The best Google Sheets add-ons for maps, geocoding and distances

The short answer

If you just want the pick, here it is. Every add-on below is free to install; the differences are in what the free plan covers and what each one is built for.

• Best interactive, filterable map: Mapping Sheets. The most installed map viewer in the Marketplace, with filters, icons by category and a search radius. Free for up to 50 locations per map; Premium is $25 per user a month or $150 a year.
• Best free all-rounder with formulas: InstaMaps. Formulas such as =GEOCODE(), =TRAVEL_TIME() and a live map in a cell, with no API key and no paid plan listed. It’s new, with few reviews so far.
• Simplest free geocode-and-share: Geocode by Awesome Table. Pick the address column, get latitude and longitude columns and a shareable map. Over a million installs, but its listing hasn’t been updated since April 2024.
• Most powerful, for Google Maps API users: Maps for Sheets. Places search, routes, isolines, boundaries, heatmaps and KML/GeoJSON export, if you bring your own API keys.
• Best for cleaning up and geocoding big, messy address lists: MapRows (ours). A status and match confidence on every row, pause and resume, results you’re allowed to keep. Its map is a static image, not an interactive map.
• Best for a one-off bulk geocoding job you’d rather pay for once: Sheets Geocoder. 100 free geocodes, then credit packs from $12 for 1,000 that never expire.
• Free and no add-on at all: Google My Maps for an interactive map of up to 2,000 rows per import, and a short Apps Script for geocoding about 1,000 addresses a day.

How we compared them

We started from the add-ons that come up when you search the Google Workspace Marketplace and Google for “map”, “geocode” and “distance” in Google Sheets, and the ones that the top comparison articles recommend. We kept the ones that are installable today, work inside Google Sheets, and are still maintained or still heavily used. Web mapping platforms that import a sheet (there are many, mostly priced per user per month for sales teams) are a different kind of product, and we left them out.

For each add-on we read, on October 29, 2026:

• its live Marketplace listing: the average rating and how many people rated it, the install count, the pricing label and the date the listing was last updated;
• its own pricing or help page for the free limits and the paid prices;
• what it needs from you: an API key, a sign-up, or permission to read your email or Drive files.

What we didn’t do: we didn’t buy any competitor’s paid plan, and we haven’t measured anyone’s geocoding accuracy against a test set, so you won’t find accuracy percentages here. Where a fact comes from the vendor’s own site rather than something you can see in the listing, we say so. A rating from 4 people tells you much less than one from 800, so we give the count next to every rating.

Side-by-side comparison

Ratings, installs and prices as shown on October 29, 2026. “Lookups” means addresses (or coordinates) converted.

What the table can’t show is that these tools don’t all do the same thing. Two of them are mainly map viewers, two are mainly geocoders, and two try to do a bit of everything. That’s the first decision.

First, which job do you have?

“Map my spreadsheet” usually means one of four jobs, and the best tool is different for each:

1. Geocoding: turning a column of addresses into latitude and longitude (and the reverse, coordinates into addresses). Almost every other job depends on this step. Our guide to geocoding addresses in Google Sheets covers the free ways to do it in detail.
2. A map people can look at: pins on an interactive map you can zoom, filter and share with a link, for a store list, a client list or event venues. See how to map addresses from Google Sheets for the step-by-step free routes.
3. Distances and travel times: how far each customer is from a depot, which store is nearest, or the driving miles between two addresses. Covered in our guides to distance between addresses and finding the nearest location.
4. Routes: putting a day’s stops in a sensible driving order.

Then two questions narrow it down. How many rows? Fifty addresses fit in almost any free plan; 20,000 don’t. And is it once or every week? A one-off job suits a pay-once credit pack or a few days on a free daily allowance; a list that changes every week suits a subscription or a free tool you can rerun.

1. Mapping Sheets: best interactive, filterable map

Mapping Sheets by theXS is the long-standing favourite for turning rows into a proper interactive map. On the Marketplace it shows 948K+ installs and 3.6 stars from 843 ratings, and the listing was updated in September 2026.

How it works. It’s a two-step tool. You pick three columns, for the title, the filter and the location (an address or coordinates), and click BUILD. The add-on geocodes the rows and writes a data file into your Google Drive. Then VIEW opens theXS’s Mapping web app, which reads that file and plots your rows on a Google Map. Each pin opens an info window with the row’s details.

What’s good. Filtering is the reason to choose it: the filter column groups pins under their own icons, and you can add check-box or slider filters on other columns, search across all the data as you type, and draw a circle around a place to show only the locations inside it. The Mapping web app is free to view, with no sign-in, so anyone with the link can see the map.

