TomTom Search API vs Overture Maps Places for AI agents
TomTom Search API is a family of TomTom location search APIs: the Orbis-based Places Search API (Suggest, Discover, Details) is now recommended, and the older Search API is labelled previous-generation. 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
- TomTom Search API: Navigation-grade POI search with a real no-card free tier and EU-priced pay-as-you-go. Strong in automotive and routing contexts.
- 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
| TomTom Search API | Overture Maps Places | |
|---|---|---|
| Searches | Addresses and points of interest (POIs) on TomTom Orbis Maps, or on TomTom Maps for the legacy Search API. | 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 (Discover returns a results array). POI results include a title, address, GeoJSON position, poiTypes (categories), contacts (phones and websites) and opening hours. | 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 free TomTom developer account and API key. No credit card is needed until you add prepaid credit. | Nothing: no account or key. Read from public Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage. |
| Free | Places Search API: 5,000 Discover and 5,000 Details requests a month, plus 10,000 Suggest. Legacy Search API: 2,500 a month. The free tier does not expire. | No key needed, and its pages state no price |
| Paid | Places Search API Discover costs EUR 18.00 per 1,000 (5K–100K), Details EUR 12.00 per 1,000 and Suggest EUR 1.00 per 1,000. The legacy Search API costs EUR 3.00 per 1,000 (2.5K–100K). Billing is prepaid credit. | Not stated on its pages |
| Acting on a result | Discover results can include phone numbers and websites. 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 | Caching or storing Results is prohibited except in clients, within cache-control header max-age. Caching to serve multiple users is not allowed. Logo and copyright attribution is required. | 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 | The Portal Terms forbid applying ML or AI to the Licensed Products in a way that makes them redundant. They also forbid using them with any ML/AI process where the information would be stored in a "Public Reference Data Set". | Not stated on its pages |
| Coverage | The market list (search on TomTom Orbis Maps) marks POI coverage per country, including the United States. TomTom says markets not listed are not supported. | Global. Release 2026-09-23.1, published monthly. |
| MCP server | TomTom Maps MCP Server, remote at https://mcp.tomtom.com/maps (public preview). Open source at https://github.com/tomtom-international/tomtom-maps-mcp | 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 TomTom Search API and Openpath vs Overture Maps Places.
Questions people ask
What do I need before I can use TomTom Search API?
A free TomTom developer account and API key. No credit card is needed until you add prepaid credit.
Is TomTom Search API free?
Places Search API: 5,000 Discover and 5,000 Details requests a month, plus 10,000 Suggest. Legacy Search API: 2,500 a month. The free tier does not expire.
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.
TomTom Search API, read on October 15, 2026:
- docs.tomtom.com/pricing: “Places Search API Discover ... Free Up to 5K Tier 1 5K–100K € 18.00”
- docs.tomtom.com/pricing: “Search API Serve search results using TomTom's previous-generation map format. For new projects we recommend Places Search API.”
- docs.tomtom.com/pricing: “Free Up to 2.5K Tier 1 2.5K–100K € 3.00”
- docs.tomtom.com/pricing: “The more you use, the less you pay per 1,000 requests”
- docs.tomtom.com/pricing: “Free means free — no time limit, no credit card required.”
- docs.tomtom.com/pricing: “You only need a payment method when you're ready to add prepaid credit and go beyond the free monthly allowance.”
- docs.tomtom.com/places-search-api/documentation/places-search/discover: “Delivers fully resolved location or discoverAction results based on complete input criteria.”
- docs.tomtom.com/legal/terms-and-conditions: “The caching or storing of any Results shall be prohibited except that you may cache Results delivered by the Licensed Products provided that”
- docs.tomtom.com/legal/terms-and-conditions: “Nothing under Clause 11.4 entitles any form of caching for the purpose of scaling results to serve multiple clients or users.”
- docs.tomtom.com/legal/terms-and-conditions: “you agree to implement to the TomTom Copyright API in order to generate the applicable copyright and logo attribution”
- docs.tomtom.com/legal/terms-and-conditions: “would be stored or retained in any Public Reference Data Set by such machine learning, AI algorithm or other software related process”
- docs.tomtom.com/tomtom-maps-mcp/documentation/overview: “The TomTom Maps Remote MCP Server is in public preview.”
- docs.tomtom.com/search-api/documentation/tomtom-orbis-maps/product-information/market-coverage: “If a market is missing in the following tables, it is not currently supported.”
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 .”