Offline maps, compared on the licence rather than the demo.
Offline support is easy to demonstrate and hard to compare, because the differences sit in the terms rather than in the feature list. These are the four that decide whether a fleet can actually run on a map it has already downloaded.
How to read this page
The right-hand column quotes or paraphrases published documentation, terms or pricing from Mapbox, and every row links to the page it came from so you can check it yourself. Where we could not source a claim from Mapbox's own documentation or product terms, the row is not on this page rather than worded more vaguely. Terms change, and quotes name the edition they were read in. If you find a row that has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it.How much you may hold offline
Offline data ships as whole signed territory packages, a region at a time, with no cap on the number of packages a device may hold.
Downloads are metered in bytes per identity per calendar month against your plan allowance, so the constraint is how much you pull in a month, not how many pieces you keep.
The Maps SDK offline guides for Android and iOS list a tile pack limit under Limitations: the cumulative number of unique tile packs cannot exceed 750.
Mapbox Product Terms (2026-07), clause 2.8.1, adds that on mobile devices a customer shall only cache up to the limits set in the mobile SDKs, and shall not circumvent or change those limits.
Preloading a region before the journey
Territory packages are built to be installed ahead of time. Layers are content addressed, so two versions sharing a layer share the blob, and a device fetches only what changed, verifies it and applies it with an atomic swap.
The same path works air-gapped: mirror the channel directory inside your network and devices update from that.
The default restrictions require customers to query the services only in response to human user queries and application interactions, and not to perform bulk or automated queries, scrape or systematically download licensed map content, or export, download, cache or store it, except as the Product Terms expressly permit.
Mapbox Product Terms (2026-07), clause 1.9. The express permission that follows is the on-device caching carve-out in clause 2.8.1, set out in the next row.
How long the data stays usable on the device
A package verifies offline and does not expire. There is no licence server to reach and no clock that stops the map working.
Manifests are signed with ed25519 and every layer is content addressed with BLAKE3 inside the signed manifest, so a device can verify exactly what it holds with no network at all.
Map content delivered through a Mapping API may be cached on an end user's device, but caching is limited to thirty days on the same device that made the request, and the on-device cache must be populated directly from the Mapping APIs.
Mapbox Product Terms (2026-07), clause 2.8.1.
Keeping a routing result
With a territory installed, search, routing and turn-by-turn guidance all run on the device against the local package, so a route is computed where it is needed rather than fetched and retained.
Offline routing needs an installed territory; the hosted API remains available for everything online.
Customers shall not export, download, cache or store results from any request to a Navigation API.
Mapbox Product Terms (2026-07), clause 2.10.1. Unlike the map content rule above, this one carries no on-device carve-out.
Read the offline model before you design around it.
The package format, the signing model, the update channel and the air-gapped path are all documented, so you can check every line above against the specification rather than against a sales deck.
Other comparisons: the full list.