Manifold® Geocoding Tools Compared to MapInfo® MapMarker®

Manifold System's $50 Geocoding Tools extension (only $30 when purchased as a bundle with a Manifold license) provides more power and greater sophistication than MapInfo's $8,950 MapMarker product. MapMarker is a popular legacy geocoder that uses TIGER 2004 as a data set as does Manifold.

	Manifold 8.00	MapMarker 11.2
Product pricing openly published on the web?	Yes - Complete Manifold pricing and discount structure is published on the web at the Products page. All customers pay the same price with the same discount rules applied to all. Your first sign you are being ripped off is when a vendor does not disclose pricing on the web. What are they afraid of you learning? That they charge too much for obsolete product? That someone else is getting a better deal than you do? The moment a vendor prices a product to you based upon how much they think they can squeeze out of you, it's clear they are willing to take advantage of you. Why get into a business relationship like that?	No - MapInfo does not publish prices on the web but instead forces users to get quotes from resellers. Pricing in this web page arise from a recent web search to locate pricing for MapInfo products.
Geocoder Price and Configuration	$50 - Price for entire US coverage via the Geocoding Tools extension to Manifold 8.00. Manifold's geocoder is an optional extension Manifold System 8.00, a general purpose GIS package. Manifold System Personal Edition is $245 - Turning on the geocoding option within Manifold System costs $50 to install the Geocoding Tools extension. Therefore, if you do not have Manifold System but you wish to use the Manifold geocoder your cost will be $295 - You can buy Geocoding Tools at the same time you buy Manifold System, or if you don't need street address geocoding right away you can always buy Geocoding Tools later for only $50. When acquiring the Geocoding Tools package at the same time as a Manifold System Edition, a discounted bundle price is available that reduces the cost of Geocoding Tools to a mere $30 - Wow! Option: Instead of using Manifold's geocoding data product, users may install Microsoft's MapPoint 2004 or 2006 product (typical price $250) which will also work with the Geocoding Tools extension. Installing Microsoft's European edition of MapPoint will add street address geocoding capabilities for 11 European countries.	$8,950 - Price for entire US coverage. MapMarker is a standalone geocoder that does not include a GIS. Adding MapInfo Professional GIS ($1490) increases the total price of MapInfo GIS + geocoding to $10440 - MapMarker is also available with limited data for a six state region ($3,250) or for one state ($1,495). Prices are taken from web pages quoting price found in a recent search.
Dataset upon which Geocoder is based	TIGER 2004 (Data released by Census Bureau in Spring, 2005) Optional: When MapPoint is used as an optional geocoder the system uses GDT / NavTech / Microsoft geocoding database for Canada, US and 11 European countries. Manifold can also do geocoding using user-supplied data sets in either street address range or point location formats.	TIGER 2004 (Data released by Census Bureau in Spring, 2005) Optional: Enhanced version utilizing TeleAtlas data may be purchased (approximately $16,495 total) for increased accuracy.
Entire US provided by default?	Yes - The Manifold Geocoding Database automatically installs the entire US by default for all licensees.	No - Requires CD ROM unlocking to unlock the entire US, six state pack or individual states.
Use Microsoft MapPoint data for enhanced US geocoding?	Yes - Manifold can automatically use MapPoint (approximately $250 from Microsoft) for enhanced US geocoding. Read Help topic...	No - Cannot use MapPoint for US geocoding; however, optional enhanced data may be purchased (approximately $15,000 total) for increased accuracy similar to MapPoint.
Canadian geocoding at low cost?	Yes - Manifold can automatically use MapPoint North American Edition (approximately $250 from Microsoft, includes US data) for geocoding Canadian street addresses. Read Help topic...	No - Cannot use MapPoint for Canadian geocoding
European geocoding at low cost?	Yes - Manifold can automatically use MapPoint European Edition for geocoding in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Read Help topic...	No - Cannot use MapPoint for European geocoding; however, optional data may be available to allow European geocoding at very high cost, typically thousands of dollars per country.
Oracle Spatial integrated geocoding?	Yes - Manifold can automatically use the Oracle Spatial geocoder as a geocoding server data source for users working with Oracle Spatial. Read Help topic...	No - Cannot use the Oracle Spatial geocoder as a geocoding server.
Web-based geocoding server integration?	Yes - Manifold can automatically use web-based geocoding servers such as the Virtual Earth or geocoding.us geocoding servers. Any desired geocoding server may be added using the open Manifold geocoding server interface. Read Help topic...	No - Cannot use either the Virtual Earth or geocoding.us web services. Does not support adding user-defined web-based geocoding servers via an open interface.
Automatically generate county maps from geocoding data with streets, rails and hydrography?	Yes - Manifold can generate county maps from the free Manifold US geocoding database. Read Help example topic...	No - MapMarker is not a GIS and cannot generate county maps from the geocoding database.
Native 64-bit operation on x64 Windows systems, including Vista x64?	Yes - Requires purchase of x64 Manifold versions, which are priced $50 higher than 32-bit versions. Geocoding Tools for 64-bit operation is still only $50, or only $30 when purchased at the same time as Manifold System.	No - Native 64-bit Windows operation is not supported.
Multithreaded DBMS Access with Multicore Processors?	Yes - All Manifold editions utilize multiple processor cores and multiple processor sockets for DBMS access using multiple threads.	No
