The best FiveM minimaps in 2026, compared honestly

#Six things that actually separate one minimap from another

Screenshots on a download page all look fine. The differences that matter show up later, usually when you want to change something. These are the six worth checking before you install anything.

1. Source resolution. The game samples the map at a fixed 6144 × 9216 across a 2 × 3 grid. A pack built from a smaller source and scaled up looks acceptable on the radar and soft on the pause map, which is exactly where people look closely. See the technical specification for the exact numbers.
2. Baked labels. Postal numbers, district names and street names painted into the texture cannot be removed later without repainting the ground underneath. If you ever move to your own postal grid, you will have two sets of numbers on screen.
3. Licence. MIT, or unstated. Unstated is the common case on forum releases, and it matters the moment you take donations or run a Tebex store of your own.
4. Brandability. Can you put your server name on it? Only if the pack ships editable source, or the tool that produced it lets you place elements before export.
5. Completeness. A proper replacement provides all twelve texture dictionaries, the LOD texture, the geometry and the radar zoom data. Pause-map-only packs are common and leave your radar on the 2013 grey map.
6. Conflicts. Every minimap uses the same file names. If a map pack or a "server base" you already run ships minimap_*.ytd, you have a fight on your hands before you start.

#The free packs worth knowing

There are good free minimaps and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. Spending money on a map before your server has players is the wrong order of operations. Three names cover most of what is actually installed on live servers.

`oulsen_satmap` is the default free satellite map. It is MIT licensed, it is a full minimap and pause-map replacement, and it ships a custom postal grid burned into the art. Two details make it more useful than most free packs: it includes a NoGrid variant you can copy over the stream folder if you do not want the grid lines, and it ships the individual DDS files so you can open the art in Paint.NET and edit it. It also ships oulsen_satmap_postals.json, so a nearest-postal script can be pointed at the same numbers the map prints. That last point is rarer than it should be, and it is the single most common source of postal confusion on servers.

`neen-atlasmap` is the coloured atlas alternative, also MIT, described by its author as an 8K coloured map. It ships in two folders — one with postal codes, one with street names — so you choose the labelling at install time instead of living with whatever the author preferred. It has an EnableCayoMiniMap switch in client.lua for servers running the Cayo Perico IPL. Its README is also unusually honest about the thing that breaks installs: it tells you to search your other resources for SetMapZoomDataLevel, SetRadarZoom and SetRadarAsInteriorThisFrame and remove them, because two resources fighting over radar zoom produces a map at the wrong scale rather than an error message.

The DLK lineage. DieLikeKane’s HD pause-menu maps predate most of the current scene and still turn up everywhere: an HD map, a road map, an atlas map and a satellite map. They were made for the pause menu first, and the working radar support came later through community server-sided ports. If you inherit a server with an old map on it, this is very often what you are looking at. The satellite version is much the largest of the set, and on a server that already streams a lot it is worth checking against your oversized asset warnings.

The honest cost of all three is that they are shared. Several hundred servers run the same image, including the ones competing with you for the same players. That is a real cost and it is not visible on the download page, but it is also completely irrelevant on day one.

#Paid Tebex presets

A large number of small Tebex stores sell finished minimaps, usually themed — night, light, a city-styled recolour, a gang-map variant. Prices sit in the region of $8 to $15 for a single map, which is the cheapest paid branding decision available to a FiveM server.

What you are buying is exclusivity by degree rather than exclusivity outright. A preset that has sold two hundred copies is still on two hundred servers, but that is a different number from the several thousand running the best-known free pack. You are also buying the thing nobody advertises: somebody has already done the tile split, the compression and the zoom data, and you can tell within five minutes whether it works.

• Ask whether the radar is included or only the pause map. This is the most common gap in cheap presets.
• Ask whether the postal grid can be removed. Usually the answer is no, because you are buying a finished texture.
• Check the file count. A complete replacement is more than a handful of files. Ours is 78 stream files, about 22 MB.
• Check whether the resource is escrowed. For a stream-only map it barely matters, but it decides whether you can fix anything yourself.

#Browser and in-game editors

A newer category, and the most interesting one if what you want is a map nobody else has. Instead of selling you a finished image, these tools let you produce one.

fivem-tools.com runs a browser minimap editor: you add gang zones, labels, images and map-wide tints over the GTA V map and export a stream-ready resource in one click. The free tier allows one generation per tool per day with 250 MB of project storage and exports up to 2048 px; the supporter tier is $15 a month for unlimited generations, 5 GB of storage and exports up to 4096 px. Worth knowing before you plan around it: the stock map is 6144 × 9216 assembled from 3072 px tiles, so confirm what their resolution figure refers to rather than assuming it matches the game’s grid.

