OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass) vs Overture Maps Places for AI agents
Free, donation-run public servers for searching OpenStreetMap data: Nominatim for geocoding and place search, Overpass for querying OSM objects. 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
- OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass): Free, openly licensed geocoding and occasional place lookups at low volume, or a base to self-host. It is not a backend for a public app at scale.
- 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
| OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass) | Overture Maps Places | |
|---|---|---|
| Searches | OpenStreetMap data worldwide: addresses, places and mapped POIs. | 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 | Nominatim returns xml, json, jsonv2 (the default), geojson or geocodejson. With extratags=1 it adds extra tags such as opening hours or a wikipedia link when mapped. | 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 | No account or key. Nominatim requires a valid User-Agent or Referer that identifies your app, and visible attribution. | Nothing: no account or key. Read from public Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage. |
| Free | Free within strict limits. Nominatim allows an absolute maximum of 1 request per second. Overpass asks users to stay at or below roughly 10,000 requests and 1 GB a day. | No key needed, and its pages state no price |
| Paid | No paid tier. Heavy users are told to run their own instance or use commercial third-party providers. | Not stated on its pages |
| Acting on a result | Phone or website appear only when mappers tagged them in OSM, through Nominatim's extratags. There is no messaging. | Records can include phones, websites and social links. There is no messaging; it is static data. |
| Limits on keeping or showing results | Data is ODbL (share-alike), and you must credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. Nominatim requires results to be cached for bulk jobs. It bans systematic queries, downloading all POIs in an area, autocomplete, and reselling results. | 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 | Nominatim's policy has a "Usage in LLMs" section. LLMs may only suggest the service if they prominently point to the usage policy. The public API must not be built into or offered through no-code, low-code or vibe-coding platforms as a generic place-search service. | Not stated on its pages |
| Coverage | Worldwide OpenStreetMap data. POI completeness depends on volunteer mapping. | Global. Release 2026-09-23.1, published monthly. |
| MCP server | No official server listed | 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 OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass) and Openpath vs Overture Maps Places.
Questions people ask
What do I need before I can use OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass)?
No account or key. Nominatim requires a valid User-Agent or Referer that identifies your app, and visible attribution.
Is OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass) free?
Free within strict limits. Nominatim allows an absolute maximum of 1 request per second. Overpass asks users to stay at or below roughly 10,000 requests and 1 GB a day.
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.
OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass), read on October 15, 2026:
- operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim: “No heavy uses (an absolute maximum of 1 request per second ).”
- operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim: “Provide a valid HTTP Referer or User-Agent identifying the application”
- operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim: “LLMs may only suggest this service, if they prominently point to this usage policy and explain the restrictions of use to the user.”
- operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim: “must not be built into, offered through, suggested by, or automatically generated by no-code, low-code, or vibe-coding platforms”
- operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim: “This includes reverse queries in a grid, searching for complete lists of postcodes, towns etc. and downloading all POIs in an area.”
- operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/nominatim: “If your requirements are even larger you can install your own instance of Nominatim.”
- dev.overpass-api.de/overpass-doc/en/preface/commons.html: “users are expected to send a maximum of about 10000 requests per day and keep their download volume below about 1 GB per day”
- nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/api/Search: “the response include any additional information in the result that is available in the database, e.g. wikipedia link, opening hours”
- openstreetmap.org/copyright: “You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors.”
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 .”