New developer framework-agnostic widgets for Tileset and Raster sources

April 3rd, 2025

New CARTO for Developers

Developers building custom, scalable geospatial apps with CARTO can now add custom charts and widgets on top of their tileset and raster sources, enriching their application with additional GPU-powered filtering capabilities. These widgets have the same features as all our developer widgets:

• Fully-customizable: using flexible data models and your own UI charting library.

• Easily sync your widgets with the deck.gl map, and seamlessly use widgets to filter.

• Framework-agnostic, with minimal dependencies: built with pure JS and Typescript, it integrates nicely in your own stack (Angular, React, Vue...).

Use cases include land use treemap charts, NDVI average scorecards, or frequency histograms over huge tilesets with millions of points, and everything in between... Get creative!

View all assets in your organization with the new Superadmin role

April 3rd, 2025

Improvement Accounts

We have introduced a new user role –Superadmin– capable of viewing and managing all assets (Maps, Workflows and Connections) in the organization, regardless of who owns them or their visibility settings. This new role will help facilitate the administration and governance of large organizations with many users and many assets:

• Delete and transfer assets in bulk

• Filter assets by owner

• View detailed asset relationships, such as the Connection used by a Workflow.

Getting started with CARTO

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 Platform

CARTO unlocks the power of spatial analysis in the cloud, extending the visualization, analysis and development capabilities of the leading cloud data warehouse platforms, such as Google BigQuery, Snowflake and Amazon Redshift.

Find out how to get the most out of our Location Intelligence platform with our product documentation:

Data and Analysis

Development tools

APIs

Get Help

New developer framework-agnostic widgets for Tileset and Raster sources

April 3rd, 2025

New CARTO for Developers

Developers building custom, scalable geospatial apps with CARTO can now add custom charts and widgets on top of their tileset and raster sources, enriching their application with additional GPU-powered filtering capabilities. These widgets have the same features as all our developer widgets:

• Fully-customizable: using flexible data models and your own UI charting library.

• Easily sync your widgets with the deck.gl map, and seamlessly use widgets to filter.

• Framework-agnostic, with minimal dependencies: built with pure JS and Typescript, it integrates nicely in your own stack (Angular, React, Vue...).

Use cases include land use treemap charts, NDVI average scorecards, or frequency histograms over huge tilesets with millions of points, and everything in between... Get creative!

View all assets in your organization with the new Superadmin role

April 3rd, 2025

Improvement Accounts

We have introduced a new user role –Superadmin– capable of viewing and managing all assets (Maps, Workflows and Connections) in the organization, regardless of who owns them or their visibility settings. This new role will help facilitate the administration and governance of large organizations with many users and many assets:

• Delete and transfer assets in bulk

• Filter assets by owner

• View detailed asset relationships, such as the Connection used by a Workflow.

Control layer presence in Builder’s map layer list

March 19th, 2025

Improvement Builder

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

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.

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, Snowflake and Databricks—all within CARTO.

Introducing AI Agents for maps - now available in Public Preview

February 20th, 2025

New Builder

✨ 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.

• 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

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.

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?

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.

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:

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 your entire organization, specific user groups, or made publicly accessible via a link.

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:

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

January 7th, 2025

Improvement CARTO for Developers

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.

Improved SSO group management

December 13th, 2024

Improvement Workspace

Discover spatial data like never before: Meet the new Data Observatory Catalog!

December 4th, 2024

Improvement Data Observatory

We’re thrilled to announce a major update to the CARTO Data Observatory catalog! The new version introduces a completely redesigned interface, making it easier than ever to browse and discover spatial datasets. Whether you're searching for demographic insights, mobility or environmental data, the improved catalog helps you navigate a vast array of options with greater clarity and efficiency.

In addition to the new design, the updated catalog now includes richer metadata for each dataset. You can access detailed descriptions, links to product documentation, Frequently Asked Questions, and relevant use-cases for each product, enabling more informed decision-making when assessing external datasets to enrich your geospatial analysis.

Avoid exposing SQL in your CARTO applications with Named Sources

November 24th, 2024

New CARTO for Developers

There are no trade-offs between simplicity, flexibility and security: developers using CARTO can now use Named Sources to avoid exposing the SQL queries used under the hood in their applications, and without necessarily having to add additional backend or proxy services.

Fully deploy CARTO within Snowflake using Container Services

November 21st, 2024

New Deployment Methods

You can now deploy your own instance of CARTO fully inside of Snowflake, as a Native App using Snowflake-managed Container Services.

From additional security benefits (from a closed environment within Snowflake) to streamlined installation, there are multiple reasons to be excited about this new deployment method, currently in BETA for specific customers.

Seamless data source switching in Builder maps

November 21st, 2024

New Builder

Builder users can now modify the location or connection of data sources directly in Builder without breaking the map configuration. This ensures that maps retain their overall configuration, as long as the fields in the updated data source have the same name and type.

For map components such as style properties, widgets, or interactions that rely on properties not found in the updated data source, the configuration will gracefully fall back to its default settings, ensuring the map remains functional.

Reusable custom color palettes in Builder

November 11th, 2024

New Builder

Admin users can now define custom color palettes for their CARTO organization, removing the need to manually add custom color styling in each new Builder map individually. This is a quick and easy way to apply styles consistently across various maps, available to all Editors within an organization.

Databricks support for CARTO Workflows

October 31st, 2024

New Workflows

We are thrilled to announce that CARTO Workflows now supports direct connections to Databricks, significantly enhancing our integration capabilities for the Databricks platform. This new feature empowers Databricks' vast community of data engineers, data scientists, and analysts to seamlessly perform geospatial analysis within CARTO Workflows.

This release caps off a series of Databricks-focused updates rolled out over recent months:

By embedding these tools directly in Databricks, we are breaking down the geospatial data silo, making geospatial insights more accessible and actionable for enterprise teams.

Search, highlight and zoom with Builder's Table widget

October 17th, 2024

Improvement Builder

You can now easily search for specific features within the Table Widget, making them quick to locate. Hover over a table row to instantly highlight the corresponding feature on the map, and with a click, the map will automatically zoom to and center on that feature.

We’ve also improved the widget’s configuration, allowing you to label, format, and reorder columns without altering your data source.

New basemap selector in Builder

October 15th, 2024

New Builder

Elevate your point visualizations with the new _carto_point_density property

October 14th, 2024

New Builder, CARTO for Developers

New framework-agnostic widgets in CARTO for Developers

October 9th, 2024

New CARTO for Developers

Developers using CARTO + deck.gl are scaling and accelerating their geospatial apps with powerful layers, using live data from their cloud data warehouse. Now, they can also add scalable, interactive charts and widgets to their geospatial applications.

• Use flexible and scalable data models to achieve exactly and quickly what you need: 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 with JS and Typescript, they are fully compatible with the framework of your choice (Angular, React, Vue...), adding minimal dependencies.

Dynamic aggregation of point layer into clusters

October 7th, 2024

New Builder

We've introduced a new functionality in Builder to dynamically visualize your point data as clusters, helping you gain deeper insights and uncover trends more effectively. By aggregating point data into clustering, you can:

• Reduce Visual Clutter: Automatically group nearby points into clusters as you zoom out, helping you maintain clarity and readability, even with dense datasets.

