Sites that demo freely available Basemaps?

Question

I've seen such sites in the past. I remember seeing one put together by Wm Lerer at a conference a couple years ago.

What I'm looking for is a map that demonstrates all (well, at least a lot) of the freely available basemaps (tilesets, web services, etc) that I could include in a mapping application (using OpenLayers, Leaflet, or whatever).

Answer 1

There is no organized catalog of XYZ tile servers per se. The closest thing is the leaflet-providers project which provides dozens of free basemaps. Code for integrating with leaflet is provided but it should be relatively easy to translate to OpenLayers or other mapping clients.

Answer 2

You can find a list of free WMS and TMS services here:

http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Maps

Written to use in the JOSM editor, it should not be too difficult to get the essential information out of it for other software that offers WMS or TMS.

Answer 3

Map Compare is the best

4 Maps sync'ed with many, many optional mapping tiles sources

example:

http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#15/49.0094/8.3902&num=4&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map&mt2=bing-map&mt3=mapnik-german

Answer 4

Expanding the list, some example from OpenLayers site (http://openlayers.org/en/v3.0.0/examples):

Google maps

http://openlayers.org/en/v3.0.0/examples/google-map.html?mode=raw

MapQuest

http://openlayers.org/en/v3.0.0/examples/mapquest.html

OpenStreetMap

http://openlayers.org/en/v3.0.0/examples/vector-osm.html

ESRI

http://openlayers.org/en/v3.0.0/examples/xyz-esri.html

Bing

http://openlayers.org/en/v3.0.0/examples/bing-maps.html