Depending on how you slice them, HERE has at least seven ways to solve your geocoding problem, but its product pages won't tell you which one you need. This page will. Nine questions, one matrix, no sales pitch until you ask for it.
The word covers a lot of ground. Validating an address as a user types it is a different engineering problem than matching two million legacy customer records, which is different again from putting a point-address locator in front of ArcGIS Pro so your analysts stop burning service credits.
Most vendors sell you one endpoint and let you figure out the rest. HERE actually has a purpose-built option for each of those situations — an interactive API, an asynchronous batch service, downloadable point address data, a self-hosted deployment, mobile SDKs, and a packaged ArcGIS bundle. The catalog is genuinely good. It's also genuinely hard to navigate if you're new to it.
So start with your requirements, not their product names.
Address geocoding and POI search look similar and behave very differently. "1600 Pennsylvania Ave" is a parsing and matching problem with a single correct answer. "coffee near the warehouse" is a relevance-ranking problem with a hundred acceptable answers. HERE's Geocoding & Search API handles both, but through different endpoints — /geocode for addresses, /discover and /browse for places — and using the wrong one is the single most common cause of disappointing results. HERE carries over 120 million places across 400+ categories, so if POIs are central to your use case, that depth is a real differentiator against street-file-only data.
Best Solutions for Street Addresses:
/geocode endpoint)Best Solutions for Places (POIs):
/discover and /browse endpoints)Forward geocoding (address → coordinates) and reverse geocoding (coordinates → address) come bundled in the API, so this rarely changes your product choice on its own.
It matters enormously for volume forecasting and licensing. Reverse geocoding a GPS breadcrumb trail from a vehicle fleet generates transaction counts an order of magnitude higher than anything your address-validation workflow will ever produce, and that's the difference between a modest subscription and a self-hosted deployment.
Best Solutions for LOW Volume (reverse or forward):
Best Solutions for HIGH Volume (reverse or forward):
Interactive geocoding is a synchronous call: a user submits a form, your app calls the API, you get an answer in milliseconds.
Batch geocoding is an asynchronous job: you POST a delimited file of addresses, HERE returns a job ID, you poll for status, you download the results. Batch is explicitly optimized for large jobs — HERE's documentation notes a processing penalty for jobs under about ten records — while running a million addresses through the single-lookup endpoint in a loop is slow, expensive, and rate-limited.
Best Solutions for One at a Time:
Best Solutions for Many at Once:
This is the question that quietly disqualifies vendors, and almost nobody asks it early enough. If you're geocoding a customer table once and writing lat/long into your data warehouse or an enterprise geodatabase, you are storing derived data — and storage rights vary sharply by provider and by license tier. Google's Maps Platform terms, for example, permit only temporary caching of latitude and longitude values for up to 30 consecutive days, after which they must be deleted. If your architecture assumes permanent storage, that's an architectural problem, not a legal footnote.
HERE offers licensing paths that support permanent storage of geocoded results, and downloadable point address data sidesteps the question entirely because the data is yours to host. The specifics depend on your license — which is precisely the kind of thing worth a fifteen-minute conversation before you commit.
Best Solutions When You Need to Store Results Permanently:
Your desktop, your data center, your AWS account, a customer's browser, or a phone in a truck cab — each implies a different delivery mechanism. ArcGIS Pro analysts want a locator file. A .NET service wants a REST endpoint. An iOS app wants a native SDK with offline capability. A regulated workload wants a container in your own VPC. HERE ships all four, and HERE Geocoding & Search is also available for purchase and deployment through AWS Marketplace if that's how your procurement works.
Best Solutions for Your Computer :
Best Solutions for Cloud or AWS:
Best Solutions for Your Server:
Best Solutions for Mobile App:
Disconnected field crews, air-gapped government networks, HIPAA and CJIS obligations, or sheer per-transaction economics at scale all lead to the same place: run the geocoder yourself.
HERE offers self-hosted location services covering forward and reverse geocoding against a global dataset of 250 million-plus house number points, deployed on your infrastructure. You trade a per-call bill and an internet dependency for infrastructure you operate. Above a certain volume, that math flips decisively.
Best Solutions for Offline Use:
If so, HERE has you covered two different ways: autocomplete and autosuggest.
These are two different endpoints solving two different UX problems, and mixing them up produces a search box that frustrates everyone. Autocomplete completes partial keystrokes into valid, structured addresses — the right choice for checkout flows, service-address entry, and any form where you need a clean, parseable address at the end. Autosuggest returns a mixed bag of places, categories, and addresses with typo tolerance, which is what you want for exploratory "find me something" search. Autocomplete for forms. Autosuggest for discovery.
