What is CARTO?
Last updated
Last updated
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.
Different type of users leverage our platform in different ways, such as:
We believe that CARTO does some things extremely well — And those things make us unique versus other geospatial platforms:
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.
Use much larger volumes of data, such as 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 the scale of the data by using our dynamic and static tiling strategies.
Use Builder to create and share dashboards in minutes, with a complete set of tools and widgets.
Create spatial workflows easily in Workflows, our no-code visual model builder.
Easy to ramp up for people with limited exposure to geospatial, unlike traditional GIS tools.
Faster development of scalable geospatial applications by leveraging CARTO and Deck.gl, allowing you to focus on driving value with your application.
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.
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.
CARTO Builder offers powerful map making capabilities, interactive data visualizations, collaboration and publication options - everything running natively from your cloud data warehouse.
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.
For the Developer community, we have created a complete library of APIs, frameworks, connectors, and development tools to accelerate your spatial app development process.
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.
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.
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.
