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CARTO

Score9 out of 10

8 Reviews and Ratings

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What is CARTO?

Carto (formerly CartoDB) in Brooklyn, New York offers their location intelligence solution.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about CARTO.
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CartoDB for schools is great!

Incentivized
Bhavika TekwaniView profile
GIS Specialist in Information Technology at George Mason University (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Twitter data imports
  • Connectors for various data sources (GDrive, CSV, etc)
  • Basemaps of different types

Cons

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

Return on Investment

  • It has removed the barrier to entry for GIS tools.

Other Software Used

ArcGIS

CartoDB - Great tool for geospatial data viz

Incentivized
Diana LamView profile
Senior Analyst at Capital One (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • SQL integration - CartoDB supports SQL, so you can use SQL to do different types of data munging and analysis, which makes it easier to do more complex visualizations of data than just using the column/row interface. It also uses common programming data structures (string, float, etc.) which makes it easy to parse data types.
  • GEOJSON compatibility - The software comes out of the box with common maps that you might want to use, but you can upload your own GIS or GEOJSON files to create custom maps.
  • Out of the box visuals - The default settings/options for map creation over most of the bases of what you might want to do. The out of the box color schemes and design are great.

Cons

  • Learning curve - CartoDB might be difficult to use if you don't have a bit of SQL or data structures background. If you're not familiar with floats, strings, etc., you might upload an Excel file and be confused about how to manipulate it to get the software to create the maps that you want.
  • Performance - When I used it, there were some occasional issues with loading and parsing large data files.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau and python

Other Software Used

Apache Spark

CartoDB is a joy to work with

Incentivized
Brandon ChristensenView profile
Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Solekai Systems (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • I adopted CartoDB just before a major API change. We chose to make a standalone instance and unfortunately this API change meant we would have to do a lot of work to move to a newer version. Perhaps just a hazard of being an early adopter.
  • It would be extremely helpful if CartoDB provided a Java library for interacting with the service. The visualization definition (setting up the map, styles, etc) is all handled by sending a JSON structure to the service. In my application I had to manually create a large number of Java classes mapping the expected JSON format so that we could construct the visualization from our code. This was a fair amount of work and was invalidated when CartoDB later changed their visualization structure. This could be mitigated by providing client libraries for common languages.

Return on Investment

  • There's an immediate "wow" factor to using CartoDB. It's what you want a map to look like and provides very intuitive user functionality out of the box. I demoed our mapping capabilities to a set of network operators and by the end of the call they were begging for an upgrade to their deployed systems.
  • The hosted service is reasonably priced but with some work you can build your own standalone instance. At that point you have a "free" (not counting development time) mapping solution that can be installed in private networks, something not possible with Google Maps.
  • I had a hard requirement that we not send actual data to Google. We were allowed to request the base map tiles from Google but the customer did not want their position data sent outside of the network. CartoDB made this possible since the overlay tile renderer was installed internally. This was a crucial selling point that helped us win the business.

CartoDB is great!

Incentivized
Sacha SelimView profile
GIS Analyst and IT Specialist in Information Technology at ICF International (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Simiple UI.
  • Great learning library full of videos.
  • Professional quality cartography.

Cons

  • The ability to easily customize legends like color swatch shape / size is missing.
  • When you turn on the option for "mouse scroll wheel zoom" the system should automatically turn on the "Full Screen" mode as well. Because the scroll wheel zoom only works in full screen view.
  • More visualization templates.

Return on Investment

  • We ended up winning a pretty large job that we used CartoDB to implement. So I would say that was a positive.

Other Software Used

ArcGIS, Mapbox