Overview

CARTO provides a set of tools for developers for creating visualizations and apps using location data. It drastically reduces development and maintenance times for geospatial applications and allows for effortless visualization of large datasets.

You will save time as you don't need to develop complex backend APIs or ETLs. With CARTO, you can focus more on your business needs and let the CARTO platform manage the geospatial area.

This documentation is designed to provide developers with the information they need to get started with CARTO APIs and tools, allowing them to quickly and easily build powerful location-based applications.

Through the different sections, you will learn:

• How to access data coming from your own Data Warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, or PostgreSQL) in a geospatial web application without any backend development on your side, including different strategies for authentication.
• Visualize data in a map using just CARTO and the WebGL-powered framework deck.gl.
• Create charts and widgets that interact seamlessly with your map data, using the UI components of your choice.
• Combine all of these pieces with the front-end framework of your choice. CARTO for Developers works with plain Javascript and adds minimal dependencies.

At the end of this journey, you will have a solid understanding of how to use CARTO for building enterprise-grade applications with any front-end technology of your choice. You will learn in our guides how to use CARTO to cover the main use cases when building a geospatial application:

Build a public application

Create a basic web application in CARTO compatible with any Javascript Framework.

Build a private application

How to build a basic private application with CARTO login.

Build a private application using SSO

Extend your CARTO private application using your own Identity Provider (IdP)

Visualize massive datasets

Learn how to visualize massive datasets in a performance and cost-effective way (up to billions of rows).

Integrate CARTO in your existing application

Learn how to securely embed CARTO into your existing architecture providing fine-grained data access.

Use Boundaries in your application

Create a visualization using CARTO that aggregates massive amounts of data into boundaries (such as postal codes)

Join our community of users in Slack

Our community in Slack is a great place to ask questions, share your work with other CARTO users, and get help from CARTO experts. Join here ⬇️

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