Google Places API alternatives for showing reviews on a website

Most people who go looking for a Google Places API alternative are not unhappy with the API. They are unhappy with two specific things it does: it returns a maximum of five reviews per place, and it bills every one of those calls at Google's most expensive Places tier. Both of those are deliberate, both are documented, and neither changes on a paid plan.

So the useful question is not "what replaces the Places API" but "which job am I actually trying to finish". There are three, they have different answers, and only one of them needs an API at all.

Why people go looking for an alternative in the first place

Two limits send almost everybody here. The first is the review cap. Google's Places API reference states that a maximum of five reviews can be returned, sorted by relevance, and there is no pagination parameter, no offset and no sort option. You cannot request the five newest. You get five that Google considers most relevant, and that is the whole feed.

The second is the bill. Places API pricing is per field rather than per call, so the most expensive field in your request sets the price for the entire request. Asking for a name and an address bills the Place Details Essentials SKU at $5.00 per 1,000. Adding the reviews field moves the same call to Place Details Enterprise plus Atmosphere at $25.00 per 1,000, and the monthly free allowance drops from 10,000 calls to 1,000. Because the Maps Platform terms do not let you cache review content, a page that shows live Google reviews bills one call per view. A site with 10,000 monthly views of that page is looking at roughly $225 a month for five reviews. The full SKU table and worked costs are on the Google Places API pricing page.

The alternatives, and what each one is actually for

If the job is putting reviews on your own website

This is the majority case and it does not need an API. A review widget is a script tag: you connect your profiles once, choose a layout, paste the embed, and the reviews render. There is no Cloud project, no billing account, no field mask to get wrong, no attribution logic to build, and no per-view charge that grows as the page succeeds. That last point is the one worth sitting with. With the Places API, a landing page doing well costs you more money every month. With a widget, it does not.

The practical difference shows up in what you can display, too. The API hands you five reviews of one Google location. A widget can pull your Google reviews alongside Trustpilot, G2 and reviews collected directly, and show them together, which is closer to what a buyer actually wants to see. If that is the shape of your problem, the Google reviews widget page covers the setup, and the review widget page covers the layouts.

If the job is getting your own reviews into a warehouse

Use the Google Business Profile API. It covers only profiles you own and have verified, but for those it returns the complete review history including your replies, and there is no per-call charge once you are approved. The catch is the approval itself: it is a manual application to Google with published prerequisites, and it takes as long as it takes. The requirements and the quota trick that tells you whether you were approved are on the Google Business Profile API page.

Once review data is landing in a warehouse on a schedule, the problem stops being retrieval and starts being trust. A rating column that silently changes type, or a sync that quietly stops on a Tuesday, will keep feeding a dashboard that looks fine, and knowing which report breaks when a field changes upstream is a data lineage question rather than a reviews one. Worth solving before the numbers reach a board deck.

If the job is place data for businesses you do not own

Here the alternatives are real and often cheaper. Foursquare Places, HERE and Mapbox all sell venue search, geocoding and place attributes, and OpenStreetMap gives you open POI data for nothing if you are willing to host the query layer. Any of them can replace the Places API for lookup, autocomplete and category search.

What none of them can do is give you Google's reviews. Google review text belongs to Google, it is not syndicated to other place data vendors, and the five review cap exists precisely because Google is not in the business of exporting its review corpus. Any tool promising you full Google review histories for arbitrary businesses is scraping Maps, which breaks the Maps Platform terms and puts your API key and Cloud project at risk. That risk is not theoretical, and it is a strange thing to accept for competitor review data you cannot legally publish anyway.

How much does the Google Places API cost per month?

For calls that include reviews, $25.00 per 1,000 after a free allowance of 1,000 calls a month. That works out to about $225 a month at 10,000 review-bearing calls, $1,225 at 50,000 and $2,475 at 100,000. Volume discounts start above 100,000 monthly calls, dropping the rate to $20.00 per 1,000, but most sites hit an uncomfortable bill long before they reach the discount.

Is there a free Google Places API alternative?

For place data, yes: OpenStreetMap through Overpass is genuinely free, and Foursquare and HERE both run free tiers. For Google review text, no. The closest thing to free is the Google Business Profile API, which has no per-call charge, but it only works for locations you own and have verified, and it requires manual approval first.

Can I get more than 5 Google reviews with a different API?

Not for a business you do not own. The five review cap is a Places API product decision, and no third party licenses Google's review corpus, so there is no compliant API that returns more. For your own verified locations the Business Profile API returns everything. For anyone else's, five is the ceiling through every legitimate route.

Which alternative should you actually pick

Work backwards from where the reviews need to end up. On a web page, use a widget and stop paying per view. In a warehouse or a BI dashboard, apply for Business Profile API access and accept the wait. In a map, a store locator or a search box, price out Foursquare, HERE or Mapbox against the Places SKUs, because for pure lookup they are usually cheaper. The one route worth ruling out entirely is scraping, and the one assumption worth dropping early is that some vendor out there quietly sells the full Google review feed. Nobody does.

If you are comparing the metered options across vendors rather than just Google, the side by side numbers for Trustpilot, Yelp, TripAdvisor and G2 are in review API pricing compared, and the two official Google routes are broken down on the Google Reviews API page.