The best WordPress map plugin for seven different jobs (written by someone who makes one)
We make one of the plugins on this list. That is the first sentence for a reason, because a “best map plugin” roundup written by a map plugin vendor is worth exactly as much as its worst recommendation.
So here is the rule this post follows. Every job below goes to the plugin we would actually install for it. Where that is not ours, the post names the one it is and says why. Modern Maps wins one row out of seven. The other six go to plugins we do not make, do not resell, and earn nothing from.
If that reads like a strange way to sell something, the reasoning is plain. There is no best WordPress map plugin. There is a best plugin for the map you are actually trying to build, and handing a reader the wrong one costs more than losing the sale does. The single most common mistake in this category is buying a store locator when what you needed was a pin on a contact page, or the reverse.
Start with five questions, not with a shortlist
A name is useless until these five answers exist.
1. Do you need Google’s own data? Street View, Google reviews, live traffic, turn-by-turn routing and place autocomplete come from the Google Maps Platform. No plugin can give you those without a Google API key and a billing account behind it. If you need them, the key is the price of entry and the shortlist gets very short. If you do not, the key is pure overhead, which is an argument we have made at length before.
2. One pin, a handful, or hundreds? The line falls somewhere around a dozen. Below it, almost any plugin works. Above it you need marker clustering so the map does not turn into a solid mass of pins at low zoom, and you probably need to import the locations from a spreadsheet rather than place them by hand.
3. Do visitors need to search or filter? “Find the nearest branch to my postcode” is a store locator. It is a different product from a map, with a search box, a distance calculation, a results list and category filters. Plugins that ship it say so on the tin.
4. Does the map have to match your design? Most map plugins render the same flat blue and beige tiles as everyone else. If the map sits inside a carefully built page, that default is the thing that will bother you every time you load it.
5. What licensing model can you live with? Some of these are one-time keys, some are annual, some are free forever. The difference matters more over five years than any feature comparison will.
If your answer to the first question is still “not sure”, the approach question comes before the plugin question: iframe embed, Google API plugin, or self-contained plugin. That post covers the fork. This one assumes you have already taken the plugin branch.
The short answer
Here is the whole post in one card. Take it and go if you like.
Seven jobs, seven plugins
The job on the left, the plugin we would install for it on the right. Six of the seven are made by other people.
Best for store locators and hundreds of pins: WP Go Maps
The biggest plugin in the category by a wide margin, at more than 300,000 active installations and a 4.8 star average across 3,026 reviews. Size matters here in a way it does not everywhere: a store locator is the kind of feature that only gets good after years of edge cases, and this one has had them.
Store locator functionality is in the free version. The paid edition is where marker clustering, importing markers from a CSV or spreadsheet, and custom marker icons live, which is exactly the shape of a hundreds-of-pins project.
It is also more flexible about map engines than its name suggests. A Google API key is needed only if you pick Google as the engine. Leaflet, OpenLayers, Stadia Maps, Maptiler, LocationIQ, Microsoft Azure and a zero-cost option are all offered instead.
The tradeoff is age. This plugin predates the block editor, and while it has since added blocks of its own for maps, store locators, directions and infowindows, the admin experience is still a settings-heavy interface bolted alongside WordPress rather than built into it. For a store locator that is a fair trade. For a single pin it is a lot of machinery.
Best free option with no API key: Leaflet Map or WP Map Block
Two genuinely free plugins that never send you to the Google Cloud Console. Which one you want comes down to how you build pages.
Leaflet Map (30,000+ installs) is shortcode driven. There is no block. You write [leaflet-map] and [leaflet-marker] into the page and configure them with attributes. Its tiles come from OpenStreetMap by default and need no key at all. If you are comfortable with shortcodes, it is capable and it is free with no upsell attached.
WP Map Block (20,000+ installs, published by aBlocks) is the opposite: block only, no shortcodes, and the listing states you do not need an API key for either Google or OpenStreetMap. If your site is a block theme and you never want to see a shortcode again, this is the one that fits your workflow.
One caveat on the second, and it is a large one. Its WordPress.org listing now opens with an announcement that WP Map Block has officially merged with aBlocks, followed by a “Why switch to aBlocks?” section aimed at people already running it. The November 2025 release, v2.0.4, is the last one under this name. It still installs and still works without a key, so on a personal site it will do the job. But the vendor is publicly steering users off the product, which you want to know before you commit a client site to it. If that gives you pause, take Leaflet Map and live with the shortcodes.
Best for Google’s own data: MapPress or Maps Widget for Google Maps
If question one came back as yes, you need a plugin that speaks to Google, and you need to accept the API key and the billing account that come with it. Google meters the Maps Platform per request. There is a free monthly allotment, the numbers move, and the bill is yours.
MapPress (30,000+ installs, updated within the last week) is the more complete of the two and hedges nicely: it ships free keyless Leaflet maps using OpenStreetMap and OpenFreeMap, and Google is opt-in when you add a key. That makes it a reasonable choice even if you are undecided, because you can start without a key and add one later.
Maps Widget for Google Maps (30,000+ installs) takes a narrower approach that suits a sidebar or a footer. It renders a static thumbnail image and opens the interactive map in a lightbox when a visitor clicks it, so the full Google stack only loads for people who asked for it. It does require a Google API key.
Best for locations your visitors add: Open User Map
This one is a different product shape, not a different feature list. Visitors can submit their own markers from the front end of your site, with an approval step before anything goes live. Nothing else on this list does that.
It is the obvious answer for a community map: member directories, event maps, a “where have you spotted this” project, a network of independent shops that adds itself. It runs on Leaflet and OpenStreetMap, so there is no API key. It carries 10,000+ installs and a 5 star average across 65 reviews, and it was updated within the last week.
