Q1 2025

Control layer presence in Builder’s map layer list

March 19th, 2025

Improvement Builder

Editor users can now manage the presence of a layer in the map layer list directly from the Legend tab in Builder. Previously, it was only possible to show or hide a layer’s legend. With this update, you now have full control over whether a layer itself should appear in the map layer list — what end-users see and interact with during map exploration.

Manage your maps, workflows, and connections at scale with our new Resources APIs

March 19th, 2025

New CARTO for Developers

As organizations expand their usage of CARTO and break the GIS data silo using cloud-native maps and workflows, it becomes important to have the right tools to manage all resources at scale. This is why, starting today, all users in CARTO have access to a new set of API endpoints where they can programmatically list and delete their maps, workflows, and connections.

Additionally, to empower Superadmins on their journey to enable CARTO for large organizations, we're exposing the following functionality via the new APIs:

• List all the maps, workflows, and connections in a CARTO organization

• Bulk delete of multiple assets with a single API request

• Transfer the ownership of an asset (map, workflow, or connection) to another user

Ready to scale up? Head over to our API reference to get started.

Connect to Databricks using OAuth authentication

March 13th, 2025

New Workspace

Users can now connect to their Databricks account using OAuth authentication, with both Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and User-to-Machine (U2M) authentication flows supported! This adds an extra layer of security for Databricks users since OAuth tokens are automatically refreshed by default and do not require the direct management of the access token. For these reasons, Databricks is strongly recommending its users to choose OAuth over Personal Access Tokens.

Want to learn more? head over to our section on Databricks connections.

Visualize rasters in Builder, directly from your data warehouse

February 27th, 2025

New Builder

Raster visualization is now available in Builder, marking a major milestone in CARTO’s end-to-end support for raster data. With this release, you can seamlessly import, analyze, and visualize raster datasets stored in Google BigQuery and Snowflake—all within CARTO.

This new capability unlocks powerful use cases, allowing you to explore and analyze data at scale, seamlessly within your cloud environment, without additional data movement. Interesting in learning more? Check our documentation.

Introducing AI Agents for maps - now available in Public Preview

February 20th, 2025

New Builder

We’re excited to announce the Public Preview of CARTO AI Agents, designed to make interacting with your maps in Builder more intuitive and dynamic. With AI Agents, users can seamlessly zoom to specific regions based on conversational input, explore map details, and apply filters using widgets—all through a natural language interface.

✨ Stay tuned—this is just the beginning. We’re already working on making AI Agents faster, smarter, and more powerful to elevate your mapping experience even further.

Expanding CARTO for Databricks: Location Data Services & Data Enrichment

February 18th, 2025

New Workflows

We’re introducing Location Data Services (LDS) support and new data enrichment components in CARTO for Databricks, enabling more seamless geospatial analysis across different user roles and workflows.

• Location Data Services (LDS) Support: Now available in both the Analytics Toolbox for Databricks and as Workflows components. Users can perform geocoding, routing, and isoline calculations via CARTO’s standard providers. The Analytics Toolbox enables direct use within Databricks notebooks and SQL workflows, while CARTO Workflows provides a low-code interface, integrating LDS into broader spatial analysis pipelines. LDS usage is subject to CARTO licensing and quotas, but users can also bring their own provider credentials, just as with other data warehouses.

• Data Enrichment Components: These new Workflows components simplify use cases like demographic enrichment, POI data integration, and trade area analysis. Users can enhance datasets with information from CARTO’s Data Observatory or their own geospatial sources, whether structured as spatial indexes, points, or polygons. By embedding enrichment within CARTO Workflows, users can more easily integrate this step into their existing analysis.

These updates further reduce complexity for Databricks users working with spatial data. Data scientists can leverage LDS functions directly within their Databricks environment, while Workflows opens up more advanced spatial analysis to less technical users. By bringing LDS and enrichment into CARTO Workflows, we make it easier to build complete geospatial pipelines without writing custom code.

Bringing cloud-native spatial analytics to your desktop GIS with the new CARTO QGIS Plugin

February 6th, 2025

New Integrations

The new 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 check out 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 gain full control over your geospatial data in a familiar GIS environment. This enables smooth workflows for spatial data management, enrichment, and analysis while ensuring your data remains centralized and up to date in your cloud ecosystem.

Connect to Snowflake using Key-pair authentication

February 3rd, 2025

New Workspace

Snowflake users can now connect to their Data Warehouse using Key-pair authentication! This is a much more secure alternative to basic username/password authentication as it is highly resistant to brute-force attacks, eliminates password management complexities, and can be easily used as the authentication mechanism for scripts and applications.