Coverage	50 States, D.C, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, US Virgin Islands, Mariana Islands Optional: Coverage via Microsoft MapPoint North American edition (approximately $250 from web retailers) includes Canada and US. Coverage with MapPoint European edition (approximately $250 from web retailers) includes 11 European countries - Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.	50 States, D.C, Puerto Rico Optional: Coverage at considerably higher cost via other MapMarker products is available for some other countries, including Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Prices for these products are so high they are not published on the web.
US Street Address Geocoding?	Yes	Yes
Geocode large tables in batch mode?	Yes	Yes
Geocode interactively?	Yes	Yes
Geocode remote tables via ODBC?	Yes	Yes
Spatial geometry direct connection to Oracle Spatial?	Yes - Requires Manifold Enterprise Edition ($395) or above.	No - MapMarker has no native spatial DBMS stack.
Spatial geometry direct connection to ESRI SDE or Personal Geodatabases?	Yes - Requires Manifold Enterprise Edition ($395) or above.	No - MapMarker has no native spatial DBMS stack.
Spatial geometry direct connection to IBM DB2 with IBM Spatial Extender?	Yes - Requires Manifold Enterprise Edition ($395) or above.	No - MapMarker has no native spatial DBMS stack.
Spatial geometry direct connection to PostgreSQL / PostGIS?	Yes - Requires Manifold Enterprise Edition ($395) or above.	No - MapMarker has no native spatial DBMS stack.
Spatial geometry direct connection to SQL Server 2008 spatial (Katmai)?	Yes - Requires Manifold Enterprise Edition ($395) or above.	No - MapMarker has no native spatial DBMS stack.
Serve multiple simultaneous geocoding results from a single geocoding engine?	Yes	Yes
Interactively geocode unmatched records by choosing a best match from a list of suggestions?	Yes	Yes
Automatically extract street address, city, state, zip fields from a single address field?	Yes	No
Optional standardization capability to clean addresses before geocoding?	Yes - Both Automatic and interactive standardization available.	No
Use geocoder within SQL statements?	Yes - It's easy to use the geocoding engine within ordinary SQL queries using extensions such as: CloseToAddress - Within a given distance of an address. CloseToZip - Within a given distance of a ZIP code. DistanceToAddress - Return the distance between an object and a given address. DistanceToZip - Return the distance between an object and a given ZIP code. LocateAddressLat - Return the latitude of a given address. LocateAddressLon - Return the longitude of a given address. LocateZipLat - Return the latitude of a given ZIP code. LocateZipLon - Return the longitude of a given ZIP code. For example, to find all dealers within 10 miles of ZIP code 94301 we could use: `SELECT * FROM Dealers WHERE DistanceToZip(ID,"94301","mi") <= 10;` Manifold SQL geocoding extensions automatically cache returned results from a geocoder request for faster performance.	No - MapMarker does not understand SQL. MapMarker is not part of an integrated system that include SQL, so it does not have this important capability.
Write back user corrections to source address table?	Yes - This is a critically important function, because cleaning errors in source addresses when interactively reviewing unmatched records saves a lot of time.	No - MapMarker's inability to propagate user corrections back into the source address list is a major annoyance. Each corrected address must again be found and corrected, by hand, using some other tool after geocoding has been accomplished.
Standardize only selected records from a table?	Yes	No
Geocode only selected records from a table?	Yes - Manifold can geocode any selection of records no matter where they may be in a table of addresses. This allows using the Query toolbar or SQL queries to find and geocode target addresses even if they are not contiguous.	Yes and No - MapMarker can geocode a contiguous range of records, but not selected records that may be scattered throughout the table. This is far less powerful than geocoding a selection but nonetheless still allows geocoding a subset of records.
Normalize address nomenclature to standard abbreviations?	Yes - Manifold can automatically convert long state names into official postal abbreviations and convert words such as "Road" into standardized abbreviations such as "Rd".	No
Automatically repair case errors?	Yes - Manifold can repair elementary errors in case, converting "525 univErsity AVenue" to "525 University Ave"	No
Detect and repair missing zip codes?	Yes - Missing ZIP codes are extremely common in many address mailing lists, for example, like addresses harvested from telephone directories. Manifold can automatically use street, city and state information to find the right ZIP code and add it to the address record.	No - MapMarker can detect missing ZIP codes but can not repair them in the source table of addresses being geocoded.
Address cleaning checks for impossible address combinations?	Yes - The standardize/cleaning pass can be used to automatically check for impossible combinations of streets, towns and zip codes, including unknown town names, street names and other clearly inaccurate data.	No
Search and replace within any field or within all fields at once?	Yes	No
Trim extraneous spaces from left or right side of address fields?	Yes	No
Copy or otherwise move "tokens" (parts of addresses) between columns?	Yes	No
Append or prepend text to address fields?	Yes	No
Force address fields to upper, lower, sentence or title case for proper capitalization?	Yes	No
Use Soundex ("sounds like") to find address records?	Yes	No
Use "more like this" to automatically find similar address records?	Yes	No
Geocode tables that bring in address fields using relations with other tables or programmatic lookup?	Yes	No
