How it works
Leaflet handles the essentials: panning and zooming, markers, popups, lines, polygons and GeoJSON layers, on desktop and touch screens. It fetches square image tiles from whichever tile server you name, so it has no map data or account of its own. Hundreds of plugins add marker clustering, heatmaps, drawing tools, search boxes and routing, and react-leaflet wraps it for React apps.
It is deliberately simple and weighs only a few dozen kilobytes. The trade-off is that it mainly shows raster tiles without WebGL, so smooth rotation, 3D and restyling a vector map in the browser are out of reach without plugins; MapLibre GL JS is the open-source option for those. The tiles are the part that can cost money: the public OpenStreetMap servers are for light use only, so production sites usually use a tile provider such as MapTiler, Stadia Maps or Thunderforest, or serve their own.
Leaflet pros and cons
Pros
- Free and open source, with no account or key for the library
- Small, quick to load and simple to learn
- Works with any tile provider, so switching is a one-line change
- Large plugin ecosystem for clustering, drawing and heatmaps
Cons
- No built-in search, geocoding or directions
- Raster tiles cannot be restyled in the browser like vector maps
- No 3D, tilt or smooth rotation out of the box
When to use Leaflet
Pick it when
- A store locator, delivery area or contact-page map
- Budgets that rule out per-load map fees
- Showing GeoJSON data, such as zones or routes, on a simple map
Skip it when
- Native mobile apps, which need a native map SDK
- Vector styling, 3D or very large datasets (look at MapLibre or Mapbox)
Leaflet pricing
Open source
Free (BSD 2-Clause). Tiles come from a separate provider, which may charge for heavier use.
Approximate, checked September 2026.What the other tools cost
Leaflet vs the alternatives
Related terms
More in Maps and location
Map providers