• Enhanced Performance: Clustering improves performance by reducing the number of individual features rendered, making it easier to handle large datasets without compromising speed.

• Meaningful Aggregation: See patterns emerge as points are grouped into clusters, helping you identify hotspots, trends, and areas of interest quickly and effectively.

• Interactive Exploration: As you zoom in and out, clusters dynamically adjust, revealing individual points as you get closer, giving you seamless interaction with your data at different scales.

Enforcing SSO for all users within an organization

October 4th, 2024

New Accounts

We've introduced a new toggle in the settings that allows Admins to enforce SSO within their organization. When enabled, every single user in that organization will have to authenticate using Single Sign-On, regaldless of their role. Users that try to authenticate with other mechanisms, such as User/Password and Google Account will not be allowed to log in.

New Export Feature and Enhanced Security for Workflows

September 26th, 2024

New Workflows

We’re pleased to introduce several updates to Workflows designed to improve both functionality and security:

Export Data from Any Node

Enhanced Security for Enterprise-Ready Components

In line with our ongoing platform-wide security initiative, we've implemented the following updates:

• You can now specify a custom bucket location when using the Send by Email component, giving you control over where your data is sent.

These updates make Workflows an even more powerful tool for enterprise users while maintaining a focus on security and ease of use.

Require Viewer Credentials for Snowflake OAuth connections

September 11th, 2024

New Workspace

Users can now require viewer credentials for their Snowflake OAuth connections. When this option is enabled, anyone accessing data through the connection — whether they're consuming maps, running workflows, or using the data explorer — will need to authenticate with their own credentials.

Monitor what's happening in your CARTO organization with the new Activity Data

August 30th, 2024

New Workspace

Administrator can now easily export (manually or programmatically via API) a comprehensive data collection of everything that happened within their CARTO organization.

The new Activity Data can be then analyzed to deeply understand things like:

• Basic engagement indicators: weekly active users, workflows run per week...

• Most used features: most used workflow components...

• Quota consumption: who is consuming more quota and why

• And many more insights about your CARTO organization

Improved asset ownership transfer

July 31st, 2024

Improvement Workspace

We've introduced an improved flow for transferring user assets (maps, workflows, connections, etc) when deleting a user or when downgrading an Editor/Admin to Viewer. From now on, Admins will be able to select the specific user that will receive the assets.

Dynamic aggregation of point layer into H3 cells

July 31st, 2024

New Builder

We've introduced a new functionality in Builder to dynamically visualize your point data as H3 aggregations, helping you gain deeper insights and uncover trends more effectively.

By aggregating point data, you can:

• Simplify Complex Data: Aggregate large volumes of point data into meaningful patterns and trends, making it easier to interpret and analyze.

• Enhance Performance: Improve rendering times and performance, especially with large datasets, by reducing the number of individual points displayed.

• Identify Hotspots: Quickly identify areas of high density or activity, helping you make data-driven decisions.

• Visual Clarity: Reduce visual clutter by grouping nearby points, providing a clearer and more informative map visualization.

Simply select this new visualization type and enjoy the benefits of aggregated data visualization, all with exceptional performance thanks to CARTO's native support for spatial indexes.

Enhanced layer panel and spatial source definition in Builder

July 29th, 2024

Improvement Builder

We are excited to introduce an improved panel in Builder for configuring your layers. This update significantly enhances the UI and UX of this panel, making the experience of creating visualizations in Builder even more enjoyable and efficient.

The redesigned panel features a cleaner layout and includes a new 'Data' section at the top. In this new section, you can define the spatial definition of the data source linked to your layer. This is especially useful if your source contains multiple spatial columns or if Builder cannot recognize the spatial column by looking at our default conventions.

Workflow Templates now available directly from your workspace

July 29th, 2024

New Workflows

• Integrated Collection: Access a wide range of workflow templates hosted on the CARTO Academy website, now readily available in the CARTO Workspace.

• Simplified Process: Users no longer need to visit the Academy site to download and import templates. The new feature allows you to easily recreate templates by selecting ‘New Workflow > From template’ within the Workspace.

• Enhanced Usability: This integration ensures that all available templates can be accessed with just a few clicks, promoting best practices and facilitating quicker setup of workflows.

This feature is designed to ease the learning curve by providing immediate access to valuable workflow templates that illustrate both building blocks for common geospatial analytics and more complex use cases, like industry-specific analysis for Telco, Insurance, Retail and CPG, Out of Home advertising, etc

Zoom to layer extent in Builder maps

July 19th, 2024

New Builder

We are excited to introduce the zoom to layer functionality in Builder, which allows you to easily zoom to the layer extent, providing an immediate view of your dataset. When layers are filtered by widgets or parameters, the zoom focuses on the filtered data, ensuring you see exactly what's relevant.

Additionally, we have incorporated a "Show only this/Show all layers" feature, allowing you to quickly toggle all layers on and off with a single action, especially useful for maps including multiple layers.

New Workflows Components for Creating Tilesets

July 15th, 2024

New Workflows

We are excited to introduce a powerful new set of components in Workflows that significantly enhance your geospatial data processing capabilities. These components are designed to facilitate the creation of various types of tilesets, allowing for efficient visualization and analysis of large spatial datasets. Here are the key features:

Create Vector Tileset

Generate vector tilesets from point, line, or polygon tables, enabling smooth and interactive map experiences.

Create Point Aggregation Tileset

Aggregate point data along with their properties into tilesets, ideal for visualizing dense point data on maps.

Create Quadbin Aggregation Tileset

Generate tilesets by aggregating quadbin indices, providing a fast and scalable way to manage spatial hierarchies and visualize large datasets.

Create H3 Aggregation Tileset

Utilize H3 hexagonal indexing to create aggregated tilesets, perfect for detailed spatial analysis and representation.

Support for organizing and filtering maps and workflows with tags

June 28th, 2024

New Workspace

We are happy to announce a new system that allows users to classify and filter maps and workflows in the CARTO Workspace with tags. With this new feature, editor users will be able to create, apply and filter maps and workflows by tags, considerably improving the organization of assets within CARTO. With this new enhancement:

• You can create, apply and remove tags by editing the Map/Workflow properties from the Workspace;

• We have added a tag filter to the Workspace so you can filter by one or several tags;

• Once a tag filter is applied, you can copy the URL for sharing that Workspace view internally;

• Tags will be automatically removed when they are no longer applied to any map or workflow.

Network planning and coverage analysis for Telco with the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery

June 28th, 2024

New Analytics Toolbox

This release includes procedures for:

• Path profile analysis to evaluate the line of sight and identify potential obstructions between two points;

New space-time analysis capabilities in the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery

June 28th, 2024

New Analytics Toolbox

Heatmap visualizations at scale for massive point-based data

June 20th, 2024

New Builder, CARTO for Developers

We are thrilled to announce density heatmap visualization supporting very large scale point-based datasets! This new feature allows you to render massive point datasets as a heatmap in a scalable and performant manner. Available now in Builder, you can easily identify hotspot patterns and gain insights from your data.

Improved Data Importing Capabilities in Workflows

June 19th, 2024

New Workflows

We are excited to introduce enhanced data importing capabilities in CARTO Workflows. This new release includes a variety of features designed to simplify and expand the ways you can import data into your workflows, providing greater flexibility and functionality.