If your map’s content is going to be written by people who are not you, start here and do not look at anything else on this page.
Best for colored regions instead of street pins: MapGeo
Coloring in countries, states or counties is a data visualization job, and a street map plugin is the wrong tool for it. MapGeo (formerly Interactive Geo Maps, 40,000+ installs) is built for it, with more than 250 vector maps covering the world, continents, individual countries and regional subdivisions like US states by county.
It needs no API key to draw regions. A Google key is optional and only used for geocoding when you add point markers.
The distinction is easy to miss when you are searching. “Sales by state, shaded darker where we sell more” and “our three shops, pinned on a street map” both sound like maps and share almost no requirements.
Best for GPX tracks and layered basemaps: Maps Marker Pro
Hiking routes, cycling routes and anything with elevation belong to a specialist. Maps Marker Pro displays GPX routes with metadata like distance, duration, pace and elevation, which none of the general-purpose plugins here attempt.
It also has the deepest basemap support of anything on this list: OpenStreetMap out of the box, with Bing, HERE, TomTom and Google available as opt-in providers. And it advertises full support for both WPML and Polylang, which makes it the pick for a genuinely multilingual site.
It is the only entry with no free version on WordPress.org. Pricing starts at EUR 49 for a single site, with EUR 149 for five and EUR 299 for twenty-five, sold as an unexpiring license key with a support and updates window attached. If your maps are the point of the site rather than a detail on the contact page, that is a rational spend.
Best when the map has to match the rest of the page: Modern Maps
This is the row we claim, and the claim is bounded: design fit inside a block theme. Not the best map plugin. The best one for the case where the map is part of how the page looks.
The build is block-native rather than retrofitted. You add the block, search an address in the editor, and style the map in the sidebar next to every other block control. Three style presets ship as Light, Dark and Standard, and marker popups are built out of ordinary blocks, so a popup can hold a heading, an image and a button with your own spacing and colors. The whole path from install to published map is about a minute, which is written up step by step here. The gallery holds 24 example maps built from those three presets and the color controls, and it is where the design claim can be checked rather than taken on faith.
Now the ceiling, in full. There is no marker clustering. There is no store locator, no distance search, no category filters. There is no GeoJSON, KML or CSV import. There are no shortcodes and no WordPress widget, so if your theme needs a map inside a classic widget area, this is the wrong plugin. Marker styling is a color and nothing else, so no custom icons or images. Address search works in the editor only. And there is no fallback for a visitor whose browser cannot run WebGL: they get an empty container rather than a static image.
Marker counts depend on which build you install, and the difference is real. Modern Maps Lite, on WordPress.org, has no marker limit and never has. The build you download from modernmapswp.com adds two markers before it asks for a license key. One detail worth knowing either way: markers that already exist in a post are never removed. Only markers added during the current editing session get trimmed, so a page authored with a license keeps every pin when someone later opens it without one.
If you want to try it
Six of the seven rows above went somewhere else, so this is a low-stakes suggestion. Install it, add a block, search an address, publish. If it is not right, you already know which of the other six to go and get.
Modern Maps Pro activates in place with a license key, with no reinstall and no second download. It adds three things: markers beyond two on the self-hosted build, advanced color controls (nine OKLCH sliders covering base lightness, chroma and hue, plus bounds and drift), and theme palette and marker colors that persist instead of resetting. Plans are annual, at one, five and twenty-five sites, and are listed on the pricing page.
If you prefer installing from the WordPress dashboard, search the plugin directory for Modern Maps Lite. Same map, no in-plugin upgrade path.
What each of these costs
| Plugin | Free version on WordPress.org | Paid tier | |—|—|—| | WP Go Maps | Yes, 300,000+ installs | Yes | | Leaflet Map | Yes, 30,000+ installs | No | | WP Map Block | Yes, 20,000+ installs | No | | MapPress | Yes, 30,000+ installs | Yes | | Maps Widget for Google Maps | Yes, 30,000+ installs | Yes | | Open User Map | Yes, 10,000+ installs | Yes | | MapGeo | Yes, 40,000+ installs | Yes | | Maps Marker Pro | No | Paid only, from EUR 49 | | Modern Maps | Yes, as Modern Maps Lite | Yes, annual |
Install counts checked 26 July 2026. Modern Maps Lite is new enough that its install count still reports as zero, which is why that row has no number.
You will have noticed the table has no prices in it. That is deliberate. Only two of these vendors’ pricing pages could be re-verified today, ours and Maps Marker Pro’s. Maps Marker Pro’s figures are quoted above because they were checked; ours are on our own pricing page rather than reprinted here. Printing four-month-old numbers for the rest would look more useful and be less true. Licensing models in this category split between one-time keys and annual renewals, and both camps are represented above, so check the vendor’s own page before you buy. That is a thirty second job and it is the one part of this research nobody else can do for you.
Worth adding: a paid tier is not a warning sign, and a free plugin with no paid tier is not automatically the bargain. Leaflet Map and WP Map Block have no revenue attached to them, which is lovely until you need a release.
The three-question version
For anyone who scrolled here first.
- Do you need Street View, Google reviews, traffic or routing? Yes, go to MapPress or Maps Widget for Google Maps, and set up the API key. No, keep reading.
- Do you need a search box that finds the nearest location out of dozens or hundreds? Yes, go to WP Go Maps. No, keep reading.
- Is the special thing about your map its content or its appearance? Content, and specifically visitor submissions, regions or GPX routes: Open User Map, MapGeo or Maps Marker Pro respectively. Appearance, on a block theme: Modern Maps.
Three questions, and most sites land on the last line of the last one. That is the only row we are arguing for.