Download websites that use MapLibre GL JS

About MapLibre GL JS

MapLibre GL JS exists because of a licence change somewhere else. In 2020 the upstream project it descends from moved to proprietary terms, and the developers who had built on the open version forked the last free release and carried on as a community. Nothing about the code required that split, and everything about the project since has been shaped by it.

What the library actually does is render vector tile maps in the browser with WebGL, in JavaScript, under a BSD licence. Map styles are declarative, data can drive the styling of features, and terrain rendering arrived later without breaking the general shape of the API. No vendor is recorded against MapLibre GL JS in our data, and the absence is meaningful rather than missing, because the project is stewarded by an organisation set up to be vendor neutral, so adopting it creates no commercial relationship with anyone.

The presence of the library on a site therefore says something specific. The operator renders maps rather than embedding a finished map from a provider, and having taken rendering in house they still need tiles, geocoding, routing or search from somewhere. Teams that switch to an open renderer usually do so to escape per view billing or licence risk, which means they are actively shopping for the pieces around it. For a tile host, a geocoding API or a location data vendor, the population of sites running their own renderer is close to a qualified list.

Version data is where a self hosted library becomes more informative than a hosted script. Because each site bundles or pins its own copy, upgrades happen on the site owner's schedule and old releases stay in production for years. Across our detections the version field takes 83 distinct values and commonly reads 4.3.0, which describes how quickly the ecosystem actually moves rather than what the release notes claim.

As of September 2026 we detect MapLibre GL JS on 6,809 sites, and the number should be treated as a lower bound. Detection depends on recognisable traces surviving the build, and a project that folds the renderer into an application chunk, renames it, or tree shakes it heavily can run the library while showing us nothing. Sites behind an application shell that loads a map only after login are invisible for the same reason. What the dataset gives you is the reachable, publicly rendering part of the installed base, which is the part you could contact anyway.