New Features:

Import from URL Component

Sunset of Previous Method

Quick Import from your desktop

• Files uploaded in this manner remain accessible within each workflow, ensuring consistent data availability and management.

Support for calling external API services from Workflows

June 3rd, 2024

New Builder

We are thrilled to announce a powerful new feature for Workflows: the ability to connect your workflows with external API services. With this new capability, we enabling use cases like the following:

• Retrieve Data from External APIs: Augment your datasets by pulling in information from APIs such as Google Environment APIs, government, cadaster, parcel data, and other specialized data sources.

• Trigger Actions via API: Automatically trigger external processes, send notifications, or execute commands directly from your workflows, like:

  • Notify on chat applications: Send real-time notifications to your company's channels to keep your team updated on workflow executions.

  • Integrations with automation tools: Integrate with automation tools to trigger external actions from a Workflow execution.

• Send data from your Workflows to external APIs: Use data from any node in your workflow to build the body for a request.

Support for custom basemaps in Builder

May 16th, 2024

New Builder

A basemap is a crucial component of any map, providing essential context, spatial features, and the visual foundation for your creations. To meet the unique needs of each organization, we now enable you to bring your own basemap directly into your CARTO organization.

Performance optimizations in Builder maps

May 14th, 2024

Improvement Builder

We are excited to introduce a set of enhancements in CARTO Builder designed to further improve the performance of our interactive map visualizations. With these improvements, Builder will:

• Load only essential properties: Builder will now load only the essential properties from your tables or SQL queries when they are needed in the map. This reduces unnecessary data transfer and speeds up processing.

• Reduce tile requests: The number of tile requests has been significantly reduced, resulting in faster map loading times and a smoother user experience.

• Limit simultaneous queries: To enhance stability and prevent overload, Builder will limit the number of simultaneous queries, ensuring a more reliable performance.

These enhancements are part of our ongoing commitment to providing the best possible experience with CARTO Builder.

Redesigning our Developers section in CARTO Workspace

April 29th, 2024

Improvement Workspace

We believe that all paths to success start from the CARTO Workspace, and the path to successfully developing powerful geospatial apps isn't an exception. With this in mind, we've carefully redesigned the experience when accessing the Developers section, and these are the highlights:

• • This change unifies the management of API Access Tokens and OAuth Clients (previously known as Applications) in a single section, making more clear what each method is best for.

Extended support for raster data sources in Imports, Data Explorer and Workflows

April 24th, 2024

New Workspace, Workflows

We're happy to introduce a suite of powerful new features that are set to enable working with raster data in CARTO. Before these were available, working with raster data required using external CLI applications and dealing with SQL queries manually in order to leverage the analytical capabilities of the CARTO Analytics Toolbox for Snowflake and BigQuery.

Raster Tables in Data Explorer: Dive deeper into your raster data in the data warehouse with full support for raster tables in the Data Explorer. Gain access to a specific set of metadata and custom actions for raster tables.

Generate PDF reports from your Builder maps

April 17th, 2024

New Builder

We’ve launched a new feature that allows you to download detailed PDF reports of your interactive Builder maps. These reports capture everything from the current map extent to widgets, parameters, and the map description.

Whether you're sharing insights with colleagues, presenting to stakeholders, or documenting your analysis, this new feature packs the richness of your interactive maps into a portable, easy-to-share format.

Get quicker, better answers with the new AI-powered help sidebar

April 11th, 2024

Improvement Workspace

A new AI-powered help assistant can now be found in the Help sidebar, available at all times from CARTO Workspace, Builder and Workflows.

It will provide quick answers based on our documentation and will link to the most relevant resource. With our documentation evolving and growing in size and depth, this AI-powered tool will save precious time and will guide you in the right direction without leaving CARTO. Ask anything!

Preview Builder maps during edition

March 31st, 2024

New Builder

Introducing: deck.gl v9

March 27th, 2024

New CARTO for Developers

Support for scheduling the execution of workflows

March 21st, 2024

New Workflows

• Hours: The workflow will be executed every X hours, at o'clock times.

• Days: The workflow will be executed every day at a specific time.

• Weeks: The workflow will be executed weekly, on a specific day, at a specific time.

• Months: The workflow will be executed monthly, on a specific day, at a specific time.

• Custom: Use a custom expression to define the schedule.

CARTO leverages native scheduling capabilities on each data warehouse to provide this functionality in all CARTO Data Warehouse, BigQuery, Snowflake and PostgreSQL connections.

Support for private embedding of CARTO Builder maps

March 14th, 2024

Improvements Builder

Maps created with CARTO Builder can now be embedded anywhere — even when they're not shared publicly. With private embedding you can restrict and maintain control over who can view these maps when embedded on web pages or apps.

New Workflows components for low-code geospatial analytics

February 29th, 2024

New Workflows

During the last few weeks, we’ve been progressively adding new and improved components in CARTO Workflows:

Extended support for URL parameters in Builder maps

February 21st, 2024

Improvements Builder

Control layer presence in Builder’s map layer list

March 19th, 2025

Improvement Builder

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

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.

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.

Introducing AI Agents for maps - now available in Public Preview

February 20th, 2025

New Builder

✨ 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.

• 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

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.

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?

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.

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:

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.

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:

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

January 7th, 2025

Improvement CARTO for Developers

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.

Enforcing SSO for all users within an organization

October 4th, 2024

New Accounts

We've introduced a new toggle in the settings that allows Admins to enforce SSO within their organization. When enabled, every single user in that organization will have to authenticate using Single Sign-On, regaldless of their role. Users that try to authenticate with other mechanisms, such as User/Password and Google Account will not be allowed to log in.

New Export Feature and Enhanced Security for Workflows

September 26th, 2024

New Workflows

We’re pleased to introduce several updates to Workflows designed to improve both functionality and security:

Export Data from Any Node

Enhanced Security for Enterprise-Ready Components

In line with our ongoing platform-wide security initiative, we've implemented the following updates:

• You can now specify a custom bucket location when using the Send by Email component, giving you control over where your data is sent.

These updates make Workflows an even more powerful tool for enterprise users while maintaining a focus on security and ease of use.

Require Viewer Credentials for Snowflake OAuth connections

September 11th, 2024

New Workspace

Users can now require viewer credentials for their Snowflake OAuth connections. When this option is enabled, anyone accessing data through the connection — whether they're consuming maps, running workflows, or using the data explorer — will need to authenticate with their own credentials.

Monitor what's happening in your CARTO organization with the new Activity Data

August 30th, 2024

New Workspace

Administrator can now easily export (manually or programmatically via API) a comprehensive data collection of everything that happened within their CARTO organization.

The new Activity Data can be then analyzed to deeply understand things like:

• Basic engagement indicators: weekly active users, workflows run per week...

• Most used features: most used workflow components...

• Quota consumption: who is consuming more quota and why

• And many more insights about your CARTO organization

Improved asset ownership transfer

31st July, 2024

Improvement Workspace

We've introduced an improved flow for transferring user assets (maps, workflows, connections, etc) when deleting a user or when downgrading an Editor/Admin to Viewer. From now on, Admins will be able to select the specific user that will receive the assets.

Dynamic aggregation of point layer into H3 cells

31st July, 2024

New Builder

We've introduced a new functionality in Builder to dynamically visualize your point data as H3 aggregations, helping you gain deeper insights and uncover trends more effectively.

