CARTO QGIS Plugin
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Version: 0.92.1
The CARTO QGIS Plugin allows you to access, visualize, and edit spatial data from leading cloud data warehouses directly within QGIS. With this plugin, you can seamlessly work with data from Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Redshift, and PostgreSQL, edit it within QGIS, and commit changes back to your data warehouse—all powered by the CARTO platform.
Simply connect your cloud data warehouse to CARTO, install the QGIS plugin, and take full control of your geospatial data within a familiar GIS environment. This ensures efficient spatial data management, enrichment, and analysis while keeping your data centralized and up to date in your cloud ecosystem.
Open QGIS on your computer.
Navigate to the Plugins tab and select Manage and Install Plugins.
Search for ‘CARTO’ Plugin, select it, and click Install Plugin.
Close the Plugins dialog. The CARTO plugin will now appear in your QGIS interface.
Log in or sign up for CARTO to access your geospatial data within QGIS.
To use the CARTO QGIS Plugin, you need internet access and authentication with CARTO. You can:
Log in with your existing CARTO Organization account, or
Sign up for a CARTO account.
Once authenticated, you’ll have access to geospatial data from your CARTO data warehouse connections.
In QGIS, the CARTO icon will appear in the Browser panel. From there, you can:
Visualize your connections and see the permissions available to you.
Navigate to specific datasets and right-click for these options:
Add Layer: Add a full table as a map layer (limited to tables under 50MB).
Add Layer with Filter: Add a filtered subset of your data using:
WHERE: Apply a SQL WHERE clause to filter records.
Extent: Filter data by defining a bounding box, either manually or from the QGIS map interface.
LIMIT: Restrict the number of rows to load.
Show Details: View metadata such as schema, table size, number of rows, etc.
Once a layer is added to your QGIS map, you can:
Visualize, style, and analyze the layer using standard QGIS tools.
Edit geometries and attributes while maintaining a link to the original data warehouse table via a primary key (unique identifier).
Save edits, triggering a synchronization process that uploads the changes back to your data warehouse.
Go to the CARTO platform for further analysis and visualization.
Schema editing is not supported. You cannot modify table structures.
Download is only available for standard tables. Tables storing pre-generated tilesets or raster data cannot be downloaded.
Performance may be affected depending on your data warehouse provider and table size.
Upcoming Version 1.0 will introduce performance improvements, including support for the Geoparquet format when exporting.
