Google Maps Places UI Kit: Easily Integrate Place Content into Any Map
The simple, cost-effective alternative to the Places API: With the Google Places UI Kit, you can integrate Google Maps place data into any map application of your choice using a low-code approach.
In digital product development, a great user experience isn't a luxury – it's a critical competitive advantage. Location data plays a central role in this: users expect detailed, interactive information about places, whether in a store locator, an interactive travel planner, or for property location details.
With the Google Maps Places UI Kit, Google now provides an innovative solution that serves as an alternative to the Places API for front-end applications, and it works with any map technology of your choice. The toolkit simplifies and accelerates development while helping to optimize your Google Maps API costs.
What is the Google Maps Places UI Kit?
The Places UI Kit is a library of pre-built UI components that allows developers to display rich place and address information from the Google Places database – with over 250 million locations – with minimal effort. Instead of fetching raw data via API calls and building a custom user interface, the UI Kit provides ready-made, visually appealing, and user-familiar modules. The key advantage lies in its combination of efficiency, cost control, and technological flexibility.
Technical Features & Benefits for Your Application
The Places UI Kit was developed to solve key challenges in application development. Its advantages are numerous, ranging from freedom of map choice to reduced costs.
Maximum Flexibility: Finally Map-Agnostic
This is the most significant new feature: Google Maps UI components are no longer tied to a Google Maps base map. You can display place data without a Google Map and combine the Places UI Kit with technologies like Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, or Leaflet. This independence opens up a wide range of new possibilities.
Significant Cost Optimization
The cost of using the Places UI Kit is often significantly lower than using the direct Places API. Instead of multiple calls to load Google Maps reviews and photos, for instance, the UI Kit bundles them into one component. This is an efficient way to reduce the cost of a map application.
Significantly Reduced Development Effort (Low-Code)
The low-code approach enables exceptionally fast implementation. The components can be integrated with just a few lines of code, which accelerates your time-to-market and frees up your development resources.
Familiar User Experience & Customization
The components deliver the well-known Google design but can be flexibly adapted to your corporate design (colors, fonts). You can also control which information blocks (e.g., reviews, opening hours) are visible.
Cross-Platform Consistency
Whether on the web, Android, or iOS, the kit ensures a consistent user experience across all platforms.
In our demo, you can see how the Places UI Kit can be used to display place details on a Mapbox map – either in the default view or customized, for example, to match your corporate design.
Ubilabs Demo: Places UI Kit on a Mapbox MapCurrent and Future Components
The Places UI Kit is being continuously expanded. The following components are currently available:
- Place Details: The core component for displaying comprehensive place details. It generates a detailed view with the name, address, photos, reviews, opening hours, and more.
- Place Search: Enables searching for and listing places via text or category search.
- Basic Place Autocomplete: The proven function for autocompleting search inputs. It provides place suggestions in a list.
- Elevation (experimental): Renders elevation data as a numerical value for a single point or as a diagram for a path.
Places UI Kit vs. Places API: Which Tool Is Right for Your Project?
The choice between the Places UI Kit and the Places API heavily depends on your use case. The main difference is that the Places UI Kit is optimally designed for the visual display of detailed place information in the frontend of a map application.
In contrast, the strength of the Places API lies in the backend and in pure data retrieval. With the Places API, it's no longer possible to display place details on maps. Via the API, you can now only place markers without additional information on a Google Map.
The Places UI Kit also offers the following advantages compared to the Places API:
- Low-Code Approach: It enables a much simpler and faster implementation through ready-made UI components that you just need to embed in your code.
- Cost-Effectiveness: For displaying visual information, the UI Kit is often the more affordable option, as it eliminates the need for expensive API calls to retrieve multiple data fields.
For maximum ROI, both solutions can be intelligently combined: Use the API to perform a search and obtain a Place ID, which you then pass to the pre-built component of the UI Kit for display.
The Cost Structure of the Places UI Kit: A Decisive Advantage
Beyond its technical flexibility, the pricing model of the Google Maps Places UI Kit is one of its most important benefits, especially in direct comparison to the classic use of the Places API. The pricing model is specifically designed to reduce costs for visual, frontend-heavy use cases.
Significant Savings on Place Details and Nearby Search
The biggest financial lever of the UI Kit becomes apparent when displaying comprehensive information about a place or generating lists of places. With classic API usage, this often requires combining multiple, expensive calls. A concrete example shows the difference (prices per 1,000 calls):
- Classic API Calls:
- Place Details: A call to retrieve details like address, photos, reviews, and opening hours costs between $17 and $25, depending on the requested data fields.
- Place Search: A search for nearby places costs between $32 and $40.
- Places UI Kit:
- Loading a Place Details or Place List component via the UI Kit, which already provides all this information bundled and visually prepared, is significantly cheaper: just $1.
So, a use case that could quickly cost over $30 with the API can be realized much more cost-effectively with the UI Kit. This optimized cost structure makes the UI Kit the ideal choice when the primary goal is to display rich information to users.
A Differentiated Look at Autocomplete
The situation is slightly different for the UI Kit's Autocomplete component. At first glance, the costs of the Autocomplete API might seem lower than using the UI Kit's Autocomplete component.
However, the crucial point lies in the overall process. A normal Autocomplete API call often only returns a Place ID. To then show the user meaningful details, a second, paid Place Details call is necessary. When you add the costs of these two calls together, the total price is almost identical to what the UI Kit's Autocomplete component costs.
The advantage of the UI Kit here is its bundled functionality and the transparent, predictable cost structure for the entire search and display process.
For Which Industries and Use Cases is the Places UI Kit Interesting?
The toolkit is the best solution for a store locator in retail, for neighborhood discovery in the real estate industry, or for interactive travel planners in the tourism industry. Any company that wants to display Points of Interest (POIs) on a map and create a compelling user experience will benefit.
Retail & E-Commerce: The Optimized Store Finder for Your Website
A customer is looking for a store. Instead of just an address, you can use the Place Details component to instantly show opening hours, reviews, and photos. This builds trust and increases the likelihood of a visit.
More on our Store Finder Solution
Real Estate: Immersive Neighborhood Data for Property Portals
Prospective buyers can explore not just the property, but also the surrounding area. With the UI Kit, you can interactively display neighborhood data for the property portal, such as schools, parks, or restaurants, and help users evaluate the quality of the location.
View Demo for Custom Real Estate Map
Tourism: Seamless Travel Planning in Your App
A user is putting together a travel itinerary. For each hotel or attraction, the Place Details component can display a preview without the user having to leave the application.
Conclusion: A Strategic Decision for Innovation and Efficiency
The Google Maps Places UI Kit is more than just a technological tool. With its map-agnostic architecture, attractive pricing model, and simple implementation, it is the ideal solution for developing innovative and user-centric applications and integrating Google Maps information into an app. It democratizes access to high-quality location data and frees up valuable resources.
Would you like to evaluate whether the Google Maps Places UI Kit is the right solution for your project? Our team of experts at Ubilabs would be happy to advise you on the strategic and technological possibilities.