Price and limits. According to theXS’s own page, the Basic plan is free for up to 50 locations per map. The Advanced Premium plan removes that limit and adds the advanced features; it costs 25 USD per user per month, or 150 USD per user per year (12.50 a month), and theXS offers it at no charge to Google Workspace for Education and nonprofit domains.

Watch out for. Fifty locations is a small free allowance: a list of 51 stores already needs Premium. Because the map is drawn from a file in your Drive, the map updates when you build again, not live as you type. Geocoding runs through Google, and theXS documents a Google daily geocoding quota error for big sheets, so very large lists may take more than one day. And remember the map link works for anyone who has it.

Best for: sharing a filterable map of up to a few thousand locations with colleagues or the public, where the map itself is the point.

2. InstaMaps: best free all-rounder with formulas

InstaMaps takes a different approach: instead of a sidebar, it adds spreadsheet formulas. It’s new, with 1K+ installs and 4.25 stars from 4 ratings, and its listing was updated in late October 2026, so it’s actively developed.

What it does. According to its listing, =GEOCODE(A2:A50) spills latitude and longitude next to your addresses; =INSTAMAP(A2:D50, "My map") puts a live, shareable map in a cell that updates when the sheet changes; =TRAVEL_TIME(), =DISTANCE() and =DISTANCE_MATRIX() give road distances and drive times. It also covers reverse geocoding, radius search and nearest location, splitting a list into territories, and multi-stop routes (its route link handles up to 100 stops, by its own documentation). There are extras most people won’t need, such as flood-zone and natural-hazard lookups for US and UK addresses.

Price and limits. The Marketplace lists it as free of charge, and needs no API key or login to try. Its help page says maps, formulas and geocoding are free “with a generous daily allowance”, and that you can ask for a higher limit for a big list. It doesn’t publish the allowance on that page, so check it in the add-on before you plan a large job. For ranges over 400 rows it recommends its menu command instead of formulas, to avoid formula time limits.

Watch out for. Four ratings are too few to judge reliability, and a free product from a small developer can change its terms. Formulas that call a web service recalculate, so freeze results you want to keep (copy, then Paste special → Values only). If you share the sheet, the live map in the cell is shareable too.

Best for: people who like formulas and want geocoding, distances and a quick map for free, on lists of a few hundred rows.

3. Geocode by Awesome Table: simplest free geocode-and-share

Geocode by Awesome Table, from Talarian, is the add-on many tutorials still point to, and it shows: 1M+ installs and 3.85 stars from 486 ratings.

How it works. Open Extensions → Geocode, choose the column with your addresses and start. It adds latitude and longitude columns and gives you a link to a map view powered by Awesome Table. The map clusters pins when there are many, has filters built from your columns (lists, dates, numbers), and a table under the map: click a row and the map centres on it. Its listing says it uses Google’s services and retries a broader search when Google doesn’t recognise an address.

Price and limits. The add-on is free to install, and the listing’s pricing field says “Not available”. The listing doesn’t state a daily limit. For comparison, Google’s own Apps Script quota for geocoding is 1,000 calls a day on a personal account and 10,000 on Workspace, so if a big sheet stops partway, a daily quota is the likely reason and the rest can run the next day.

Watch out for. The listing was last updated on April 1, 2024. That doesn’t mean it’s broken, and plenty of people still use it, but you’re relying on a tool that isn’t visibly being worked on, and the reviews are mixed. Google’s terms also limit how long Google geocoding results may be stored and say they shouldn’t be shown on non-Google maps, which matters if you plan to reuse the coordinates elsewhere.

Best for: a quick, free job: a few hundred addresses, coordinates in the sheet and a filterable map link to share, today.

4. Maps for Sheets: most powerful, if you bring your own API keys

Maps for Sheets, by My Routes, is the toolkit for people who know the Google Maps Platform. It shows 1M+ installs and 3.49 stars from 61 ratings; the listing was updated in August 2026.

What it does. More than any other add-on here. Static maps with heatmaps and shapes inserted into the sheet, administrative boundaries, Street View and place photos, place search and nearby places with details (rating, opening hours, price level), routes, isolines (everywhere within a given drive time), address components, and GeoJSON and KML downloads. Much of it works as custom functions, such as gsNearbyPlaces() and gsFindPlaces2().

Price and limits. It comes with shared Google, Microsoft and HERE API keys for a limited trial. After that, you add your own Google Maps API key (and a Microsoft or HERE key for boundaries and isolines). You then pay two things: the add-on subscription, which its site says is assigned per spreadsheet for trial and one-sheet plans, with every user of in-cell formulas needing their own subscription; and the API usage itself, billed by Google or the other provider. Google gives a free monthly usage allowance per API, but you need a billing account to get a key. We couldn’t find the subscription price published on its site; it’s shown inside the add-on.