By aggregating point data, you can:

• Simplify Complex Data: Aggregate large volumes of point data into meaningful patterns and trends, making it easier to interpret and analyze.

• Enhance Performance: Improve rendering times and performance, especially with large datasets, by reducing the number of individual points displayed.

• Identify Hotspots: Quickly identify areas of high density or activity, helping you make data-driven decisions.

• Visual Clarity: Reduce visual clutter by grouping nearby points, providing a clearer and more informative map visualization.

Simply select this new visualization type and enjoy the benefits of aggregated data visualization, all with exceptional performance thanks to CARTO's native support for spatial indexes.

Enhanced layer panel and spatial source definition in Builder

29th July, 2024

New Builder

We are excited to introduce an improved layer panel in Builder for configuring your layers. This update significantly enhances the UI and UX of this panel, making the experience of creating visualizations in Builder even more enjoyable and efficient.

The redesigned panel features a cleaner layout and includes a new 'Data' section at the top. In this new section, you can define the spatial definition of the source linked to your layer. This is especially useful if your source contains multiple spatial columns or if Builder cannot recognize the spatial column by default.

Workflows Templates now available directly from Workspace

29th July, 2024

New Workflows

• Integrated Collection: Access a wide range of workflow templates hosted on the CARTO Academy website, now readily available in the CARTO Workspace.

• Simplified Process: Users no longer need to visit the Academy site to download and import templates. The new feature allows you to easily recreate templates by selecting ‘New Workflow > From template’ within the Workspace.

• Enhanced Usability: This integration ensures that all available templates can be accessed with just a few clicks, promoting best practices and facilitating quicker setup of workflows.

This feature is designed to ease the learning curve by providing immediate access to valuable workflow templates that illustrate both building blocks for common geospatial analytics and more complex use cases, like industry-specific analysis for Telco, Insurance, Retail and CPG, Out of Home advertising, etc

Zoom to layer extent in Builder maps

19th July, 2024

New Builder

We are excited to introduce the zoom to layer functionality in Builder, which allows you to easily zoom to the layer extent, providing an immediate view of your dataset. When layers are filtered by widgets or parameters, the zoom focuses on the filtered data, ensuring you see exactly what's relevant.

Additionally, we have incorporated a "Show only this/Show all layers" feature, allowing you to quickly toggle all layers on and off with a single action, especially useful for maps including multiple layers.

Whether you're exploring vast datasets or gathering insights on geospatially distributed features, these new features will ensure a better exploration experience!

New Workflows Components for Creating Tilesets

15th July, 2024

New Workflows

We are excited to introduce a powerful new set of components in Workflows that significantly enhance your geospatial data processing capabilities. These components are designed to facilitate the creation of various types of tilesets, allowing for efficient visualization and analysis of large spatial datasets. Here are the key features:

Create Vector Tileset

Generate vector tilesets from point, line, or polygon tables, enabling smooth and interactive map experiences.

Create Point Aggregation Tileset

Aggregate point data along with their properties into tilesets, ideal for visualizing dense point data on maps.

Create Quadbin Aggregation Tileset

Generate tilesets by aggregating quadbin indices, providing a fast and scalable way to manage spatial hierarchies and visualize large datasets.

Create H3 Aggregation Tileset

Utilize H3 hexagonal indexing to create aggregated tilesets, perfect for detailed spatial analysis and representation.

Improved SSO group management

December 13th, 2024

Improvement Workspace

Discover spatial data like never before: Meet the new Data Observatory Catalog!

December 4th, 2024

Improvement Data Observatory

We’re thrilled to announce a major update to the CARTO Data Observatory catalog! The new version introduces a completely redesigned interface, making it easier than ever to browse and discover spatial datasets. Whether you're searching for demographic insights, mobility or environmental data, the improved catalog helps you navigate a vast array of options with greater clarity and efficiency.

In addition to the new design, the updated catalog now includes richer metadata for each dataset. You can access detailed descriptions, links to product documentation, Frequently Asked Questions, and relevant use-cases for each product, enabling more informed decision-making when assessing external datasets to enrich your geospatial analysis.

Avoid exposing SQL in your CARTO applications with Named Sources

November 24th, 2024

New CARTO for Developers

There are no trade-offs between simplicity, flexibility and security: developers using CARTO can now use Named Sources to avoid exposing the SQL queries used under the hood in their applications, and without necessarily having to add additional backend or proxy services.

Fully deploy CARTO within Snowflake using Container Services

November 21st, 2024

New Deployment Methods

You can now deploy your own instance of CARTO fully inside of Snowflake, as a Native App using Snowflake-maaged Container Services.

From additional security benefits (from a closed environment within Snowflake) to streamlined installation, there are multiple reasons to be excited about this new deployment method, currently in BETA for specific customers.

Seamless data source switching in Builder maps

November 21st, 2024

New Builder

Builder users can now modify the location or connection of data sources directly in Builder without breaking the map configuration. This ensures that maps retain their overall configuration, as long as the fields in the updated data source have the same name and type.

For map components such as style properties, widgets, or interactions that rely on properties not found in the updated data source, the configuration will gracefully fall back to its default settings, ensuring the map remains functional.

Reusable custom color palettes in Builder

November 11th, 2024

New Builder

Admin users can now define custom color palettes for their CARTO organization, removing the need to manually add custom color styling in each new Builder map individually. This is a quick and easy way to apply styles consistently across various maps, available to all Editors within an organization.

Databricks support for CARTO Workflows

October 31st, 2024

New Workflows

We are thrilled to announce that CARTO Workflows now supports direct connections to Databricks, significantly enhancing our integration capabilities for the Databricks platform. This new feature empowers Databricks' vast community of data engineers, data scientists, and analysts to seamlessly perform geospatial analysis within CARTO Workflows.

This release caps off a series of Databricks-focused updates rolled out over recent months:

By embedding these tools directly in Databricks, we are breaking down the geospatial data silo, making geospatial insights more accessible and actionable for enterprise teams.

Search, highlight and zoom with Builder's Table widget

October 17th, 2024

Improvement Builder

You can now easily search for specific features within the Table Widget, making them quick to locate. Hover over a table row to instantly highlight the corresponding feature on the map, and with a click, the map will automatically zoom to and center on that feature.

We’ve also improved the widget’s configuration, allowing you to label, format, and reorder columns without altering your data source.

New basemap selector in Builder

October 15th, 2024

New Builder

Elevate your point visualizations with the new _carto_point_density property

October 14th, 2024

New Builder, CARTO for Developers

New framework-agnostic widgets in CARTO for Developers

October 9th, 2024

New CARTO for Developers

Developers using CARTO + deck.gl are scaling and accelerating their geospatial apps with powerful layers, using live data from their cloud data warehouse. Now, they can also add scalable, interactive charts and widgets to their geospatial applications.

• Use flexible and scalable data models to achieve exactly and quickly what you need: 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 with JS and Typescript, they are fully compatible with the framework of your choice (Angular, React, Vue...), adding minimal dependencies.

Dynamic aggregation of point layer into clusters

7th October, 2024

New Builder

We've introduced a new functionality in Builder to dynamically visualize your point data as clusters, helping you gain deeper insights and uncover trends more effectively.