Best Solutions for User Input:
/autocomplete endpoint)/autosuggest endpoint)The HERE Geocoding & Search /geocode endpoint accepts structured queries (discrete street, city, postal code fields), unstructured free-form strings, and hybrid combinations of the two. Structured input generally yields higher confidence and cleaner match scoring.
But if you're working with hand-keyed legacy records, CRM exports, or scraped data — partial addresses, transposed fields, misspellings — the free-form and typo-tolerant paths matter more than raw precision benchmarks. Know which one describes your data before you evaluate match rates, because testing a dirty dataset against a structured endpoint will make any geocoder look bad.
Best Solution for Messy or Unstructured Queries:
/geocode endpoint with q parameter)/autocomplete endpoint)Asset IDs, meter locations, store numbers, service territories, custom place names your field staff actually use. If your users need to search proprietary locations in the same box that searches public addresses, you need a platform that ingests your data rather than an API that only knows HERE's map. HERE supports bringing your own datasets into the search infrastructure so a single query returns both.
Best Solutions for Bringing Your Own Data:
Not sure how to answer these questions? Every geocoding project or application is different and ADCi is here to help. Schedule a call with us for a low-pressure conversation and we'll help you figure it all out.
Seven options, grouped by how you'd use them.
Cloud-hosted and pay-as-you-go. Fastest to start.
Runs: HERE cloud or AWS
Runs: HERE cloud or AWS
Runs: HERE cloud
Fixed cost, unlimited requests, runs on your machine.
Runs: Your computer (ArcGIS)
Runs: Your computer or server (ArcGIS)
Native SDKs for iOS and Android.
Runs: HERE Cloud
For regulated, offline or very high-volume work.
Runs: Your servers or VPC
Not sure which one fits?
Schedule a callSwipe sideways to see all seven options
| Feature | HERE API Single Lookup API | HERE API Batch API | HERE API Bring Your Own Data | ArcGIS ArcGIS + GIS Data Suite | ArcGIS ArcGIS + Custom Locator | Mobile iOS or Android SDKs | Self-hosted Self-Hosted API |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost & deployment | |||||||
| Cost model | Pay per use | Pay per use | Pay per use | Fixed cost unlimited | Fixed cost unlimited | Pay per use | Fixed cost unlimited |
| Where it runs | HERE cloud or AWS | HERE cloud or AWS | HERE cloud | Your computer (ArcGIS) | Your computer or server (ArcGIS) | HERE Cloud | Your servers or VPC |
| Requires ArcGIS | – | – | – | – | – | ||
| What it handles | |||||||
| Points of interest (places) | – | ||||||
| Messy / free-text input | – | – | – | – | – | ||
| Autocomplete & suggest | – | – | – | – | – | ||
| High volume | – | – | – | ||||
| Mix in your own data | – | – | with customized locator | – | – | ||
| Offline / local | – | – | – | If preloaded | |||
| Store results permanently | With special licensing | With special licensing | With special licensing | – | – | ||
| Native mobile | – | – | – | – | – | – | |
| Summary | |||||||
| Best for | Forms, apps and real-time lookups, one address at a time | Large files, CRM exports and legacy records | Searching your own locations and HERE's in one box | ArcGIS teams that want a packaged, all-in-one dataset | High-precision, offline geocoding in ArcGIS | Native mobile apps, including in-the-field use | Air-gapped, regulated or very high-volume workloads |
If you know what you need, and it's part of the HERE Geocode & Search API, go sign up for the free tier and start calling some endpoints. You don't need a partner to evaluate an API, and we get that.
Run your own addresses through /geocode, see what the match rates look like in your service area, check whether autocomplete behaves the way your form needs it to.
Come find us when the evaluation ends and the project starts. Finding the right API endpoint and getting the right licensing are two different problems. We're here to help with both, but we get it if you only need us for the licensing part.
The licensing available self-service is only a portion of the options available and ADCi can often save you money if you buy through us.
Regardless, it will never cost you anything to buy through ADCi and you now have someone to call when you need help understanding or reducing your costs.
When you work with ADCi, you have a partner working with you to ensure that you get what you need and nothing more, structured in a way that maximizes your data while minimizing your investment.
HERE's catalog is deep, and the self-service tiers are only the surface of it. Coverage areas, transaction tiers, storage rights, deployment models, and update cadence are all levers. We've run these configurations hundreds of times and we'll tell you when the cheaper option is the right one.
