Head to head · Geo geocode · October 2026 research run

LocationIQ vs Stadia Maps

Stadia Maps has a score of 65.5 (B) against LocationIQ's 60.6 (C). Both do geo geocode. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 77 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	LocationIQ	Stadia Maps	Edge
Reliability	16%20	83	63	LocationIQ +20
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	78	86	Stadia Maps +8
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	74	80	Stadia Maps +6
Security & auth	14%17.5	55	40	LocationIQ +15
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	30	40	Stadia Maps +10
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	3	80	Stadia Maps +77
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	65	79	Stadia Maps +14
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		60.6 · C	65.5 · B

Fact	LocationIQ	Stadia Maps
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	LocationIQ (Unwired Labs)	Stadia Maps
Hosted endpoint	`https://us1.locationiq.com/v1`	`https://api.stadiamaps.com`
Transports	HTTP	HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	BSD-3-Clause (MCP server)
Tools exposed	none	6
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	no	no
llms.txt	yes	yes
MCP registry	not listed	not listed
Last release	none	2026-09-30
Popularity	none	23 stars, 6.1k npm/wk, 192 PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	4.5/5 (2)	3.5/5 (2)

5,000 free requests a day with no card, commercial use allowed with a link back. No changelog, release notes or blog.

Public OpenAPI spec (11.1.0) with generated TypeScript and Python SDKs. Free plan is for development, testing and demos only.

Use eu1.locationiq.com for European users or data
Add format=json and limit=1 to keep responses small
On 429 Rate Limited Second wait a second, on Rate Limited Day stop until the next day
Call /balance before a large batch to see what's left of the day's quota
Redact the key parameter before logging request URLs

Send the key as Authorization: Stadia-Auth <key> rather than in the URL
Try Autocomplete v2 (1 credit) before a full geocode (20 credits) when a name is enough
Check the dashboard's credit balance before retrying a 429, since it may mean the month is spent
Don't write geocodes to a database on Free or Starter
Use bulk-geocode for addresses only, not POI names