Quickly find duplicates, including all duplicates except the first example?	Yes	No
Query toolbar to rapidly find records using various search criteria?	Yes	No
Select only some records for editing / transformation / cleaning?	Yes	No
Quick geocode preview?	Yes - Manifold presents alternatives to unmatched records in a list from which choices can be made.	Yes - MapMarker has a nice visual pre-viewer to help choose from suggested alternatives to unmatched records.
ZIP code centroid matching?	Yes - Geocoding to a ZIP code only will match to that ZIP code centroid.	Yes
Create output columns on the fly?	Yes - All columns.	Yes - But limited to only latitude, longitude and status columns until the table is opened in MapMarker.
Custom address dictionaries allowed?	Yes	Yes
Airport geocoding?	Yes - Requires using a "points of interest" airports data set.	Yes - A built in function for those who need to geocode to airport three letter identifiers.
Street intersection geocoding?	No - But pre-geocoded street intersections may be obtained and used via the Census Bureau's street intersections CD. Yes - when the optional MapPoint geocoder is used.	Yes - An option allows geocoding of street intersections.
Application interface?	Yes - Manifold includes a built in development environment for Microsoft standard ActiveX scripting plus interfaces to any standard Microsoft development language. With no other purchase required users can program within Manifold using Visual Basic scripting, JavaScript, Python and PERL as well as .NET languages such as C#, VB .NET and Iron Python.	Yes - MapMarker includes an interface for MapInfo's proprietary MapBasic language and also a COM object that can be called from Microsoft languages and ActiveX scripts; however, unlike Manifold, MapMarker does not provide any built in programming capability.
Automatic address standardization into standard address forms?	Yes	No
Quick test of candidate address in interactive mode?	Yes - Manifold allows fast editing of candidate addresses to check against suggested addresses.	Yes - MapMarker provides this via a quick find tool.
Automatic report of status for each geocoded record?	Yes	Yes
User specifiable search level acceptance?	Yes - User control allowed of match acceptance in automatic mode with the following choices: any error - Does not process record unless it is a perfect match in all fields. Equivalent to setting an "unknown building" error. unknown street name, possible misspelling - Matches to Zip and City and does not process record unless the street name is an exact match. unknown street name, no similar names - Matches to Zip and City, and attempts to match to similar street names if an exact match to the street name cannot be found. Uses "Soundex" and similar algorithms to attempt to find the right street in case of a street name misspelling. This is the default setting. unknown zip - Do not process record if the zip code cannot be found. critical error - Stop processing only on problems with an incomplete geocoding database or on hardware failure.	Yes
Automatic offset of geocoded records?	Yes - Manifold allows geocoded records to be automatically offset to the left or right side of the street centerline by a specified distance using user-specified units of measure.	Yes
Multiple file formats?	Yes - Manifold can import or link to tables in all common Microsoft file formats, including: CSV - Text formats such as .asc, .txt. DB - Borland Paradox DBF - dBase, FoxPro DSN - Microsoft data source connection. HTML - tables in HTML pages MDB - Microsoft Access 2000 and Access 97 UDL - Microsoft Universal Data Link WKx - Lotus XLS - Microsoft Excel ODBC - Any ODBC driver. OLE DB - Any OLE DB provider ADO.NET - Microsoft's .NET connection. Linked tables allow geocoding of remote tables in any of the data sources above, including common databases such as Access, Informix, SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL, Interbase, etc.	Yes - MapMarker can read tables in: TAB - MapInfo table DBF - dBase ODBC - Remote tables. Via ODBC MapMarker allows geocoding of remote tables, including in databases such as Microsoft Access, Informix, SQL Server, Sybase and Oracle. Although these are the only ones listed in the MapInfo web site presumably other DBMS products with ODBC drivers would be included.
Includes built-in scripting capability to automate management of address records, geocoding or updating of address records?	Yes	No
Write update queries to modify address records automatically?	Yes	No
Include full SQL capability to explore address record tables?	Yes	No
Use geocoder within Internet Map Server pages without any programming?	Yes - Because Manifold includes the Manifold Internet Map Server within the same application as the geocoder, all geocoder functions may be used within a web site that serves maps via the Internet Map Server. This is most helpful in applications such as dealer locator web sites when the geocoder is invoked by spatial queries built into the project. No programming is required for such functions, although more sophisticated web sites could utilize geocoder features programmatically. The Business Tools option ($95) for Manifold System allows optimal routing and driving directions.	No - Because MapMarker does not include an Internet map server engine it does not have built-in web site capability without programming. It is unknown what level of programming is required to use MapMarker from a web site.
How does performance compare?	Not as good - For comparable hardware, most users seem to think that street address geocoding in Manifold runs about four time slower than MapMarker. Many factors go into performance: comparing a 64-bit machine running 64-bit Manifold against a 32-bit machine running MapMarker will reduce the speed disadvantage of Manifold, for example.	Excellent - MapMarker sets the benchmark for street address geocoder throughput in GIS applications. Although many factors go into performance, overall few people complain about its speed.

