Overpass Turbo, others) may offer authenticated tiers with higher rate limits.
Pricing
Public servers are donation-funded. Usage policy explicitly prohibits bulk geocoding, automated heavy usage, and commercial applications without self-hosting. For commercial use at scale, run your own Nominatim instance or use a commercial provider like OpenCage or Geocodio that wraps OSM data with an SLA.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Nominatim returns an empty array `[]` for addresses it cannot geocode — agents expecting a 404 or error response for failed geocoding will silently treat 'not found' as success and must explicitly check array length
- ⚠ Overpass QL query complexity and data size are the primary rate-limiting factors — a query for all roads in a large country can time out on the public server even if below the per-second request limit; structure queries with bounding boxes and area filters
- ⚠ OSM data uses the ODbL license — any public-facing product that uses OSM data must attribute OpenStreetMap contributors and, if the data is modified and distributed, must also publish the modifications under ODbL; commercial use without proper attribution violates the license
- ⚠ Nominatim geocoding quality is highly uneven globally — US and Western European addresses are generally good, but addresses in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and rural areas may fail or return centroid-level results for entire villages
- ⚠ The Overpass API endpoint `overpass-api.de` and `overpass.kumi.systems` are community-operated and can be down for maintenance without warning — production agents should implement fallback to an alternative instance or self-hosted deployment
- ⚠ OSM node/way/relation IDs are not stable across the planet dump refresh — the same physical location may have a different OSM ID after major edits; do not use OSM IDs as stable identifiers in your data model
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
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Package Brief
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.