We've also added support for Key-pair rotation, enabling users to update the private key of Key-pair connections they own. For more information, see our section on Key-pair authentication for Snowflake connections.

Support for aggregating data sources by identical geometries in Builder

January 30th, 2025

New Builder

Are you working with datasets where multiple rows share the same geometry but have varying attributes, such as administrative boundaries, roads, or infrastructure locations?

The new aggregate by geometry functionality allows you to aggregate those features in your layer visualization and interactions, improving performance while keeping access to detailed insights.

With this update, you can:

• Aggregate geometries in your layer to ensure optimal performance.

• Aggregate styling and interaction attributes to retrieve relevant information linked to your aggregated feature.

• Maintain widget functionality over the original source, enabling drill-down operations for deeper analysis.

Expand and tailor Workflows functionality with Extension Packages

January 30th, 2025

New Workflows

With this new release, users and partners can now extend the capabilities of our low-code analytics tool CARTO Workflows by creating, integrating and distributing custom components tailored to their specific spatial analytics needs.

To start creating your own Workflows Extension Packages we have published this public GitHub template. Kick off your own repository out the template and start developing extensions for BigQuery and Snowflake connections.

Additionally, we have published a set of extensions readily available to be installed from the Workflows UI. The initial release boasts a curated collection of extensions, including:

• BigQuery ML: Integrate machine learning workflows with your geospatial data using BigQuery ML directly within Workflows.

• Google Earth Engine: Unleash the power of Google Earth Engine for advanced spatial analysis tasks.

• Google Environment APIs: Bring the power of Google Environment APIs (Solar, Air Quality, Pollen) into your geospatial analytics workflows.

• Telco Signal Propagation Models: Analyze telecommunication signals with path profiles, propagation modeling, and obstacle identification.

Head over to the CARTO Workflows documentation to learn more about Extension Packages and explore the initial release offerings.

Support for sharing maps with specific users

January 17th, 2025

New Workspace

We've introduced the ability to share maps with individual users! Previously, maps could only be shared with the entire organization, specific user groups, or made publicly accessible via a link.

With this new feature, Editors now have more granular control over map access permissions. Users can select exactly which individuals should have access to a map (and they can revoke it at any time), making it easier to collaborate on specific projects while maintaining security. For more information, see our section on publishing and sharing maps.

Connect CARTO and Google BigQuery using Workload Identity Federation

January 10th, 2025

New Workspace

We’re excited to announce that CARTO now supports connecting to Google BigQuery via Workload Identity Federation! This new capability enables secure, seamless authentication without requiring service account keys, making it easier to manage access and improving security for your cloud-native maps, workflows and applications.

With Workload Identity Federation, you can set up a trust relationship between CARTO and your Google Cloud projects for a smooth integration — In other words, you will be managing permissions to each of your CARTO users directly in Google Cloud, using IAM rules.

Another benefit of this method is that it provides a framework to effortlessly scale and distribute granular permissions across large-scale teams using CARTO and BigQuery. To get started:

• Administrators will need to set up an integration to configure Workload Identity Federation in CARTO.

• Once the integration is set up, all users will be able to use Workload Identity Federation when connecting CARTO and BigQuery.

Develop completely custom widgets powered by H3 and Quadbin spatial index-based sources

January 7th, 2025

Improvement CARTO for Developers

A few months ago we introduced our framework-agnostic widgets, a new system for developers to add scalable and highly-performant charts and other data components to their CARTO + deck.gl application, with support for vector-based data sources: points, lines and polygons.

Today, we're extremely happy to announce that developers can now build completely custom widgets using spatial index sources as well. These sources aggregate the data in a spatial index system, such as H3 or Quadbin, for increased performance and scalability. The main benefits of the new framework-agnostic widgets apply to spatial index-based widgets as well:

• Build anything using H3 and Quadbin sources: from scorecards to bar charts, tables, time series, and everything in between.

• Bring your own UI: Use your favorite charting library or custom HTML components.

• Easily sync your widgets with the deck.gl map.

• Seamlessly use widgets to filter the map and other widgets, fully leveraging your cloud data warehouse computing power.

• Built using JS and Typescript only, they are fully compatible with the framework of your choice (Angular, React, Vue...), adding minimal dependencies.

Ready to learn more? Get started by reading the technical reference or by exploring the examples.