What is CARTO?

CARTO is the leading Agentic GIS and Location Intelligence platform. It enables organizations to use AI, spatial data and analysis for more efficient delivery routes, better behavioral marketing, strategic store placements, and much more.

Data Scientists, Developers, and Analysts use CARTO and its Agentic GIS approach to optimize business processes and predict future outcomes through the power of Spatial Data Science and AI Agents reasoning.

CARTO is the only cloud-first spatial platform built for accelerated, modern GIS. It runs natively on top of your cloud data warehouse platform (e.g. Google BigQuery, Snowflake, AWS Redshift, Oracle, Databricks, PostgreSQL, etc.), providing easy access to highly scalable spatial analysis and visualization capabilities in the cloud - be it for analytics, app development, data engineering, AI-powered decision-making, and more.

Users can use CARTO in both cloud and self-hosted deployments, giving enterprises full control over their data, and infrastructure while ensuring security, compliance, and seamless integration with existing systems.

CARTO offers enterprise-grade secure connectivity to your own vetted AI models, authenticated through your organization’s credentials and proxy configuration. Supported providers include Google, Snowflake, AWS Bedrock, Databricks, Oracle, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more, ensuring full compliance, governance, and flexibility for enterprise AI deployments.

Who uses CARTO?

Different type of users leverage our platform in different ways, such as:

🧑‍💼 Data Analysts

A Data Analyst might use Builder to create maps and dashboards, and Workflows to design analysis pipelines. They can also develop AI Agents powered by their own MCP Tools, making spatial insights accessible through natural language.

🧑‍💻 Data Engineers

A Data Engineering might automate geospatial pipelines and enrich data from the Data Observatory, exposing curated results as tools for AI Agents and enterprise applications.

🧑‍🔬 Data Scientists

A Data Scientist might use Workflows and the Analytics Toolbox to engineer spatial features and perform advanced analyses, then visualize and share results through Builder dashboards. They might also leverage AI Agents and MCP Tools to explore correlations and generate insights conversationally.

🧑‍💻 Developers

A Developer might build scalable and performant geospatial apps faster and on top of their own cloud data warehouse by using the CARTO module in deck.gl, CARTO APIs, and custom MCP tools that connect to internal data or trigger workflows.

📈 Analytics and GIS leaders

An Analytic and GIS Leader might empower teams across the organization to use spatial data effectively, from Builder dashboards and Workflows for analysis to AI Agents and MCP Tools that make insights accessible through natural language.

🗺️ GIS Analysts

A GIS Analyst might use Workflows to analyze data exposing them as MCP Tools to be reused by AI Agents within map-powered dashboards or other systems, turning complex spatial analysis into modular and accessible insights

☁️ Cloud Architects

A Cloud Architect might implement CARTO to speed up the migration of geospatial workloads to the cloud.

What makes CARTO unique?

We believe that CARTO does some things extremely well — And those things make us unique versus other geospatial platforms:

Cloud Native

• Direct connection to your cloud data warehouse — no migration or ETLs needed.

• Use native SQL across the platform and leverage your data warehouse geospatial capabilities.

• Our Analytics Toolbox functions are installed and run natively in your data warehouse, expanding its geospatial capabilities.

• Streamlined security and governance by inheriting data and user access controls.

• Easy to ramp up for people with limited exposure to geospatial, unlike traditional GIS tools.

Scale and Performance

• Process millions and billions of records by leveraging your cloud data warehouse computational power.

• Full support for spatial indexing techniques such as H3, optimizing transformations, enrichment, and analysis for superior performance with large datasets.

• Create performant visualizations regardless of data scale using dynamic and static tiling strategies.

• Use Builder to create and share dashboards in minutes; create spatial workflows easily in Workflows, our no-code visual model builder

• Faster development of scalable geospatial applications by leveraging CARTO and Deck.gl, allowing you to focus on driving value with your application

Agentic GIS

• CARTO brings AI-powered spatial reasoning to the cloud with AI Agents capable of understanding, analyzing, and visualizing your data through natural language.

• Combine the scale of cloud-native processing with the adaptability of AI to assist in complex analyses, build workflows, and generate spatial insights conversationally.

• Securely connect CARTO to your own vetted AI models using your organization’s credentials and proxy.

• Integrate these capabilities through the CARTO MCP Server, fully aligned with the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Components of the CARTO platform

Depending on your usage of the CARTO platform, whether it’s for visualization, analysis, data access, or application development, you will be using different components of the platform.

Workspace

The central location of all your experience with CARTO; connect to multiple cloud data warehouses, explore your geospatial data, access Maps, Workflows and AI Agents and access the different CARTO tools. Login or create an account.

Builder

CARTO Builder offers powerful map making capabilities, interactive data visualizations, collaboration and publication options - everything running natively from your cloud data warehouse. Learn more.

AI Agents

CARTO AI Agents provide a powerful conversational interface that allows anyone, regardless of technical expertise, to ask questions in natural language and receive instant, actionable insights. This marks a fundamental shift beyond dashboards to a dynamic, intuitive way of exploring your geospatial data. Learn more.

Workflows

CARTO Workflows is a visual model builder that allows you to build complex spatial analyses and data preparation and transformation workflows without writing code. As with the rest of our platform, Workflows is fully cloud-native and runs in your own data warehouse. Learn more.

CARTO MCP Server

The CARTO MCP Server enables AI Agents to use geospatial tools built with Workflows. By exposing workflows as MCP Tools, GIS teams can empower agents to answer spatial questions with organization-specific logic. Learn more.

Platform APIs and libraries

For the Developer community, we have created a complete library of APIs, frameworks, connectors, and development tools to accelerate your spatial app development process. View all libraries and APIs.

Analytics Toolbox

The CARTO Analytics Toolbox is a suite of functions and procedures to easily enhance the geospatial capabilities available in the different cloud data warehouses. It contains more than 100 advanced spatial functions, grouped in different modules such as tiler, data, clustering, statistics, etc. Learn more.

Data Observatory

We catalog and distribute thousands of vetted public and premium spatial datasets, covering most global markets. These datasets are available across the different components of CARTO, so you can use them for data enrichment or as additional layers for your spatial apps and analyses. Explore our Spatial Data Catalog.

Next steps

Now that you're familiar with CARTO, here are some beginner-friendly next steps you can take to get started:

1. Create a new CARTO organization if you haven't already: our 14-day free trial does not require a credit card and allows you for unlimited testing.

2. Read our first-steps guides to connect to your data, create your first map, create your first agent, create your first workflow, create your first MCP tool and develop your first application.

3. Discover our CARTO Academy where you will find easy-to-follow steps to build your first use cases using the CARTO platform.