By aggregating point data into clustering, you can:

• Reduce Visual Clutter: Automatically group nearby points into clusters as you zoom out, helping you maintain clarity and readability, even with dense datasets.

• Enhanced Performance: Clustering improves performance by reducing the number of individual features rendered, making it easier to handle large datasets without compromising speed.

• Meaningful Aggregation: See patterns emerge as points are grouped into clusters, helping you identify hotspots, trends, and areas of interest quickly and effectively.

• Interactive Exploration: As you zoom in and out, clusters dynamically adjust, revealing individual points as you get closer, giving you seamless interaction with your data at different scales.

Enhancements to export data from Builder maps

December 20th, 2023

Improvement Builder

Additionally, when exporting data as CSV, it now includes the geometry column in WKT (Well-Known Text) format, if applicable. This enhancement simplifies data handling and boosts compatibility with various geospatial tools, making integrations smoother.

ML Generate Text component available for Workflows

December 18th, 2023

New Workflows

It can be used to help analyze the result of an enrichment; to generate labels or categories based on variables on your table; or could also generate new content for each row on your data, using different variables to compose a prompt that will be evaluated on each row.

With this new addition, Generative AI capabilities are handy and readily available from Workflows.

Export Workflows results to a bucket

November 28th, 2023

New Workflows

The node's data will be exported as a series of files, which URLs will be stored in a table. Just inspect the Data tab in the results panel to access the links to each file.

This component is currently available for all CARTO Data Warehouse and BigQuery connections.

Improvements to the results panel in Workflows

November 27th, 2023

Improvement Workflows

We have added a few improvements to the results panel in Workflows that are focused on better usability and data exploration capabilities:

• Renovated, sleeker design;

• See when the workflow was executed for the last time;

• Easily find the number of columns and rows of a result;

• Explore the complete result with pagination for optimal performance;

• Copy the content of a page to the clipboard, ready to be pasted into a spreadsheet;

• Analyze statistics of each column:

  • Frequency of the Top 20 categories for string, date and timestamp columns;

  • Maximum and minimum values, average and sum for numeric columns.

• SQL control code is hidden to facilitate readability.

Support for OAuth connections in Snowflake

November 22nd, 2023

New Workspace

You can now set up an OAuth integration to connect CARTO and Snowflake. This allows users to follow their usual Snowflake login flow (Snowflake OAuth) to set up their connections in CARTO, which has security benefits and is a more familiar process for all Snowflake users.

If you have an external identity provider integrated in Snowflake such as Azure Active Directory or Okta, we also support External OAuth to achieve the same process.

Measure point-to-point distances in Builder maps

November 16th, 2023

New Builder

This new functionality is ideal for a diverse range of use cases, from planning tasks to gaining a deeper understanding of spatial relationships between various map elements.

Style qualitative data using hex color codes

November 6th, 2023

New Builder

Collection of Workflows examples

October 25th, 2023

New Workflows

We have just published a new collection of workflows examples, designed with a hands-on approach to empower users and ease the learning curve for using CARTO Workflows.

It showcases a wide range of scenarios, from simple building blocks for your geospatial analysis to more complex, industry-specific workflows tailored to suit specific use cases.

Improved import capabilities in Workflows

October 25th, 2023

New Workflows

New Pie Widget available in Builder

October 18th, 2023

New Builder

Thanks to this new feature you can quickly and easily analyze data proportions and category weights, allowing for better understanding of each data category within your dataset. This enhancement empowers users to make more informed decisions by providing a clearer view of their data.

Preview Builder maps during edition

March 31st, 2024

New Builder

Introducing: deck.gl v9

March 27th, 2024

New CARTO for Developers

Support for scheduling the execution of workflows

March 21st, 2024

New Workflows

• Hours: The workflow will be executed every X hours, at o'clock times.

• Days: The workflow will be executed every day at a specific time.

• Weeks: The workflow will be executed weekly, on a specific day, at a specific time.

• Months: The workflow will be executed monthly, on a specific day, at a specific time.

• Custom: Use a custom expression to define the schedule.

CARTO leverages native scheduling capabilities on each data warehouse to provide this functionality in all CARTO Data Warehouse, BigQuery, Snowflake and PostgreSQL connections.

Support for private embedding of CARTO Builder maps

March 14th, 2024

Improvements Builder

Maps created with CARTO Builder can now be embedded anywhere — even when they're not shared publicly. With private embedding you can restrict and maintain control over who can view these maps when embedded on web pages or apps.

New Workflows components for low-code geospatial analytics

February 29th, 2024

New Workflows

During the last few weeks, we’ve been progressively adding new and improved components in CARTO Workflows:

Extended support for URL parameters in Builder maps

February 21st, 2024

Improvements Builder

Distinguish Users by authentication method

February 19th, 2024

Improvements Workspace

We have added a new column to the Users and Groups table of the Organization Settings which displays the authentication method used by each user (Google Account, Username/Password, SSO or Github). This will help Admins better manage their organization, avoid confusion and identify users quickly.

Support for configuring and executing your workflows with an API call

February 8th, 2024

New Workflows

We are excited to announce the release of a comprehensive set of new features in CARTO Workflows designed to provide the ability to trigger the execution of your workflows by calling an API.

All these elements have been built to enable users to integrate workflows into larger analytical processes, and to embed asynchronous analytical capabilities into web applications.

Improvements when sharing map and workflow links to new users

January 15th, 2024

Improvements Workspace

• The unauthenticated screen for all shared maps and workflows has been redesigned for clarity

• Users can now login or signup through the map/workflow link, and they will be automatically redirected to the desired map/workflow once successfully authenticated

New CARTO Academy - tutorials, videos and templates to boost your spatial analysis skills

January 11th, 2024

New Documentation

Introducing a new Usage quota and a new Location Data Services credits system

March 28th, 2023

Improvement Workspace

In order to give more flexibility to our users, we have removed a lot of the quotas that were feature-specific, such as maps, public maps, apps or connections, and we have replaced them with a combined usage metric, the Usage quota, that will be the main driver of consumption for all new customers through the CARTO platform.

Additionally, we have changed the way LDS credits are calculated. Before, they were monthly and separated by service: geocoding and isolines. Now, we've combined them into a single annual quota that results in more capacity and better flexibility.

Importing geospatial files into Amazon Redshift using CARTO

March 14th, 2023

Improvement Workspace

With this new functionality, CARTO users working with Amazon Redshift will be able to quickly get their geospatial data ready for advanced analysis and visualization, from no-code tools like Builder or Workflows to geospatial development libraries such as CARTO for deck.gl.

Merchant universe matching analysis to understand market penetration for CPG players available in the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery

March 7th, 2023

New Analytics Toolbox

New Builder SQL Analyses available for Redshift and Snowflake connections

March 3rd, 2023

New Builder

A set of new analyses have been added to Builder, to reach the same level of support on different data warehouses:

• Create buffers: Available now for Redshift and Snowflake connections.

• Intersect and aggregate: Available now for Snowflake connections.

• K-means clustering: Available now for Redshift and Snowflake connections.

Enabling users to share workflows with their organization

February 24th, 2023

Beta Workflows

Additionally, we have adapted the Workflows main page in the Workspace to allow searching workflows and managing the existing ones, in line with what’s available in the Maps section.