MapInfo's MapMarker geocoder product is a typical example of an overpriced legacy GIS geocoding product. It's difficult to imagine what drives people to spend nearly nine thousand dollars on a TIGER 2004 geocoder that is based on free government data, but we suppose it has something to do with not realizing more modern choices are available. We're proud to report that the Manifold geocoder offers lots more for only $30 to $50 above the cost of Manifold System Personal Edition (a mere $245). In fact, even if you don't care about GIS at all and only need a geocoder the $275 price of Manifold with the Geocoding Tools option will save you almost eight thousand seven hundred dollars! Better yet, on top of all that savings you can get a far superior product.

A key advantage of Manifold's geocoding engine is that it is a built in part of Manifold System. That means geocoding work can benefit from the immense set of Manifold table management capabilities that are part of Manifold System. As any person experienced in geocoding knows, half the battle is getting clean addresses with which to work. Manifold has a vast array of capabilities that can be deployed to massage address records into proper shape. In addition, the Manifold geocoder has a dedicated Standardize command that is designed to clean address records and to normalize them into a standard form.

The built-in nature of geocoding in Manifold also means that geocoding in Manifold gains immense functionality from leveraging thousands of powerful GIS capabilities that are also built into the Manifold environment. MapMarker, in contrast, is only a standalone geocoder and has no significant GIS functionality. That is why numerous features which are expected in a modern GIS geocoding environment, such as direct storage of geocoded geometry into modern spatial databases, or web integration are not available in MapMarker but are available in Manifold. For example, because Manifold geocoding is an integral part of Manifold System it is also an integral part of Manifold IMS, the Manifold Internet Map Server. This makes it possible to create address-aware Internet map web sites such as dealer locator web sites.

It's true that MapMarker runs significantly faster than Manifold, all other things being equal. However, the cost difference is so great and large jobs tend to take so long anyway in either MapMarker or Manifold that most users will launch really large jobs at the end of the day, so with either system the job will be done when you come in the next morning. Manifold continues to get faster with every release - at some point, possibly as early as late 2008, performance probably will become equal. Until then, take the money you save on MapMarker and use it to deploy dramatically faster hardware all throughout your office!

Please Comment on this Comparison

For MapInfo fans - If there is something in the above comparison that is wrong or unfair, please tell us. This page is based on a comparison created using data published by MapInfo on their web site. However, it is certainly possible that either we or the MapInfo web site may have missed something in MapMarker that you know about. To the best of our knowledge the comparison does a good job of comparing the two. If there is something MapMarker does that Manifold does not do, please tell us so we can publish it. Despite the rip-off price, MapMarker is a cool program and acknowledging MapMarker strong points makes Manifold's winning edge all that more credible.

For Manifold fans - The above comparison misses many things that Manifold does better than MapMarker, especially in database and table functionality used to clean address records. It's just too much for one web page. If we missed something you think is especially important please let us know.

Please send comments to sales@manifold.net. Thanks!

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