ESRI vs MapBox

Esri is an international supplier of Geographic Information System software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications. The company is headquartered in Redlands, California. The company was founded as Environmental Systems Research Institute in 1969 as a land-use consulting firm. Esri products have 40.7% of the global market share. The company has 10 regional offices in the U.S. and a network of 80 international distributors, with about a million users in 200 countries. The firm has 3,000 employees in the U.S., and is still privately held by the founders. In 2006, revenues were about $660 million.

Mapbox is one of the biggest providers of custom online maps for major websites such as Foursquare, Pinterest, Evernote, the Financial Times and Uber Technologies. Mapbox is the creator of, or a significant contributor to many popular open source mapping libraries and applications, including the MBTiles specification, the TileMill cartography IDE, the Leaflet JavaScript library, the CartoCSS map styling language and parser, and the mapbox.js JavaScript library.