How does the geocoding service in graphhopper work?

There is a difference between our open source projects:

https://www.graphhopper.com/open-source/

and our commercial offering the GraphHopper Directions API.

The latter is based on these open source projects but also uses other projects like photon or even other software like gisgraphy hosted elsewhere but provided through the same API and without the need to create yet another contract. Also Geocoding is a delicate topic when using open data and open source and so we provide alternatives.