CARTO Workflows in public beta now with support for Snowflake, Redshift and PostgreSQL

February 1st, 2023

Beta Workflows

New functions to generate routing matrices and isolines natively in BigQuery

January 31st, 2023

Beta Analytics Toolbox

Adding raster support in BigQuery with a new module in the Analytics Toolbox

January 31st, 2023

Beta Analytics Toolbox

New space for private data available for every user in the CARTO Data Warehouse

January 26th, 2023

New Workspace

The new dataset "private" is a unique dataset for each user, and all the tables and tilesets in this dataset will only be available to that user. Private datasets have a unique qualified name that identifies the user, extracted from their email.

Search, list view and breadcrumbs when browsing your data in Builder and Workspace

January 24th, 2023

Improvement Builder Workspace

An important step of most processes in CARTO is to browse and select data sources and data locations:

This is especially beneficial if you have a large number of projects/databases, schemas/datasets, or tables and tilesets: where previously you would need to scroll indefinitely, now you can perform a quick search.

Dynamic aggregation of point layers into Quadbin grids

January 23rd, 2023

New Builder

This produces a very significant increment in performance, but also allows aggregating data from the original features to make sure that all data is taken into consideration.

Some highlights:

• Available for all point tile layers from all data warehouses

• Implemented with pure SQL in our Maps API, no external dependencies such as the Analytics Toolbox or third-party libraries.

• It allows aggregating properties from the original points and also the number of points per cell.

• Inherits all the advantages and features of the previously existing Spatial Index layers.

• The aggregation happens transparently so no need to manually type any SQL code to aggregate the points.

CARTO Workflows in public beta with support for Google BigQuery and CARTO Data Warehouse

January 18th, 2023

Beta Workflows

New documentation layout

January 18th, 2023

Improvement Documentation

Our documentation portal just got a new look and feel! This new layout should provide the following benefits:

• Cleaner look that uses more screen space if available

• A search bar to quickly find content

• All the documentation is organized and available on the left menu

• All pages now have an "On this page" index on the right sidebar __ to quickly locate sections

Multiple editor users working on the same map

January 13th, 2023

New Builder

Collaborating on CARTO maps is finally possible, in asynchronous mode. This is helpful in setups such as production-ready maps, where the original owner might be out of the office; or in situations where the data, analysis, and cartography are each accomplished by different users. This is how it works:

1. The map owner first needs to enable collaboration for that map.

2. From that moment, all editors with access to the map will be able to edit it.

3. If two editors try to edit at the same time, the last one will be locked out, with the option of requesting to take over editing.

Happy collaboration!

What is the new version of the CARTO Platform?

Is the previous version of CARTO going to be deprecated?

No, we don’t have plans to deprecate the previous version of our platform for our existing Enterprise customers, so you don’t need to worry about that now. However, it is important to note that any new product developments will happen only in the new version of CARTO.

How can I log into the legacy CARTO platform?

What happens to my current CARTO subscription? Will I have to pay extra to access the new platform?

If you are an existing CARTO Enterprise customer, we will give you an account to the new version of our platform without any additional cost for the reminder of your subscription term. Please get in touch with your CARTO representative or our Support team and we will provision you an enterprise account to the new platform according to your subscription plan.

Can I login to both versions of the CARTO platform with the same credentials?

No, the two platforms are completely independent, and hence they require their own set of credentials to login. In our login page users can select which version of CARTO they want to access. To access your old account, select “CARTO Dashboard”.

Will all my data in the previous platform be readily available when I access the new version of CARTO?

No, by default it is not. Both versions of the platform are completely independent. Get in touch with your CARTO representative or our Support team, and we can assist you to migrate your datasets across our two platform versions.

Will I be forced to move all my data to the new version of the CARTO platform?

No, you won’t. If you are an existing CARTO customer you can enjoy both versions of the platform. If you are an existing enterprise customer, and you would like to make available in the new platform some of the tables you have in your existing account, please get in touch with your CARTO representative or our Support team, and we can assist you to migrate data across our two platform versions.

Is CARTO’s Student Package still available?

Can I setup a Single Sign-On integration in the new platform?

Where can I see my current quotas and usage?

Can I license premium data with a trial, or student account?

No, premium data subscriptions are only available for Enterprise plans. For Trial and Student plans, you will only have access to data samples or public data products from the Data Observatory.

Individual plans do not get access to the Data Observatory. If you need to use it, you would need to upgrade to a Starter plan, or get in touch with sales@carto.com

Are premium data subscriptions based on perpetual licenses?

Premium subscriptions are offered on a Data-as-a-Service model based on yearly or multi-yearly licenses. Once the subscription expires and it is not renewed, the user needs to stop using and delete the associated datasets from the account.

Can I export the data from CARTO and use it on other platforms?

It will depend on the data provider and the type of license you have purchased for your premium data subscription. Some data providers offer different types of licenses if their data is going to be used only within a CARTO application or exported into other technologies.

My screen is stuck on the "Creating an Organization" page.

If you have never signed up for CARTO before, this can normally be fixed by clearing your browser’s cache. If you have previously used CARTO or created another CARTO organization - including a free trial - please see the FAQs below.

How can I join an existing organization on CARTO?

A CARTO user with an admin role from your organization will be able to add you to their organization through the CARTO Workspace via Settings > Users and Groups.

If you have a previous or existing CARTO login (including free trials) which are not attached to this organization, you will not be able to immediately join. In this instance, you should contact your customer success manager or support@carto.com who can help you.

Can I be a member of multiple CARTO organizations?

You cannot join multiple CARTO organizations with the same email address. If you have a requirement like this, you should contact your customer success manager or support@carto.com who can help you.

I have previously used CARTO (including signing up for a free trial). Can I create a new organization or user with the same email?

If you are attending a CARTO event where a free trial is a requirement, please contact the event organizers who will be able to coordinate this for you.

Can I extend my free trial to longer than 14 days?

Can I start multiple free trials with CARTO?

If you are attending a CARTO event where a free trial is a requirement, please contact the event organizers who will be able to coordinate this for you.

Why should I migrate to the new version of the CARTO platform?

The new platform offers you a complete cloud native experience, and unparalleled geospatial analysis and visualization capabilities on top of the leading cloud data warehouse platforms (i.e. Google BigQuery, Snowflake, AWS Redshift and Databricks), eliminating the need of complex ETLs and the limits of scalability that our previous platform had.

In the new CARTO, we have implemented a new and more powerful version of CARTO Builder, further advanced our Data Observatory and Development tools, and created a new suite of geospatial analytics functions that can be run natively in the aforementioned cloud data warehouse platforms.

Our teams are currently laser focused on evolving both functionality and user experience to make the new CARTO the most powerful spatial analytics platform available in the market. Although we currently do not have any plans to deprecate the previous version, we recommend you to start your new projects in the new CARTO platform. CARTO will not be doing any further developments on the components of the old version of the platform, which will remain “as is”.

Is CARTO going to provide me assistance if I would like to migrate to the new platform?

What type of objects can be migrated between platforms?

We can only offer migration support between platform versions for data tables and your active Data Observatory subscriptions.

Can I migrate my maps from the previous version to the new version of CARTO?

No. Unfortunately, since the technology stack between platforms is completely different, we cannot offer compatibility of maps built in the previous version of CARTO with our new technology. If you have TAM hours in your Support package, please ask your Customer Success Manager for an evaluation of the effort required to build your maps in the new platform.

