CARTO vs. Salesforce Maps

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.

Incentivized

If you are a small business or have a small team in the field, anything Salesforce and its components should be avoided. Its price-point and ROI are overstated.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Color coding different accounts or data fields.
• Ability to see travel time and not just distance.
• Lots of data fields to pull from - big recent improvement.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Lots of glitches
• Get signed out often, which interrupts the day
• Could be more intuitive

Incentivized

Worked well once you figured it out. The 'help portal' was no 'help'. Once you get done self-teaching yourself enough of the terminology and workings, it is pretty quick and easy to use. But the learning curve, again, is not worth the time or effort

Incentivized

Support was comical. It was barely available and the few times I did get help the language barrier was extraordinarily problematic

Incentivized

CartoDB is more user friendly and quicker to learn than ArcGIS Online and Mapbox

Incentivized

MapAnything is very easy to use but it appears that similar companies are too. Because of the new pricing structure, they are expensive.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency
• Reduced labor time
• Improved visibility

Incentivized