what3words vs Plus Codes: which location system should you actually use?

The Direct Answer: Two Systems, Two Philosophies

what3words and Google Plus Codes both solve the same underlying problem — how do you describe an exact spot on Earth without a street address? — but they approach it from opposite directions. what3words divides the planet into 3-meter squares (roughly 57 trillion of them) and assigns each square a unique combination of three dictionary words, such as "filled.count.soap." Google's Open Location Code system, better known as Plus Codes, divides the world into a grid and encodes each cell as an alphanumeric string like "8FVC9G8F+6X," which can be shortened when combined with a nearby city or region.

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The practical difference comes down to error tolerance and memorability. A what3words address is easy for a human to say out loud over the phone or read aloud in an emergency, but if you mishear one word — say, "table" instead of "cable" — you could end up somewhere entirely different, sometimes hundreds of kilometers away. A Plus Code is harder to pronounce but has built-in error detection: similar-looking codes tend to map to nearby locations, so a typo usually puts you close rather than catastrophically far away. Neither system is objectively superior; they optimize for different failure modes.

For most consumer use cases in 2026, Plus Codes are free, open-source, and built directly into Google Maps, while what3words requires its own app or an integrated third-party app and operates on a proprietary, licensed model. That distinction shapes everything else about how the two systems compare.

How Each System Actually Works Under the Hood

Plus Codes derive from the Open Location Code (OLC) specification that Google released as open source in 2014. The system uses base-20 pairs of characters drawn from a 20-character alphabet (23456789CFGHJMPQRVWX) chosen specifically to avoid visually confusing characters. Each pair of characters narrows the location by a factor of 20, so a full 10-character code plus a plus sign identifies an area roughly 13.9 by 13.9 meters at the equator. Adding a fifth pair refines this further. Codes can be shortened relative to a reference location — dropping four characters still works within about 0.4 degrees of latitude and longitude, which covers most metropolitan areas.

what3words took a different path when it launched in 2013, founded by Chris Sheldrick after repeated frustrations with delivery drivers unable to find rural locations. The company algorithmically assigned three words from curated dictionaries to every 3-by-3-meter square on Earth. The word lists were engineered so that similar-sounding combinations are geographically distant: words that differ by only one letter or sound are deliberately placed far apart to reduce the risk of voice-recognition errors sending someone to the wrong continent. The system supports dozens of languages, with separate word lists per language, though coverage quality varies considerably between major languages like English, Spanish, and German versus smaller ones.

Both systems encode latitude and longitude deterministically, meaning any given coordinate always maps to the same code. Neither requires connectivity to decode once you have the offline data, though in practice most people use them through apps that assume some network access.

Head-to-Head Comparison Table

This table captures the core trade-off: what3words wins on human communication, Plus Codes wins on openness, cost, and resilience to transcription errors.

Why the Error-Handling Debate Matters So Much

The most contested point between the two systems is how they fail. Critics of what3words have pointed out that homophone pairs and near-identical word combinations exist within the English index despite the company's claims otherwise, and that a single mistyped or misheard word can resolve to a valid but wildly incorrect location — there is no checksum telling you something went wrong. In an emergency scenario where someone reads three words over a bad phone line, this is a genuine safety consideration. Independent analyses published over the years have documented cases where plausible typos produce coordinates thousands of kilometers apart.

Plus Codes handle this differently. Because the encoding is positional — each character pair progressively narrows the area — a wrong character shifts the result by a bounded amount related to that character's position in the string. Get the last character wrong and you might be off by tens of meters; get an early character wrong and you're off by more, but the structure means errors degrade gracefully rather than catastrophically. There's no silent failure mode where a plausible-looking code points to another hemisphere.

That said, what3words' defenders note that in real emergency deployments — UK ambulance services, several British police forces, and various mountain rescue teams have used it — the system performs well precisely because people can remember and communicate three common words without writing anything down. A panicked caller is far more likely to correctly relay "dog.blanket.spoon" than "9C4X+7Q2." The debate is ultimately about which failure mode you'd rather live with, and honest analysts acknowledge both sides have merit.

Practical Steps: Using Both Systems Today

Using Plus Codes requires nothing beyond Google Maps, which has supported them natively since around 2015. Open the app, drop a pin anywhere, and the Plus Code appears in the location details alongside the coordinates. Tap it to copy, share it via any messaging platform, or paste it into the Maps search bar to navigate back. You can also shorten codes locally — a code like "9G8F+6X London" resolves correctly anywhere near London. For developers, Google publishes open-source OLC libraries in JavaScript, Java, Python, C++, and other languages, so you can generate and decode codes without touching Google's servers at all.