Watch out for. Setup: creating a Google Cloud project, enabling half a dozen APIs and restricting the key takes some time if you’ve never done it. Costs are harder to predict because they depend on your API usage. And Google’s usual storage and display rules for Maps data apply.

Best for: analysts and developers who want Places data, isolines or boundaries in a sheet, and are comfortable with a Google Cloud key and its bill.

5. MapRows (ours): best for big, messy address lists

We make MapRows, so read this section knowing that. It’s new: on the Marketplace it has no reviews yet and too few installs to show a count, and that’s a fair reason to be cautious.

What it does. From a sidebar, you pick an address column (or several, such as street, city, state and ZIP) and MapRows writes latitude, longitude and a clean formatted address into new columns to the right, plus optional parts such as city, county, state, postcode and country. It also reverse geocodes coordinates into addresses, measures distance between two columns, and inserts a map image of your points on a new sheet. A free formula, =MAPROWS_DISTANCE(lat1, lng1, lat2, lng2, "mi"), gives straight-line distance with no lookups and no limit.

Where it’s different. It’s built for long, untidy lists:

• every row gets a status (OK, LOW_CONFIDENCE, NO_MATCH, EMPTY_INPUT, INVALID_INPUT or ERROR) and a match confidence, so you can filter the rows that need a second look instead of trusting every pin;
• progress is saved as it goes: when you reach the daily allowance it pauses, and resumes from the next unfinished row after the reset, without charging you twice for finished rows;
• it never changes your existing columns, only adds new ones;
• results come from Geoapify using OpenStreetMap data, under terms that let you keep the coordinates and use them on any map;
• it reads only the columns you choose, keeps no copy of your data, and doesn’t read your email address or other account data.

Price and limits. Free: 100 lookups a day, straight-line distance and maps of up to 25 points. Pro: $9 a month or $59 a year, tax included, with 2,500 lookups a day (fair use), driving, walking and cycling distance and travel time, maps of up to 200 points, and the option to use your own Geoapify key for unlimited volume.

Where it’s weaker, honestly. The map is a static image in the sheet, not an interactive map you can filter or share with a link; for that, Mapping Sheets, InstaMaps or Google My Maps are better. Its free daily allowance is smaller than some free tools, and OpenStreetMap data can be patchier than Google’s for brand-new streets or rural addresses in some countries (the confidence score is there to catch exactly those rows). And it doesn’t do routes with several stops.

Best for: geocoding hundreds or thousands of addresses you need to trust and keep, such as a CRM export, member list or property list, and measuring distances from them.

6. Sheets Geocoder: best for a pay-once bulk job

Geocoder for Google Sheets, sold as Sheets Geocoder by Codeprint, does one thing: forward and reverse geocoding of a selected range. It’s small so far: 191 installs and 5 stars from a single rating, with the listing updated in September 2026.

What’s good. The pricing suits a one-off job. Its pricing page lists 100 free geocodes, one time (not per day), then credit packs of 1,000 for $12 or 5,000 for $29, paid once, that never expire. For regular work, Pro is $34.99 a month or $174.99 a year, for up to 75,000 rows a calendar month. You choose which fields to write (latitude, longitude, formatted address, city, region, postal code, country, match precision and status), and large paid jobs run in the background. No API key is needed: its site says free lookups go to Google and paid ones to Radar.

Watch out for. Every valid row uses a credit, including duplicates and no-match rows, so remove duplicate addresses first. There’s no map. The free allowance is a one-off 100, and it’s tied to your Google account email, which the add-on reads.

Best for: geocoding a few thousand addresses once, when you’d rather pay $12 or $29 than subscribe.

Free options without an add-on

Before installing anything, it’s worth knowing that Google already gives you three free tools, and for many lists they’re enough.

Google My Maps (google.com/mymaps) makes an interactive map from a Google Sheet or a CSV. Create a map, click Import on a layer, pick the sheet and tell it which column holds the address and which holds the title. You can style pins by a column, add layers and share the map with a link or embed it. Google’s help page says not to import files with more than 2,000 rows per layer. It doesn’t update automatically when the sheet changes; you reimport the layer, which keeps your styles. For most people who just want pins on a map, this is the best free answer, and our mapping guide walks through it.

The built-in Geo chart (Insert → Chart, then Geo chart) shades countries or US states by a number, such as sales by state. It doesn’t plot street addresses as pins, so it’s for regional summaries, not store lists.

