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CARTO

CARTO
Formerly CartoDB

Overview

What is CARTO?

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

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

CARTO has been widely embraced by users across various industries due to its versatility and intuitive features. Real estate investment …
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Pricing

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What is CARTO?

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

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Mapbox?

Mapbox is the location data platform for developers building custom geospatial features into mobile, web, and on-premise applications.

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Product Demos

Demo - CartoDB (Data Innovation Day 2014)

YouTube

carto demo 3d slam KITTI 2019 08 13 16 26 16

YouTube

Carto Demo Playthrough / Longplay / Walkthrough (no commentary)

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Carto Maps Demo for temporal animation, and multiple attribute data

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EZvi Tank Changing the Carto Demo

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Data Viz Workshop: Carto demo 1

YouTube
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Product Details

What is CARTO?

CARTO Video

From smartphones to connected cars, location data is changing the way we live and the way business happens. CARTO is the platform that turns location data into more efficient delivery routes, better behavioral marketing, strategic store placements, and much more. Everyone, f...
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CARTO Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(7)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

CARTO has been widely embraced by users across various industries due to its versatility and intuitive features. Real estate investment teams, for instance, have found great value in leveraging CARTO to analyze and visualize data related to their investments. The platform's customizable visualizations have proven to be instrumental in supporting their research efforts. Similarly, personnel from different fields have benefited from the method of depicting and integrating information directly into CARTO, as it enables them to effectively use and present data in a visually appealing manner. From visualizing police jurisdictional boundaries to gathering spatial insights for academic studies, CARTO has demonstrated its usefulness in solving geospatial problems around the world. The software's ability to combine and visualize different datasets, overlay data on Google Maps, and create interactive web maps has been praised by users who rely on location-based analytics and mapping techniques. Overall, CARTO's user-friendly interface, wide range of functionalities, and streamlined storage and access capabilities have made it a valuable tool for professionals seeking efficient solutions to their geospatial needs.

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.

Errors in Display: Some users have reported occasional errors being displayed, possibly due to issues with the data source. These errors have been mentioned by multiple reviewers and can affect the overall user experience.

Difficult User Interface: The user interface is not considered user-friendly and can be difficult for new users to understand. This issue has been mentioned by several reviewers, indicating a common frustration among users.

Challenging Data Manipulation: Manipulating and uploading data sets with geometry data can be challenging, leading to corrupted and invalid geometries. Some users have expressed difficulty with this aspect of the product, suggesting that improvements are needed in this area.

  1. Users commonly recommend trying out CARTO with a simple map and available datasets to get started. They suggest using the CARTO Builder and exploring the API tutorials for different use cases. This is especially beneficial for organizations with limited resources and technical ability.

  2. Users find it useful to integrate CARTO with other technologies like databricks and JavaScript. This allows for enhanced mapping capabilities and creates more robust visualizations.

  3. Implementing geo analysis in reports and presentations can greatly enhance audience appeal. CARTO serves as a valuable visual and presentation tool, although some users find that detailed analytics may be lacking. It's important to consider this limitation when utilizing the platform.

Overall, users suggest giving CARTO a try for satisfactory results. They highlight its usefulness as a publishing and sharing tool for maps to a large audience. Additionally, users value reading the blog posts and exploring map designs created by others. Collaborating with the CARTO team is also recommended for efficient and optimal use. It is advised to take the time to understand the various features of CARTO by reading the documentation.

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Twitter data imports
  • Connectors for various data sources (GDrive, CSV, etc)
  • Basemaps of different types
  • I don't like the new Builder UI as it has been tough to explain. Other than that I have no complaints.
Well suited:
1) Building maps quickly where the geographical analysis is not too complicated.
2) Fast prototyping for demos
  • It has removed the barrier to entry for GIS tools.
Diana Lam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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.
  • 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.
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 visualization. One benefit of doing this is that CartoDB can automatically publish your viz to a link or object, so you don't have to export it and host it yourself. Another benefit is that CartoDB automatically updates the viz once you change the data, eliminating the need to continuously regenerate image files.

I haven't used Tableau too extensively, but from the experience I've had with it -- Tableau is better suited for traditional analytical visualization (charts, graphs, etc.) than for geospatial mapping and visualization.
Brandon Christensen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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.
  • 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.
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. This allows flexibility and more dynamic behavior but does not scale to large numbers of data points - more than ~1000 points brings the browser to its knees. CartoDB takes a fundamentally different approach, rendering position data on the server side into static image tiles that are overlaid on top of a standard Google Map. This means scaling is dependent on backend equipment not on the user's browser/machine.

If you're doing something small Google Maps API is great and it doesn't require any extra setup or dependencies. If you need to scale CartoDB is the best solution available.
April 11, 2016

CartoDB is great!

Sacha Selim | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Simiple UI.
  • Great learning library full of videos.
  • Professional quality cartography.
  • 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.
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.
  • We ended up winning a pretty large job that we used CartoDB to implement. So I would say that was a positive.
CartoDB is more user friendly and quicker to learn than ArcGIS Online and Mapbox.
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