Python is definitely a more powerful tool for data munging and analysis, but the python packages for geo-related data viz (bokeh, matplotlib, seaborn) are cumbersome to use. I would recommend doing your data analysis in Python and then exporting the final data to CartoDB for …
Google Maps API was what we started with. It provides a lot of nice tools, but they are all browser-side. This means that when you want to display points on a map you send data to the users browser and the software runs on the users's machine to render that data into points. …