Amazon Location Service vs Azure Maps

Amazon Location Service

Places, Routes and Maps calls work over plain HTTPS with an API key limited to named actions, and every one of the 17 operations is read-only with typed inputs. Access starts with an AWS account a person opens, the key travels in the URL query string, and stored results cost eight times the single-use rate.

Azure Maps

Azure Maps publishes OpenAPI documents for every service, per-service rate limits, a 99.9 per cent SLA and written rules on storing results, and Entra ID roles can limit a caller to one service. Place search exists only in Search 1.0, which the newer version has superseded, and the REST client libraries are all beta.

Amazon Location Service

1. Call the v2 endpoints (places.geo.<region>.amazonaws.com/v2/geocode, routes.geo, maps.geo). They need no resource creation, unlike the v1 place index and route calculator calls
2. Set IntendedUse to Storage before saving or caching any Places result. The default SingleUse results may not be stored under section 82.4 of the AWS Service Terms
3. Read PricingBucket in each response. Requesting Contact, Access, TimeZone or Phonemes in AdditionalFeatures moves a Places call from $0.50 to $1.50 per 1,000
4. Keep the API key out of logs and shared URLs, since it travels as ?key=. Use SigV4 with an IAM role for server-side work, and for the Jobs API, which refuses API keys
5. Back off on HTTP 429 ThrottlingException. The burst allowance is 80 per cent of the per-second rate within any part of a second

Azure Maps

1. Send the key in the subscription-key header, or use Authorization: Bearer with x-ms-client-id. The key also works as a URL parameter, which leaks into logs.
2. Call GET /geocode?api-version=2026-01-01 for addresses. It can return 200 with no results, so check confidence, matchCodes and the entity type before use.
3. Use Search 1.0 (/search/poi/json, /search/nearby/json, /search/fuzzy/json) for places. The 2026-01-01 version has no place search.
4. Use eu.atlas.microsoft.com or us.atlas.microsoft.com to keep request data in that geography.
5. Don't store route or tile results beyond six months, and never for serving several users. The product terms allow keeping geocodes while the account is active.