Why manby?

The short answer

• tippecanoe’s tiles. manby takes tippecanoe’s options and makes the tiles tippecanoe makes. All 188 of tippecanoe’s expected test outputs match, so a tippecanoe command works with manby in its place.
• Much faster. Eight to eighteen times faster on the benchmarks, and up to forty times where tippecanoe’s disk slows it down.
• Less memory. manby’s peak memory is below tippecanoe’s on every benchmark, on macOS and on Linux.
• Larger than memory. With --memory-budget, 40 million points take 79 seconds in 1.1 GB, where tippecanoe takes 652 seconds and 10 GB.
• tile-join too. manby join makes tile-join’s tiles, two to thirty-five times faster.
• MapLibre Tiles. --tile-format=mlt writes MLT as well as Mapbox Vector Tiles.

Compared with the alternatives

Tool	Written in	Reads	Keeping tiles small	MapLibre Tiles
tippecanoe	C++	GeoJSON, FlatGeobuf, CSV, Geobuf	Drops, coalesces or clusters features evenly across each zoom level until its tiles fit	In review
tippecanoe-rs	Rust	As tippecanoe	As tippecanoe, with its tiles	No
manby	Rust	As tippecanoe, and other formats by way of GDAL	As tippecanoe, with its tiles	Yes
tylertoo	Rust, also from Python	GeoParquet	A size limit on each tile on its own, with its own thinning and simplification, so not tippecanoe’s tiles	No
planetiler	Java	OpenStreetMap, Shapefile, GeoPackage, GeoJSON, GeoParquet	A profile, in Java or YAML, decides what each zoom level keeps	Yes
GDAL (ogr2ogr)	C++	Almost any vector format	Each tile on its own, at a lower resolution past 500 kB, then only its largest features	No
freestiler	Rust, from R and Python	Data frames, GeoParquet, DuckDB queries	A drop rate below a base zoom, clustering and coalescing, not fitted to a size limit	Experimental
geojson-vt	JavaScript	GeoJSON	Simplification, with tiles made in the browser as the map asks for them	No

tippecanoe

tippecanoe is the reference. Erica Fischer started it in 2014 and wrote nearly all of it, at Mapbox and then at Felt. Its way of thinning features evenly across a zoom level until every tile fits is what manby keeps, and owes to her. If tippecanoe is fast enough for you, there is no need to switch.

tippecanoe-rs

A line-by-line Rust port of tippecanoe, in manby’s repository. It makes the same tiles at the speed of the C++, so a port alone is no faster. manby takes its geometry from the port, which is why the tiles are the same, and its speed from doing the work differently.

tylertoo

tylertoo tiles GeoParquet into PMTiles, from the command line or from Python, with remote reads and builds split across machines. It fits each tile on its own rather than a zoom level at a time, so its tiles are not tippecanoe’s. On manby’s benchmarks it is faster on the census tracts and slower on points and roads, with three to eight times manby’s memory.

planetiler

planetiler builds basemaps such as OpenMapTiles from OpenStreetMap, the whole planet in hours on one machine, with a profile deciding what each zoom level keeps. manby tiles your own features as they are.

GDAL

ogr2ogr writes vector tiles from anything GDAL reads, each tile on its own, cutting tiles over 500 kB down to their largest features. It is also the usual way into manby for the formats manby does not read.

freestiler

freestiler tiles data frames and DuckDB queries from R and Python, with tippecanoe’s drop rate, clustering and coalescing, but without fitting tiles to a size limit.

geojson-vt

geojson-vt slices GeoJSON into tiles in the browser, as MapLibre GL JS does for GeoJSON sources. For data small enough to send whole, no tileset is needed.

When to use something else

• A basemap from OpenStreetMap. planetiler, or tilemaker, with a profile such as OpenMapTiles. manby tiles the features it is given.
• Tiles that follow a live database. PostGIS’s ST_AsMVT, served by Martin, makes each tile when it is asked for.
• Small GeoJSON in a web map. MapLibre’s GeoJSON source, with geojson-vt.
• Data frames in R or Python. freestiler.
• GeoParquet, without tippecanoe’s tiles. tylertoo reads it directly, from remote storage too.
• Small inputs. They take seconds with tippecanoe too, and tippecanoe is the reference.

When manby fits

• tippecanoe’s tiles, in a fraction of the time. Tilesets rebuilt often, in CI or every night, or many of them.
• Large inputs on a small machine. --memory-budget keeps memory near a budget, at a fraction of tippecanoe’s time.
• PMTiles for hosting. manby writes PMTiles directly, ready for a bucket or a CDN.
• GeoPackage, GeoParquet, Shapefile or OpenStreetMap. GDAL’s ogr2ogr, or any converter like it, makes FlatGeobuf of them, which manby reads in parallel. Other formats shows how.