CARTO Formerly CartoDB vs Mapbox

• It is amazing at allowing control of the visualizations. It takes a little bit to get used to but the combination of full SQL queries and CSS-like styling is very powerful.
• The services are built on a robust stack of open source software. I was able to build a standalone instance of CartoDB relatively easily (after some research and trial and error).
• Server side map rendering is key for handling large data sets. The way the images are returned makes them very easy to catch in an HTTP cache to minimize the hits to the server. The interactivity that CartoDB has built in makes this completely transparent to the end user, they can click on parts of the static images and be presented with popups or change map styles. It's a very clever implementation.

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• Documentation is clean, easy to read, and very well organized which makes it easy to get going or learn something new
• The online user interface makes it quick and easy to edit maps, upload new datasets, view analytics, or get API keys
• Great integrations with Tableau and easy to develop for Android, iOS, or Web

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• I don't like the new Builder UI as it has been tough to explain. Other than that I have no complaints.

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• The product is not always that easy to use, aimed at professionals understanding colors and palettes etc.
• Being a full cloud product it can be complicated working with the interface when your connectivity is not great.
• Tutorials and samples could be more visual and could cover more ideas on how to use Mapbox.

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• CartoDB definitely saves a lot of time when creating visualizations. Previously, I would use different software and have to make edits manually (or just create the visualizations manually to start with). I would say that the software definitely cuts the time required to create certain visualizations by a half or two-thirds.

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• Mapbox is the only service that has all the products we need to release our product to the market. Without Mapbox, we would've spent far more time integrating multiple different map/geo services like Mapbox and HERE maps together.
• Mapbox was sometimes expensive in the testing period, and we would've definitely moved some of the services on-premise to save money if we had the time.
• Mapbox has functionality for traffic-aware routing in many countries, as well as matrix-structured routing data, which is what enables our service to function. Having all of this integrated within an API allows us to easily scale our service to multiple different cities/countries in a matter of days.

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