LMX Minimap Creator takes the opposite approach and puts the editor inside the game. You type a command, draw turf zones, labels, postal codes and images directly on the live map, and the resource writes the minimap_*.ytd and minimap_sea_*.ytd files with BC3 compression straight into its own stream folder. It is a paid Tebex resource, listed at $29.99 as a one-time purchase, and the code is escrowed with only config.lua open. For a gang or hood server that wants to redraw territory every few weeks, editing in-game with the real map underneath you is a genuinely better workflow than exporting, uploading and reconnecting each time.

The trade-off in both cases is the base art. An editor puts your shapes and labels on top of a map somebody else made; it does not change the terrain, the coastline treatment or the road palette underneath. If what you dislike is the base map itself, an editor will not fix it.

#Commissioning one

Paying a designer is the only route that gets you exactly what is in your head. Fiverr listings for a custom FiveM minimap start around $10 and the established sellers advertise entry tiers between roughly $30 and $100; developers on the Cfx.re forums and in Discord servers typically quote more, and the final number depends almost entirely on how much of the postal grid and labelling work is in scope.

Commissioning is the right call in a narrow set of cases: a custom map for a non-San-Andreas world, a server built around a fictional city, or a brand identity strict enough that a palette is not enough. It is the wrong call if what you actually want is the stock map in your colours, which is a rendering problem rather than a drawing problem.

• Agree the deliverable in files, not in pictures: twelve .ytd dictionaries, the LOD texture, geometry, a manifest and the zoom script.
• Agree who owns the source. Without layered source, the second revision costs as much as the first.
• Agree the postal grid up front and in writing. Renumbering after the art is baked means repainting.
• Ask to see the pause map at 100%, not a radar screenshot. Upscaling hides on the radar.

#Where this shop sits

For completeness and so you can judge it against the rest: this site sells 36 maps, which is twelve colour themes applied to three base map styles — with postal codes, without postal codes, and a Google-style street map. A map is $8.00, each overlay element you place is $1.00, and a later edit to a live design is $1.00 per element. Every tenth account that registers gets a base map free. The output is the standard 6144 × 9216 across 78 stream files, roughly 22 MB, with no framework dependency, so it installs identically on ESX, QBCore, Qbox, vMenu or a standalone server.

The themes are black OBSIDIAN, white ALABASTER, gray GRAPHITE, red CRIMSON, blue COBALT, yellow SOLAR, green EMERALD, orange EMBER, purple VIOLET, pink MAGENTA, and two elevation-led palettes, TOPO NIGHT and TOPO DAY. Branding is placed in a browser studio and baked into the texture before export, so a logo costs nothing at runtime. What it does not do is draw gang territory or custom zone shapes. That is what the editors above are for.

The full catalogue is at all 36 minimaps, the branding side is described in custom FiveM minimaps, and the studio itself is covered in the minimap maker.

#Everything side by side

#Which one to pick

• You have not launched yet. Take a free MIT pack. oulsen_satmap if you want satellite and are happy with its postal grid, neen-atlasmap if you want colour and street names. Spend the money later on something players leave over.
• You already run a nearest-postal HUD or a dispatch that draws postals. Take a map with no baked numbers. Two postal grids on one screen is worse than either alone. See postal codes explained.
• You want the map to match your HUD. A themed map is the shortest path, because you are choosing a palette rather than commissioning art.
• You run gang territory or hood zones. An editor, in-game or browser. Nothing else lets you redraw a turf boundary on a Tuesday.
• You have a fictional city or a non-San-Andreas map. Commission it. None of the off-the-shelf options can help.
• You inherited a server and the map looks wrong. Do not buy anything yet. Find out what is already streaming minimap_* files first.

#What none of them do for you

Three problems are identical whichever route you take, and they account for most of the "the map I bought does not work" threads on the forums.

The first is the name collision. Streamed file names are global. If two resources ship minimap_0_0.ytd, whichever loads last wins and which one that is has no guarantee behind it. Large map add-ons and prebuilt "server bases" bundle minimaps far more often than people expect, so search for them before blaming the new map.

# Linux / Git Bash
find resources -iname 'minimap*.ytd'

# Windows PowerShell
Get-ChildItem .\resources -Recurse -Filter 'minimap*.ytd' | Select-Object FullName

The second is the client cache. FiveM keeps streamed textures and will serve the old map back to anyone who has already connected. Every existing player needs to clear it once, and if you do not announce that, half of them will report the map as unchanged. Clearing the FiveM cache covers it.

The third is the radar zoom data. A higher-resolution map needs the radar zoom levels adjusted or it appears at the wrong scale next to the player blip. Most packs handle this with a SetMapZoomDataLevel call in a client script; if two of your resources make that call, they will disagree. Radar zoom settings explains the numbers.

Fix those three and almost any of the options above will install in five minutes. Skip them and the most expensive map on the list will still look broken.