What information will you need to provide to receive assistance with the migration?

In order for us to assist you with the migration to the new CARTO platform, we will need to receive the following information about your CARTO account in the previous version of the platform:

• The name(s) of the CARTO organization(s) in the previous version of the platform that you want to migrate to the new version;

• The name of the CARTO organization in the new platform to which you want to migrate your data to;

• A list of the data tables to migrate;

• An estimate on the size of the tables that you want to migrate;

Do I need to provide an authorization for CARTO to work on my platform migration?

Yes. For us to be able to actively assist you with the platform migration, we will need you to send us a written authorization with the following text in order to give us the required permissions:

If my data tables are migrated to the CARTO Data Warehouse in the new platform, are there any associated costs with its usage?

Will the platform migration tasks interfere with the standard service?

Any task associated with the platform migration is not expected to interfere with your CARTO service. In any case, CARTO will agree with you on a timeframe to carry out the migration activities, so you are completely informed on when these will be performed and therefore reduce the chances of any interference with your own usage of your CARTO accounts.

What methods can I use to create a map layer?

To add a data source to a map as a new layer you can either:

• Pick a table or tileset from one of your active connections to cloud data warehouses

• Importing data from a local or remote file. Right now we currently support GeoJSON, Shapefile (in a zip package), and CSV files. We’re working to support more formats in the future.

How can I run spatial analyses in Builder?

To run spatial analysis in Builder, you can use the SQL Editor, which is accessible when adding a data source as a custom query. The SQL Editor allows you to execute SQL commands directly in your cloud data warehouse (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, etc.), taking advantage of the full capabilities of the platform, including functions and operations available there. Additionally, you can leverage UDFs from the Analytics Toolbxo for enhanced spatial analysis. While the SQL Editor is ideal for performing simple analysis or utilizing SQL Parameters, for more complex or multi-step analysis, we recommend using Workflows. Workflows enable you to perform detailed, step-by-step analysis and save the results as a materialized table, which can then be used as a source in Builder. This approach provides greater flexibility and scalability for more advanced spatial analysis tasks.

How does the export mechanism from Builder works?

The export mechanism in Builder leverages the built-in export functionality of the connected cloud data warehouse to handle and process data. This ensures efficient export of datasets, aligning with the performance optimization strategies of the underlying platform.

When using BigQuery specifically, the export process stores data in a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket. For performance and scalability, BigQuery splits the exported data into multiple smaller files rather than a single large file. This behavior is expected and is a result of BigQuery’s internal strategies to parallelize the export jobs for optimal performance.

When creating a new workflow, I cannot see the data sources available in my connection - what may be happening?

This may be because the data warehouse connection associated with the workflow does not have the required permissions to run Workflows in the data warehouse, such as the permission of creating schemas in the Workflows temp. location (configured in the advanced options of the connection card). Please choose or create another connection with data owner permissions or modify the permissions in the current connection and try again. If the issue persists, please contact our support team at support@carto.com.

Working with my data sources from a BigQuery connection I receive an error message about not having permissions to query the table or that the table does not exist on a specific region - What may be happening?

Working with my data sources from a Snowflake connection I receive the following error message: "cannot get Workflow schema" - What may be happening?

My workflow is producing the error message "no value assigned." What could be causing this?

Usually this error occurs when either the input data sources have not finished loading, or the workflow has not had time to fully initialize before you’ve run it. This means that your later components have not had a chance to work out which values it will be receiving from the previous components.

This can usually be fixed by re-running the workflow.

What frameworks and libraries can I use for developing custom apps with CARTO?

You can use any framework or visualization library because CARTO is based on industry-standards. If there is not a hard requirement, we recommend using deck.gl for visualization and CARTO for React for creating apps that extend the platform functionality.

Are “CARTO for deck.gl” and “CARTO for React” compatible with the new version of the platform?

Yes, you can use both tools with the previous and the new version of the platform.

Does CARTO provide an SDK for the development of Mobile applications?

CARTO does not currently offer an SDK for the development of mobile apps as a component of our cloud native platform. In order to develop mobile applications with geospatial data, we recommend using the relevant SDK of your cloud vendor, or from products such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, Mapbox or Maplibre.

The Mobile SDK in the previous version of the CARTO platform will not be further developed, and we don’t recommend starting new projects with it.

Is the CARTO Platform SOC 2 Type II-certified?

Yes. As part of its SOC 2 Type II certification, CARTO undergoes annual auditing of its system and organization controls, performed by an independent, third-party certified auditor.

CARTO’s latest SOC 2 Type II report is available upon request for customers and prospects. Please note that prospects must have signed an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) with CARTO before receiving the SOC 2 Type II report.

Does it comply with GDPR, CCPA and other data privacy laws?

What are the password and login management controls in CARTO?

There are three ways for users to access their CARTO accounts:

• Single Sign-On (SSO): In this case, your organization will define the password requirements and will leverage all security policies such as rotation, MFA, etc.

• Sign in with Google: The password requirements and policies are defined in your Google account preferences, which may be managed by your organization.

• Username/Password: CARTO uses Auth0 to securely process the data and enforces sufficient length and complexity standards.

When we create a connection to CARTO, does it make any copies of our data?

CARTO is cloud-native by design, and we have no need to replicate your data — never. Maps, Workflows, and Applications built with CARTO will launch queries against live data in your own data warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, PostgreSQL, etc) and the result of these queries is not stored for further uses, with the exception of a temporal cache layer for performance and cost optimization, that is encrypted and distributed securely. This applies to all kinds of deployments.

How does CARTO manage our data?

To understand how CARTO processes your data we first need to describe the three categories of data that CARTO processes:

• Connected Data: This is the data in your data warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, PostgreSQL, etc) that you'll be using in CARTO. As seen above, CARTO does not make any copies of your data. This data is encrypted in transit, and the credentials are never exposed in the frontend.

• User-generated Content: These are the map details, workflows, credentials and configurations created by the users in a CARTO organization. User-generated Content is managed by CARTO. We carry out daily backups and encryption, except for self-hosted deployments. It is encrypted at rest and in transit.

• Personal Data: This is the additional data needed by the platform to identify and provide service to the user such as settings, contact information, name, etc; User Data is managed by CARTO. We carry out daily backups and encryption, except for self-hosted deployments. It is encrypted at rest and in transit.

Where is my data stored?

• Connected Data: Stored in your connected cloud data warehouse, including the result of all analysis done in CARTO.

How does CARTO manage security when a map, workflow or an application are shared?

CARTO provides several controls to make sure viewers and editors don't gain unauthorized access to the underlying data of a map, workflow or application.

• Editors can create connections to their data by providing credentials that are stored, encrypted, and never exposed in the browser in any case. These connections can then be shared with all editors in the organization (or with specific groups).
• Maps, workflows and applications relying on a connection will stop working as soon as the credentials used are revoked.

• Maps, workflows, and applications can be shared with all users within an organization (including viewers), or with specific groups, but this does not grant them access to the connection.

What is CARTO’s Analytics Toolbox?

CARTO’s Analytics Toolbox is a set of UDFs and Store Procedures to unlock Spatial Analytics directly on top of your cloud data warehouse platform. It is organized in a set of modules based on the functionality they offer.

