This post compares the pros and cons of two popular mapping services, Cesium and Mapbox, to help you choose the service best for you.

When looking toward integrating 3D maps or elements into your application, Cesium and Mapbox are good options.

The purpose of this article is to explain and give a crucial comparison between these two popular mapping services based on the following key elements:

• Customization options
• API’s and SDK’s
• Look and feel

We’ll also look more generally at the pros and cons of each mapping service.

What is Cesium?

Cesium provides a fast, simple, end-to-end platform for tiling, visualizing, sharing, and analyzing 3D geospatial data.

Cesium helps to transform massive and diverse 3D geospatial data into streamable 3D content that’s ready to be used in your application and in any other environment.

Cesium Pros

Globe view support

Cesium provides support for representations of the Earth in a 3D globe view model. It gives you the ability to freely move around in the virtual environment by changing the viewing angle and position. One additional capability of globe view is that it allows you to represent many different views of the surface of the Earth.

Fully 3D

Unlike Mapbox, Cesium is fully 3D out of the box. This allows for the rotation and visualization of objects from multiple perspectives. This makes the experience of implementing and compositing 3D objects in mapping services even more seamless.

3D data tiling and streaming

Cesium provides 3D tiling, which transforms massive and diverse 3D geospatial data into streamable 3D content ready to be used in your application. You could also arrange and bring together data from multiple sources to visualize it as one.

Generous free trial option and flexible pricing plans

At the time of writing this article, Cesium provides a community (or free tier) plan of up to 15 GB/month for data streaming, unlimited apps, end users, and 5 GB storage space to host and share your 3D contents. This option is suitable for non-commercial projects.

Cesium Cons

Relatively larger SDK size

Compared to Mapbox, Cesium has a relatively larger SDK size, with the latest unpacked version of Cesium.js, (released Oct 01 2020), weighing up to 79.4 MB.

Incomplete building information

Unlike Mapbox, Cesium does not provide building information (more on this under the look and feel section).

Slower response time

Cesium has a slow response time, with an update upon interacting with the globe view loading at around +3sec on a stable 7.2Mbps Internet connection.

How about Mapbox?

Mapbox, on the other hand, helps developers build better mapping, navigation, and search experiences across different platforms.

Unlike Cesium, Mapbox provides vast mapping services outside of 3D mapping, some of which include:

• Augmented reality navigation
• Automotive (driving experience)

Mapbox Pros

Choose between different map styles

Mapbox provides several map styles that can either be used directly in your application or as a starting point for creating a new custom style in Mapbox Studio.

Generous free trial

Mapbox also offers a generous free tier, with up to 50,000/month free map loads for web and up to 25,000 monthly active users for their mobile SDKs.

Faster load/ update time

On a sample 3D building display test, Mapbox seems to update the map faster than Cesium. It loads at a little less than 2 seconds while under a stable 7.2Mbps internet connection.

Mapbox provides building information

Unlike Cesium, Mapbox provides support for 3D buildings information (more on this under the look and feel section).

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