TrustRadius Insights for CARTO are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Visually Enriched Raw Data: Many users have found the raw data in Carto to be visually enriched and informative, allowing them to gain valuable insights through visual representations. They appreciate how the data is presented in a visually appealing manner, making it easier for them to understand and analyze.
Good Service Provided by Carto Team: Several users have praised the exceptional service provided by the Carto team. They value the effective communication and prompt delivery of requested depictions, which has greatly contributed to their positive experience with the platform.
Availability of Additional Libraries for Enhanced UI Processing Power: Users highly appreciate the availability of additional libraries in Python and JavaScript within Carto. These libraries provide them with enhanced functionality, enabling customization and optimization of their UI processing power. This flexibility allows users to tailor their experience according to their specific needs and preferences.
We use CartoDB at George Mason University to teach students about location intelligence and GIS. The only problem we're addressing is exposing students to a platform that can help them make charts/maps easily and visualize geographic data for their theses and dissertations.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited: 1) Building maps quickly where the geographical analysis is not too complicated. 2) Fast prototyping for demos
As an analyst at an economic development consulting firm, I frequently analyzed and visualized demographic data. My organization did not use CartoDB as a whole, but analysts were allowed to use whatever tools they wanted to produce work, and so I decided to use CartoDB because of its ease of use. I primarily used the software to generate chloropleth maps to visualize different pieces of demographic data across zip codes. Without CartoDB, we typically made these maps manually or using other software that didn't have as much visual customization as CartoDB.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
I integrated CartoDB into a Java Spring MVC web application to support complex visualizations of geographic networking data. CartoDB allowed me to create maps of network nodes colored by various state information to help identify and diagnose trouble areas. Once I got it set up it was very simple to add visualizations of additional metrics so we ended up building out map styles for all sorts of information and finding interesting and unexpected patterns.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
I have not seen a better mapping tool than CartoDB. You get the familiarity of Google Maps with arbitrarily complex geographic data visualization on top. CartoDB excels at large data sets where Google Maps API completely chokes when attempting to handle more than ~1000 data points. I was able to plot 500,000 points on a map with reasonable speed and able to perform complex aggregations to display boundaries of areas containing certain types of data, intersections of those sections, and more.
Currently CartoDB is not being used by our company internally. Though there has been some talk of eventually doing so. We use for CartoDB as a tool to create interactive online web maps that accompany environmental documents we produce.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would say it is suited where you have a client that wants to access up to date information that was mapped in the file but the information needs to remain private.
