I think it is all down to the usage and performance needed. If you need high resiliency and performances, using a third party API like smartip.io is the way to

I think it is all down to the usage and performance needed. If you need high resiliency and performances, using a third party API like smartip.io is the way to go. If the requirements are less strict then using a local db like MaxMind would be the right choice. As a side note, we offer very simple and well documented libraries in C#, Typescript and PHP.