mapbox/geobuf

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1032 stars · 86 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Geobuf is a JavaScript library that encodes GeoJSON geographic data into a compact binary format based on protocol buffers, achieving 6-8x size reduction with fast encoding and decoding. It also ships CLI binaries (2geobuf, geobuf2, shp2geobuf) for converting between GeoJSON, Geobuf, and Shapefiles.

Use cases

• compress geo files to smaller binary format
• convert shapefile to compact binary encoding
• reduce size of geographic data for web transfer
• encode geo as protobuf
• decode geobuf back to geo
• serve large map datasets efficiently

When to choose

• you need to shrink large GeoJSON datasets for storage or network transfer
• you want fast, nearly lossless binary encoding of geographic data without tiling or projection
• you need CLI conversion between GeoJSON, Shapefile, and binary formats

When to avoid

• you need lossless coordinate precision beyond 6 decimal places (~10cm)
• you need tiled, projected vector tiles for map rendering (use Mapbox Vector Tiles instead)
• you require a fully frozen, guaranteed-stable encoding schema

Facets

library · maturity stable

serialization compression files browser cli cross-platform geo protobuf binary-format geospatial-data shapefile geospatial maps nodejs

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mapbox/geobuf")