Using what3words starts with downloading the free app on iOS or Android. The app works offline once the word list is downloaded, which matters for hiking and remote travel. Tap the locator to see the three-word address for your current position, search for a saved location, or type in a what3words address shared by someone else. The app includes compass navigation mode for walking toward a target square. If you're a business wanting to embed what3words into your own product — a checkout form, a dispatch system, a booking flow — you'll need to contact the company for API access, which involves commercial licensing terms rather than self-serve pricing.

A sensible workflow for many people is to use Plus Codes as the default because they're universal and free, and keep what3words installed for situations involving verbal communication — giving a taxi driver a destination, describing a campsite to friends, or providing your position to emergency services in countries where responders recognize the format.

Common Mistakes People Make With Both Systems

The biggest mistake with what3words is treating it as a verified, error-proof standard. Users sometimes assume that because the system sounds precise, any three-word combination must be unique and unambiguous — but typos, autocorrect interference, and voice-to-text errors can silently redirect you. Always confirm the full three words character by character when accuracy matters, and cross-check against a map view before traveling somewhere remote. Another frequent error is assuming universal adoption: outside the UK and parts of Europe, many emergency call centers cannot process what3words addresses, so knowing your latitude and longitude remains essential backup knowledge.

With Plus Codes, the most common mistake is truncating too aggressively. Shortened codes only work relative to a nearby reference city, and sharing just six characters with someone in a different country produces a useless or misleading result. Always include the locality when shortening. People also confuse Plus Codes with traditional MGRS or UTM military grid references — they look superficially similar but are entirely incompatible systems. Finally, developers sometimes assume Plus Codes require Google infrastructure; in fact the entire codec is open source, and building a dependency on Google's APIs when the free library would suffice adds unnecessary cost and lock-in.

A shared mistake across both systems is relying on either one exclusively during outdoor activities. Batteries die, phones break, and neither system helps if you can't access your device. Carrying a paper map and knowing basic navigation skills remains non-negotiable for serious backcountry travel regardless of which digital addressing scheme you prefer.

When to Choose Which System — and When to Act

Choose what3words when spoken communication is the bottleneck. If your use case involves reading a location aloud — event marshals directing attendees, delivery instructions for unaddressed rural properties, meeting points at festivals, or emergency calls in regions where services accept the format — the memorability advantage is real and measurable. Businesses in logistics, events, and outdoor hospitality have licensed the API for exactly these reasons, and the company reported integrations with major automotive brands for in-car navigation.

Choose Plus Codes when openness, cost, and integration matter more than speakability. If you're building software, Plus Codes cost nothing to implement, carry no licensing risk, work offline through open libraries, and appear inside the world's dominant mapping app. For humanitarian and development contexts — where addressing gaps affect billions of people — the open licensing model makes Plus Codes the pragmatic default, and organizations like the UN have explored grid-based addressing along these lines.

Act now if you operate field teams, run events, or ship products to poorly addressed areas: audit how your customers currently communicate locations, pick one system as primary based on the criteria above, and document fallback procedures using raw GPS coordinates. The decision takes an afternoon; retrofitting it after a failed delivery or missed emergency costs far more.

Costs, Business Considerations, and the Bigger Picture

For individual users, both systems are free, and that won't change. The economics diverge at the commercial layer. what3words monetizes through enterprise licensing — pricing is quote-based and varies by volume and use case, historically ranging from modest annual fees for small integrations to substantial contracts for automotive OEMs embedding the system in vehicle head units. This creates a strategic dependency: your product's core location feature depends on a private company's continued operation and pricing decisions.

Plus Codes impose zero licensing cost forever because the specification is Apache 2.0 licensed. You can implement, modify, and redistribute the codec without permission. The trade-off is that Google provides no commercial support contract for the open libraries, and the feature receives relatively little marketing attention inside Google Maps itself, so user awareness lags what3words' focused branding efforts.

There's also a credibility dimension worth acknowledging honestly. what3words has faced sustained criticism from security researchers and mapping experts over its error-handling claims, and the company's aggressive responses to critics have generated their own headlines. None of this negates the system's genuine utility in emergency communication, but buyers evaluating it for safety-critical applications should demand independent validation rather than accepting vendor claims at face value. Plus Codes attract less controversy simply because they make fewer promises — they're a transparent mathematical encoding anyone can verify.

For creative and operations teams coordinating spontaneous campaigns, pop-up activations, or distributed shoots, the practical recommendation is straightforward: standardize internal tooling on Plus Codes and raw coordinates for reliability, and offer what3words addresses as a human-friendly layer in customer-facing communications where verbal sharing happens. Both systems coexist fine; pretending one must win is the actual mistake.