Choosing the Right HERE APIs

Choosing HERE APIs by product name leads teams to the wrong product. Choose by the question your system needs answered. “How long is the drive from A to B?” and “What is the drive time between these 200 depots and these 3,000 stops?” look like the same question. They are not the same product, they are not the same price, and building the second out of the first is one of the most expensive architectural mistakes in this domain.

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Why this matters

The cost of choosing the wrong API is not a slightly higher invoice. It’s an architecture you have to unwind. A team approximates multi-stop optimization with N routing calls. It works at 5 stops. At 40 stops it takes ninety seconds, costs eight times what tour planning would, and produces routes a human dispatcher would reject. By the time this is obvious, it’s load-bearing. A team routes trucks with the car engine because the response shape was familiar. Everything looks fine in QA — QA doesn’t drive under bridges.

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How do I choose the right HERE API?

Answer these in order. Stop at the first match. 1. Are you moving a vehicle from A to B? → Routing API. If the vehicle is a truck, van over 3.5t, hazmat carrier, or oversized load, use transportMode=truck with the physical constraints. See Truck Routing Guide. 2. Do you need travel times between many origins and many destinations? → Distance Matrix API. Not N routing calls. One request. This is the highest-leverage correct choice on this page. 3. Do you need to visit many stops in an optimal order, with constraints? → Tour Planning API. Time windows, vehicle capacity, driver shifts, skills. This is a solver, not a router. Enterprise tier, typically committed plan. 4. Do you need to convert an address to coordinates? → Geocoding API for real-time, one at a time. Batch Geocoding for anything that tolerates latency. If you are geocoding a file, you want batch. See HERE Pricing Explained. 5. Coordinates back to an address? → Reverse Geocoding API. Common in telematics — turning a GPS ping into a human-readable location. 6. Type-ahead address entry in a UI? → Autocomplete / Search API. Be candid about whether Google’s POI database is better for your users. For street addresses, HERE is strong. For “coffee shop near me,” it is not. 7. Do you need to display a map? → Digital Maps / tiles. Works with Leaflet, OpenLayers, MapLibre GL, and the HERE Maps SDK. Web tiles and mobile SDK are separate entitlements. 8. Do you need to match a raw GPS trace to the road network? → Route Matching API. Turning noisy probe data into travelled road segments. Essential for ELD, IFTA reporting, and anything auditing where a vehicle actually went. 9. Do you need EV range and charging stops in the route? → EV Routing. Consumption model, current charge state, charging stops as routing outputs. Not a filter on top of car routing. 10. Do you need location where GPS is unreliable? → Positioning API. Hybrid GPS/Wi-Fi/cellular. Warehouses, urban canyons, indoors. Most teams never need this.

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Routing vs Matrix vs Tour Planning

This distinction earns its own section because getting it wrong is expensive. Matrix operations support large origin-destination sets in a single call, with different limits depending on whether you call synchronously or asynchronously. Check the current limits in the official HERE documentation before you architect around a specific ceiling — and confirm which mode your entitlement covers.

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Real-time vs batch geocoding

Same data, different product, materially different price. Use real-time geocoding when a user is waiting. Address entry at checkout. Dispatcher looking up a customer. Use batch geocoding when nothing is waiting. Nightly address normalization. Backfilling a customer table. Importing a partner’s location file. The tell: if the result is written to a database rather than rendered to a screen, it should have been batched. And cache either way. Addresses do not move. Re-geocoding the same customer address on every order is the most common avoidable cost in this entire platform.

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Key concepts

Transport mode selects an engine, not a speed profile. truck changes traversable segments and legal turns. It is not car with a penalty applied. Constraints are inputs, not filters. Height, gross weight, axle count, hazmat class. Omit them and the truck engine assumes an unconstrained vehicle. No warning is issued. Entitlements are per-API. Requesting the right API means little if your key isn’t licensed for it. You will discover this as a 403. See Authentication. Batch is asynchronous. Submit, poll, retrieve. Design for it rather than wrapping it in a synchronous facade with a timeout. You do not have to choose one vendor for everything. Keep Google for consumer place search, move routing and batch geocoding to HERE. This is a common and defensible architecture.

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Best practices

• Write down the question before you pick the product. One sentence per integration point. This step catches most wrong choices for free.
• Prototype against the exact API you will ship. Not the adjacent one with the friendlier response shape.
• Test truck routing on known trap geometry. The 11foot8 bridge in Durham NC. Storrow Drive in Boston. The Southern State Parkway on Long Island. If your integration routes a 4.1m vehicle through any of these, your constraints aren’t applied.
• Confirm entitlements before sprint planning. One curl per intended endpoint. Ten minutes.
• Separate what needs latency from what needs to be cheap. Then route each to the right product.
• Cache geocoding results in your own datastore. Not in a request-scoped memo.
• Reconsider quarterly. Products you dismissed at 10k calls/month may be obvious at 500k.

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Common mistakes

Looping the Routing API to build a distance matrix. Slower, more expensive, more failure surface. Distance Matrix exists. Looping the Routing API to build an optimized tour. Worse routes than the solver, at higher cost. Tour Planning exists. Using car routing for commercial vehicles. The response is well-formed. The route is unsafe. Using real-time geocoding for batch workloads. Paying for latency you are throwing away. Choosing Autocomplete because it’s cheaper than Google, when the use case is POI discovery. Your users will notice. Cost savings on a feature people stop using is not savings. Approximating Route Matching with nearest-road lookups. Fine until an auditor asks which road segment the vehicle actually travelled. Migrating every API at once. Two systems, two failure surfaces, one incident with no clear cause. Migrate one. Stabilize. Then the next.

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FAQ

Which HERE API should I use for truck routing? Routing API with transportMode=truck and explicit physical constraints. Both parts are required. See Truck Routing Guide. What is the difference between Routing and Distance Matrix? Routing returns a path between two points. Distance Matrix returns times and distances across many origin-destination pairs in one call. If you’re looping routing calls, you want matrix. When do I need Tour Planning instead of Distance Matrix? When you need an ordered itinerary respecting constraints — time windows, vehicle capacity, driver hours — not just a table of travel times. Is HERE Autocomplete as good as Google Places? For street addresses, competitive. For business POIs, reviews, and hours, no. Choose per use case, not per vendor. Can I mix HERE and Google in one product? Yes, and many teams should. Google for consumer place search, HERE for routing and batch geocoding is a sensible split. Do I need the mobile SDK or will the tile API do? Tiles for web. SDK for native turn-by-turn, offline maps, or on-device rendering. Separate entitlements, both available under one Placematic contract. How do I know if my key covers an API? Call it. 200 means entitled. 403 means licensed elsewhere, not here. See Authentication. Where do I find full parameter documentation? The official HERE documentation. These guides cover implementation judgement, not parameter reference — we don’t duplicate what HERE maintains well.

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Related guides

Also relevant: Authentication · Batch Geocoding · Migrating from Google Maps

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Need production HERE API keys or enterprise licensing? Placematic is an official HERE Technologies reseller and implementation partner helping companies choose the right HERE APIs, estimate costs, migrate from Google Maps and build production-ready geospatial solutions.