How can I use the functions available in the Analytics Toolbox?

You can use the functions in the Analytics Toolbox via CARTO Builder, SQL Notebooks, and directly in the console of your cloud data warehouse platform.

To learn how to get access to the toolbox please visit the Documentation page for the:

Can I use the Analytics Toolbox from the CARTO Data Warehouse connection?

In the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery, are there differences when using it from different GCP regions?

For BigQuery connections in US and EU regions, we recommend to use the Analytics Toolbox we have enabled in US multi-region (project name: carto-un) and EU multi-region (project name: carto-un-eu)

Note that this also applies if you want to leverage the Analytics Toolbox from your CARTO Data Warehouse connection.

What are the different deployment options for the CARTO platform?

There are two different deployment options for the CARTO platform:

• Self-Hosted: With this option, you host your own CARTO tenant. That means it can be deployed in your virtual private cloud (VPC) or behind your virtual private network (VPN).

• (BETA) Snowflake Container Services: Fully deploy CARTO inside Snowflake by leveraging Snowflake Native Apps and Container Services.

Where can I find information about the requirements for deploying CARTO as Self-hosted?

How are updates and product releases managed in a Self-hosted deployment?

While in CARTO Cloud updates and product releases are continously added to the platform, if you’re self-hosting your own CARTO tenant, it will need to be updated periodically to enjoy the latest version of the platform.

Where can I find information about deploying CARTO with Snowflake Container Services?

We routinely hear from students, teachers, professors, and university administrators that they’d love to use CARTO in the classroom. Here is how schools and individual students may make use of CARTO:

• Individual Student Accounts: free CARTO accounts via GitHub Student Developer Pack

• Educator Accounts: free CARTO accounts by request

• Enterprise Accounts for Education: discounts and grants on a case by case basis

How can I get a Student account in CARTO?

How can I get an Educator account?

We need Enterprise capabilities for our institution or academic research, can you help?

What is the process for getting a CARTO Student account?

To verify that only eligible students are accessing CARTO, we take advantage of Github’s verification system. This means you will need to go through their channels to ensure you receive the proper student account:

Step 1: Sign up for Github

1. 1. ✅ yourname@university.edu

   2. ❌ yourname@gmail.com

2. Here’s a video-tutorial with all the steps:

Step 2: Apply for the Github Education Pack

To be eligible, you must

• Be a student aged 13+ and enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study

• Verify who you are with one of the following:

  • a school-issued email address

  • provide a valid student identification card

  • other official proof of enrollment

Step 3: Wait for verification and confirm

Once you apply, Github will need to verify you are, in fact, a student. This could take from 1 hour to several days. Please be patient and wait for your official verification, it is important for the process.

Upon verification, you will receive an email from Github that you have access to the Education Pack

Step 4: Claim your CARTO student account

This process will connect your GitHub account. Remember you should that URL for login too, although it will always be available from the general login page.

I am an educator and my course materials use the previous version of CARTO. What can I do?

First of all, thank you for using CARTO to unlock the potential of geospatial analysis with your students. We believe the new version of CARTO will carve out a new path for cloud native Location Intelligence for the years to come — Happy to have you onboard!

To update your teaching materials to reflect the new version of CARTO, we recommend you follow these simple steps. As an example, if your course content consisted of 5 datasets and 10 maps, updating content to the new CARTO platform shouldn’t take longer than a couple of hours.

4. Import the .CSV datasets you have exported

   • If you don’t have a data warehouse, you can use the CARTO Data Warehouse provided by us
5. Finally, using our new Builder tool, recreate the maps you’ll need for your course content.

We appreciate these updates require some time and effort on your side, but rest assured, we won’t be limiting access to your previous CARTO account any time soon.

Custom Markers in Builder

September 19, 2022

New Builder

• Using one from our preset collection; based on the well-known Maki icon library, which is designed for cartography purposes;

• Uploading a custom icon in .png or .svg formats.

Different markers can also be defined by the values of a categorical column, and can even be rotated based on a numeric value; which enables different use-cases such as rotating an arrow based on azimuth for telecommunication antennas or the wind direction in weather maps.

Caching performance improvements

September 16, 2022

Improvement APIs

In Builder, users have new a couple of new features:

• “Refresh data source”: to make sure users get non-cached versions of the data. Note that with this option your map will be skipping the CDN and getting the data each time from your data warehouse.

• “Refresh data source every X”: to allow the user to control the update frequency of the data displayed on public maps.

New layout in Settings section

September 15, 2022

Improvement Workspace

We have improved the layout in the Settings section in the CARTO Workspace; providing a better way to organize different areas by topic and providing a smoother interface for explaining the different Settings options for your CARTO account.

Performance improvements in Dynamic Tiling

September 13, 2022

Improvement APIs

• When working with points, many times widgets were not showing data due to our “visual aggregation” strategy when points were very close to each other. We have now removed this type of aggregation, and we are only applying a limit of 200k points per tile to prevent performance issues. If now you encounter widgets not showing data, you just need to zoom in to reduce the number of points per tile.

• With our previous strategy some polygons or lines that were falling in the intersection of multiple tiles were splitted for visualization purposes, which was making the same data point count multiple times in widgets. We have solved this problem by asking the user to identify a unique id property for the data source at the time of creating widgets.

Improvements in invitation & request management for Admin users

September 7, 2022

Improvement Workspace

Geocoding and isolines in Google BigQuery

August 26, 2022

New Analytics Toolbox - Builder - Workspace

Note that these functionalities are also enabled from the Data Explorer and Builder tools.

Geostatistics functions in the Analytics Toolbox for AWS Redshift

August 26, 2022

New Analytics Toolbox

New Range widget in Builder

August 5, 2022

New Builder

Cannibalization Analysis available in the Retail module of the Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery

August 4, 2022

New Analytics Toolbox

Renaming of data sources in Builder

July 28, 2022

Improvement Builder

New Data Explorer UI

July 15, 2022

Improvement Workspace

Spatial Index tilesets for Postgresql

July 15, 2022

New Analytics Toolbox

CARTO for React 1.3

July 12, 2022

New Developer Tools

We are excited to announce a new release of our CARTO for React library, packed with awesome new features to extend the CARTO platform and provide more capabilities for building custom solutions:

Sharing maps and connections with groups

July 8, 2022

New Workspace

Custom Pop-ups in Builder maps

July 7, 2022

New Builder

CARTO for deck.gl 8.8

July 1, 2022

New Developer Tools

We are really happy to announce a new release of “CARTO for deck.gl” to allow developers to build even more awesome apps and map visualizations with the CARTO platform. This new release comes from:

• Support in the CartoLayer for datasets using spatial indexes such as H3 and Quadbin. You can now build visualizations with very large datasets without the need of geometry data at an incredible performance and reduced costs.

• You can now leverage our Dynamic Tiling system with SQL Queries, providing great scaling capabilities to your maps.

• deck.gl code base is now migrated to TypeScript. This improves the robustness and maintainability of TypeScript apps using deck.gl as well as the deck.gl codebase itself.

CARTO Accounts

Migration to the new platform

Users & account setup

General

Builder

Workflows

Data Observatory

Analytics Toolbox

Development Tools

Deployment Options

Support Packages

CARTO for Education

Security and Compliance