What is CARTO?
CARTO is the leading Location Intelligence platform for the modern data stack. It enables organizations to use 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 to optimize business processes and predict future outcomes through the power of Spatial Data Science.
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, etc.), providing easy access to highly scalable spatial analysis and visualization capabilities in the cloud - be it for analytics, app development, data engineering, and more. CARTO is available in both cloud and self-hosted deployments.
Who uses CARTO?
Different type of users leverage our platform in different ways, such as:
What makes CARTO unique?
We believe that CARTO does some things extremely well — And those things make us unique versus other geospatial platforms:
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, geocode your tables, enrich your data with a wealth of vetted datasets to enhance your geospatial analysis, and access the different CARTO tools.
Builder
CARTO Builder offers powerful map making capabilities, interactive data visualizations, collaboration and publication options - everything running natively from your cloud data warehouse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Next steps
Now that you're familiar with CARTO, here are some beginner-friendly next steps you can take to get started:
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.
Read our first-steps guides to connect to your data, create your first map, create your first workflow and develop your first application.
Discover our CARTO Academy where you will find easy-to-follow steps to build your first use cases using the CARTO platform.
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