Carto (formerly CartoDB) in Brooklyn, New York offers their location intelligence solution.
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Mapbox
Score 7.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Mapbox is the location data platform for developers building custom geospatial features into mobile, web, and on-premise applications.
$0
per month
QGIS
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
QGIS (formerly Quantum GIS) is a free and open source geographic information system.
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Pricing
CARTO
Mapbox
QGIS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starting Price
$0.00
Per 1000 users
QGIS
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CARTO
Mapbox
QGIS
Free Trial
No
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Designed for businesses of all sizes, Mapbox is free to start building with and offers free tiers for most products. As usage grows, volume pricing is applied automatically, no negotiation necessary.
Pricing is based either on pay-as-you-go usage or negotiated sales contracts that unlock additional discounts for annual commitments.
Paid support plans are also available.
QGIS vs. ArcGIS. The main reason is the price of ArcGIS. Most of the functionality is identical in both products, however, interfacing QGIS with external software allows it to dramatically increase processing capabilities.
QGIS vs. ERDAS IMAGINE. It is quite good for satellite …
CartoDB is great for generating geographic visualizations of data where the geographies are well-defined. It would be great for analysts to develop visualizations of data with spatial elements. That being said, the software is limited if you want to do any real data munging or analysis, as it can be cumbersome to use and there isn't a great interface for actually saving the results of different manipulations (you can save it as a new file, but it's hard to do version control, etc.). I would recommend preparing the data outside of CartoDB and only using the tool for visualization once the data is well prepared.
For services that require maps and basic geo-functionality in production, Mapbox is one of the greatest choices out there. They're free, provide much more refined/modern productions compared to Google maps, and have very good support on different platforms. For services that require higher-computation products, like matrix routing, optimization, etc..., the prices can get quite high very quickly, and you should consider moving those services to an on-premise server at that point.
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.
Styling: the styling engine is fantastic with raster styling features that I recognize from apps like Photoshop.
Print layouts: I can set up custom print layouts, and even do automated multi-page atlas style reports that I use for cycling through detailed areas when providing my clients with pdf reports.
Extendable: the plugins are fantastic, and almost anything I need that isn't provided natively with QGIS is available as a plugin.
Community: the QGIS community is passionate about GIS, and are always ready to help. There are great training resources available online.
Making maps in QGIS is a bit clunky. I also find it to be extremely unintuitive. For basic GIS, it is great, but I would much rather make maps (for publication purposes) in ArcGIS.
Editing and adding feature layers is not very intuitive. Changing colors of added point or line features is a rather convoluted process.
ArcGIS has a huge selection of online courses, and if you have the appropriate license, you can access most for free. I found these to be very helpful when dealing with map projections and other issues. However, QGIS does not have a large library of courses specifically made for that program.
It is a good tool to use. We can perform various customisations; I always end up exploring and finding a new feature that can be used in my work somewhere. And one good thing is that is actually quite reasonable in terms of cost, with the free tier being quite adequate
I wasn't a GIS user at all when I started using QGIS, nor did I have any background working with data in anything other than Excel, and as a result, I struggled quite a lot in the beginning (it's not quite Google Maps). But having said that, I haven't come across anything that I couldn't do with a little help from the online community. I've done complex spatial analyses on large datasets of metropolitan cities, designed custom multi-page pdf reports that automatically cycle through different areas of an area, etc.
And the GIS staff that I've appointed, after their initial resistance, took to the tool like a fish to water, and I haven't heard them complain after starting to use the tool for a week or two.
But if you're new to GIS, be patient and invest some time to learn how to use the tool. It is absolutely worth it.
Even though there is a no dedicated support team for QGIS (or at least we are not aware of it), there is a huge online community and a large number of forums catering to every question you may have regarding any particular functionality of QGIS. So, you have a lot of help available but you will have to sift through it on the web.
One feature that made me go in favor of Mapbox was its stellar documentation. Google Maps and Bing Maps are the other alternatives I considered, but the learning curve with both of them is steeper than it is with Mapbox. Also, Mapbox Studio gives newbies a very simple, clean and easy to use environment to make and store maps online
QGIS is open source and freely available for Windows and Mac iOS Geographic Information System Software. QGIS is highly customizable as per project requirements and different application usage. QGIS has ample tools and plugins that are useful for the analysis of raster and vector data. It also supports GRASS, GDAL, and SAGA tools.
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.
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.
QGIS gives us more impactful data on children and maternal health issues, which in turn has helped us establish more programs, relationships, and funding opportunities because of the excellent data presentations we can give.
QGIS has allowed our staff to improve their data analysis skills, improving our workforce across the board, with or without the direct use of geographic data.
QGIS has required a lot of staff time to learn, but the ROI on time spent vs the reports we produced afterward has been well worth it.