Apps Script can geocode for free with Google’s built-in Maps service. A short custom function gives you latitude and longitude for an address in a cell, and a script can work down a whole column. Google’s published quota is 1,000 geocode calls a day on a personal account and 10,000 on Workspace, and the same for directions. Our geocoding guide has a ready-made script, and the latitude and longitude formula guide shows the single-cell version. The same terms on storing Google results apply.

For US addresses only, the U.S. Census Bureau’s free batch geocoder takes a CSV of up to 10,000 addresses at a time and returns coordinates you can paste back into the sheet; the geocoding guide covers it too.

Distances and routes

Distance is where the add-ons differ most, and where it’s easiest to get a wrong number.

• Straight-line distance (“as the crow flies”) needs no lookup once you have coordinates, so it’s free almost everywhere: a haversine formula in plain Google Sheets, or MapRows’ free =MAPROWS_DISTANCE(). It’s right for “which store is nearest” and radius filters. Our distance between coordinates guide has the formula.
• Driving distance and time come from a routing service, so they cost a lookup. InstaMaps includes them free within its allowance, MapRows includes them on Pro, Maps for Sheets bills them to your Google key, and a free Apps Script function can ask Google for about 1,000 routes a day. Use driving distance for anything you claim or invoice, such as a mileage log: a straight line is always shorter than the drive.
• Multi-stop routes in an efficient order are a separate problem. InstaMaps does it in the sheet; Mapping Sheets’ premium plan has directions in its map viewer; MapRows doesn’t do it. For a daily delivery or field-service route, a dedicated route planner may serve you better than any sheet add-on.

Which one to pick

If you’re still unsure, combine them. A common, cheap setup is to geocode in the sheet with whichever geocoder fits your volume, check the low-confidence rows by hand, then import the sheet with coordinates into Google My Maps or Mapping Sheets for the map people actually look at. Coordinates import more reliably than addresses, because the map tool doesn’t have to guess.

Before you install anything

A few checks save most of the problems people hit with map add-ons:

1. Clean the addresses first. Put the city, state or region and the postcode in every address, or in their own columns. “12 Main St” exists in hundreds of towns; most bad pins are missing a city. If your addresses are all in one cell, our guide to splitting an address into columns helps.
2. Remove duplicates. Paid geocoders often charge per row, duplicates included. Use Data → Data cleanup → Remove duplicates on a copy of the address column first.
3. Count the rows against the free limit. 50 locations, 100 a day, 1,000 a day and 2,000 per import are very different limits. Know which one you’ll hit before you start.
4. Read the permissions screen. Some add-ons ask to see your email address or create files in your Drive. That’s often needed for how they work (a map file, a free allowance tied to your account), but you should know what you’re agreeing to, especially with customer data.
5. Check where the results may be used. Coordinates from Google’s geocoding come with Google’s terms on storage and on showing them only on Google maps. Results based on OpenStreetMap data can be kept and reused under its open licence, with attribution.
6. Freeze results you want to keep. Formula results recalculate. Copy the coordinates and use Paste special → Values only once you’re happy with them.

Common problems

Pins in the wrong country or the middle of the sea. The address was ambiguous, or latitude and longitude are swapped. Add the city and country to the address, limit matches to one country if the add-on allows it, and check the row: latitude is between −90 and 90, and for most of the US longitude is negative.

The add-on stops halfway through. You’ve hit a daily quota or Apps Script’s six-minute run limit. Tools that save progress (MapRows, Sheets Geocoder’s background jobs) carry on; with others, run the rest the next day starting from the first empty row.

The map doesn’t show new rows. Mapping Sheets and My Maps work from a snapshot. Build again in Mapping Sheets, or reimport the layer in My Maps. InstaMaps’ cell map updates live.

“This app is blocked” or the add-on won’t install. On a work or school account, your admin decides which Marketplace apps are allowed. Ask them to allow the one you need, or try it with a personal account and test data first.

Distances look too short. They’re straight-line distances. Switch to driving distance for anything you’ll claim or quote.

Frequently asked questions

Related

• How to map addresses from Google Sheets
• How to geocode addresses in Google Sheets
• Calculate driving distance and travel time between addresses in Google Sheets
• MapRows documentation
• All guides

Disclosure: Cellbrook makes MapRows, one of the add-ons compared in this guide. We don’t take payment or commissions from any of the others, and none of the links on this page are affiliate links. Ratings, install counts and prices were read from each add-on’s live listing and pricing page on October 29, 2026; they change, so check before you buy.

Google Sheets, Google Maps, Google My Maps and Google Workspace are trademarks of Google LLC. Other product names belong to their owners. MapRows and Cellbrook are not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or by the makers of the other add-ons named here.