WorldGuessr vs OpenGuessr

Both are free. Here is what that means on each

Neither game has a paywall. OpenGuessr's about page puts it well: the "open" in its name stands for the principle that no feature should be restricted to paying users. That is true in practice. As a guest we played, changed settings, toggled NMPZ, browsed every map and opened the shop, and nothing asked us to sign in. OpenGuessr does not even have a landing page; opening the site drops you straight into a round, which its about page says is deliberate. WorldGuessr has a menu first, but the same rule applies: no sign-in to play.

OpenGuessr also sells one-time supporter tiers, which is a fair way to fund a free game. Tier 1 is USD 3.99 and gives a supporter pin and a highlighted name, tier 2 is USD 6.99 and removes ads, and tier 3 is USD 19.99. You pay once and the perks never expire. There is also a token currency for things like tournament entry, which you can earn or buy. WorldGuessr sells nothing at all, so on WorldGuessr there is no way to pay to remove the ads.

Both games show ads to cover the Street View bill. OpenGuessr's in-game banner sits along the bottom of the play screen, and in our session one advertisement covered the Guess button and the bottom of the map until we closed it. WorldGuessr keeps its banners around the edges of the game.

No Move: the one real technical difference

No Move rounds are the ones where you cannot walk, so all you have is the view around you. Both games offer them. The difference is in how the panorama is drawn.

OpenGuessr's setting is called "No Move, Pan or Zoom", and it runs on Google's own Street View embed with moving disabled. Google's embed paints road names onto the road and keeps its own chevrons, attribution and controls on screen, and there is no option to turn the names off. In three NMPZ rounds we started, each one showed a road name on the road: Missouri W in the United States, El Alto to Mallasilla in Bolivia, and Mittelstrasse in Switzerland. In a mode whose whole point is to work out where you are from what you can see, a road name is a free answer.

WorldGuessr draws its No Move and NMPZ panoramas itself, from the raw imagery, so there are no labels and no Google interface. The two screenshots below were taken the same evening, both as a first-time visitor with no account, so you can judge for yourself.

Moving rounds on WorldGuessr use Google's own Street View panorama, so road names show there just as they do on GeoGuessr. Only No Move and NMPZ rounds use WorldGuessr's renderer. This matters mainly to people who take No Move seriously. If you only play moving rounds, the two games look the same.

Maps

OpenGuessr's map browser has three groups: base maps (World, Capital Cities, Famous Places), special modes (Country Guessr, Image Guessr, Meta Guessr, Quizzes), and a long alphabetical list of countries. The browser shows no total, but the library is large. Its about page describes it as tens of thousands of maps, and its developer puts the current figure at about 30,000. A community map has to have at least 50 locations before OpenGuessr accepts it.

WorldGuessr has 72,316 community maps at the time of writing, and the number is live: it comes from the same API the game uses, and it goes up every day as players publish maps. Every one of them has its own page you can link to, making one is free, and the 93 official country maps sit alongside them, 20 of those with recognition tips written for that country. The two totals are not counted the same way, because WorldGuessr accepts a map from 5 locations and OpenGuessr from 50. WorldGuessr has the larger library on either measure, but the gap is smaller than the raw counts suggest.

Modes: OpenGuessr has more of them

Credit where it is due. OpenGuessr has been more adventurous with modes. Image Guessr asks you to place a photograph rather than a panorama. Meta Guessr tests you on the small tells, like camera generation and car type, that the top players use. There are quizzes, built with its education site, and a weekly tournament with a token entry fee. Its about page also mentions restrictions such as grayscale and blink mode for multiplayer, though we did not find them in the menus as a guest. WorldGuessr has none of those.

WorldGuessr's modes are the classic round, No Move and NMPZ, a three-round daily challenge with streaks, Country Guesser and Continent Guesser, ranked duels, 2v2, an unranked queue, and parties. They are GeoGuessr's own modes, built the same way, so anyone coming from there already knows every one of them. The list is shorter, and it is aimed at people who want a well-made version of the standard game rather than variations on it.

Multiplayer

Both have duels and 2v2, and both have parties you can host or join without an account. The difference is how much sits behind the duel button.

WorldGuessr's ranked duels use the format GeoGuessr made standard. Both players start with 5,000 health, every round the player with the weaker guess loses the gap between the two scores, and the match ends when someone reaches zero. Around that sits a rating that moves after every match, five leagues from Trekker to Legend, matchmaking that pairs you by rating and widens its search the longer you wait, and a rejoin: if your connection drops mid-duel you come back into the same match instead of forfeiting it. 2v2 works the same way with one shared health bar per team, and there is a separate unranked queue for a quick game with nothing at stake.

OpenGuessr has duels, 2v2 and ranked divisions too, and it runs weekly tournaments, which WorldGuessr does not. We could not test its duels head to head, because that needs a second player. What we can say, as the people who make one of these two games and hear from players who switch, is that WorldGuessr's duels are the more complete and the more stable of the two. Treat that as our view rather than a measurement.

For groups, WorldGuessr's parties hold up to 200 players, with emotes, and a party can split into team duels without anyone leaving the room. That is the strongest part of WorldGuessr's multiplayer and it is the part worth trying if you play with a class or a large Discord.

Apps and languages

OpenGuessr is a website, and only a website. WorldGuessr has native apps for Android and iOS; the Android app is rated 4.8 out of 5 by a little under 700 people at the time of writing. If you play on a phone, that is a real difference, because a Street View game in a phone browser is cramped on either site.

OpenGuessr is in English only; its settings have no language option. WorldGuessr is translated into English, German, Spanish, French and Russian.

Community and learning

OpenGuessr runs a separate education site with country guides and quizzes that is genuinely useful for learning the game, and it is open source under the MIT license, which is more than most projects manage. It also has a Discord and a Reddit community.

WorldGuessr has a Discord, a forum where guides and map feedback live, and a YouTube channel. Its learning content is smaller: a recognition guide on 20 of the 93 country maps, sitting on the map's own page so you read it right before you play.

Source code

You will see OpenGuessr described as open source. Its own about page is more careful than that. In its words, "While the complete website isn't, parts of OpenGuessr are open-source, specifically the reusable chunks that other developers or players might find useful", and it lists seven of them: a multiplayer library, a chat component, a profanity filter, a scroll transition, a bug reporter, a moderation tool, and the education site. That is an honest description and OpenGuessr deserves credit for making it.

WorldGuessr's code is public at github.com/codergautam/worldguessr under the PolyForm Noncommercial license. That is not the same as open source in the strict sense, because you may not sell it or run it commercially, but anyone can read how locations are picked, how scoring works and how ratings move, and can run their own copy for personal or classroom use.