HERE Geocoding & Search vs Overture Maps Places for AI agents
HERE Geocoding & Search is HERE's location search API family (Discover/Search, Autosuggest, Geocode, Reverse Geocode) for finding addresses and places/POIs. Overture Maps Places is an open, monthly-released dataset of places (points of interest), downloadable as Parquet files. It is not an API.
The short answer
- HERE Geocoding & Search: Cheap per-call POI and address search with a free monthly tier. Good when results stay inside an app and are not fed to AI systems.
- Overture Maps Places: A free, permissively licensed global POI base you can store, index and serve yourself. Not live data, and with no hours, ratings or reviews.
Side by side
| HERE Geocoding & Search | Overture Maps Places | |
|---|---|---|
| Searches | Addresses, places/POIs, EV charge points and third-party data such as Tripadvisor, searchable by free text or along routes. | Nothing to call. You download or query the files yourself, for example with DuckDB. It contains tens of millions of places such as schools, businesses, hospitals and landmarks. |
| Returns | JSON with an items array. Only title, id, resultType and position are guaranteed. Place results can add address, categories, contacts (phone, www, email) and openingHours. | GeoParquet place records with names, addresses, taxonomy and basic_category (which replaced categories in September 2026), phones, websites, socials, a 0–1 confidence score and source info. |
| Before the first call | A HERE platform account on the Base Plan, which requires entering a payment method at sign-up (since 2025), plus an app ID and API key. | Nothing: no account or key. Read from public Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage. |
| Free | 5,000 Discover/Search transactions a month on the Base Plan (30,000 for Geocode and Autocomplete). | No key needed, and its pages state no price |
| Paid | Discover/Search: EUR 2.33 per 1,000 (5,001 to 200,000), then EUR 1.87 per 1,000 up to 1,000,000. | Not stated on its pages |
| Acting on a result | Place results can include phone, website and email contacts. There is no way to message a business through the API. | Records can include phones, websites and social links. There is no messaging; it is static data. |
| Limits on keeping or showing results | The Platform Terms bar caching or storing Results outside the Platform for more than 30 days (24 hours for Japan and Positioning). The Base Plan also excludes asset-tracking use cases. | You can store and reuse it. Licensed CDLA Permissive 2.0 or Apache 2.0 depending on source (Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and others); some sources need their own attribution. Does not include OpenStreetMap data. |
| AI in its terms | Restrictive. Unless your plan or a separate agreement allows it, the Platform Terms (6.3 f) forbid using HERE Materials "in connection with a machine learning or artificial intelligence (“AI”) system," including generative AI. | Not stated on its pages |
| Coverage | Not stated on the pages read. Searches can be limited to countries by ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code. | Global. Release 2026-09-23.1, published monthly. |
| MCP server | HERE Location Reasoning, an MCP server at https://hlr.here.ai/mcp (docs: https://docs.here.com/location-reasoning/docs/hlroverview). Access terms and pricing for it were not confirmed. | No official server listed |
Where Openpath fits
If the agent needs a local business to message in Austin, Texas, Openpath returns the listings themselves, free and with no key. See Openpath vs HERE Geocoding & Search and Openpath vs Overture Maps Places.
Questions people ask
What do I need before I can use HERE Geocoding & Search?
A HERE platform account on the Base Plan, which requires entering a payment method at sign-up (since 2025), plus an app ID and API key.
Is HERE Geocoding & Search free?
5,000 Discover/Search transactions a month on the Base Plan (30,000 for Geocode and Autocomplete).
What do I need before I can use Overture Maps Places?
Nothing: no account or key. Read from public Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage.
Is Overture Maps Places free?
No key needed, and its pages state no price.
Sources
Every line about another company comes from its own pages. Prices and terms change, so check the source before you rely on one.
HERE Geocoding & Search, read on October 15, 2026:
- here.com/get-started/pricing: “Discover / Search pricing Monthly Transactions Cost per 1,000 0 to 5,000 Free 5,001 to 200,000 €2.33”
- here.com/get-started/pricing: “200,001 to 1,000,000 €1.87 1,000,001+ Contact us 1 Transaction is counted for every Request.”
- here.com/get-started/pricing: “Discover addresses, Places/POIs, EV charge points, truck-specific attributes and 3rd party data like Tripadvisor”
- here.com/learn/blog/april-2025-platform-release-notes: “The Base plan requires entering a payment method during the onboarding process to access our platform.”
- docs.here.com/geocoding-and-search/docs/discover: “Only title, id, resultType, position can be expected for all results.”
- legal.here.com/en-gb/terms/here-platform-terms: “for more than 30 days, except HERE Positioning services which cannot be cached or stored outside the Platform for more than 24 hours”
- legal.here.com/en-gb/terms/here-platform-terms: “Use HERE Materials in connection with a machine learning or artificial intelligence (“AI”) system”
- legal.here.com/en-gb/terms/here-platform-terms: “Except as otherwise permitted in your Subscription Plan or separate agreement with HERE, you may not:”
- here.com/get-started/pricing/base-plan-restrictions: “The following use cases are excluded from the Base Plan.”
- docs.here.com/location-reasoning/docs/hlroverview: “HERE Location Reasoning is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server”
- docs.here.com/location-reasoning/docs/hlroverview: “The HERE Location Reasoning MCP server is available at: https://hlr.here.ai/mcp”
Overture Maps Places, read on October 15, 2026:
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “The Overture places theme contains tens of millions of point representations of real-world entities”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “Places is published under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses, depending on the source.”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “The theme does not include OpenStreetMap data.”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-09-23.1/theme=places/type=place/*”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “The categories property has been removed from the places schema as of the September 2026 release”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “confidence , CAST ( websites AS JSON ) AS websites , CAST ( socials AS JSON ) AS socials”
- docs.overturemaps.org/attribution: “Some of the data sources we use in Overture datasets require their own attribution, according to their licenses.”
- docs.overturemaps.org/attribution: “Data from Meta . Available under CDLA Permissive 2.0 .”