Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
CARTO vs Mapbox: What are the differences?
Developers describe CARTO as "The CARTO platform empowers business analysts, data scientists and more, to turn location data into business outcomes". The CARTO platform empowers everyone, from business analysts to data scientists, to turn location data into business outcomes. We accelerate innovation, power new use cases and disrupt business models through Location Intelligence. On the other hand, Mapbox is detailed as "Design and publish beautiful maps". We make it possible to pin travel spots on Pinterest, find restaurants on Foursquare, and visualize data on GitHub.
CARTO and Mapbox can be primarily classified as "Mapping APIs" tools.
Some of the features offered by CARTO are:
- Drag and drop data import allows you to create visualizations in seconds
- Make sense of your location data and power your business.
- Create beautiful visualizations with our easy to use design and styling tools.
On the other hand, Mapbox provides the following key features:
- Develop mobile and web applications with Mapbox.js, our open-source JavaScript library.
- Build native applications on iOS with the Mapbox iOS SDK or on iOS and OS X with MBXMapKit.
- Build native applications for Android. Use Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, and other tile sources in your app, as well as overlays like GeoJSON data and interactive tooltips.
CARTO is an open source tool with 2.18K GitHub stars and 601 GitHub forks. Here's a link to CARTO's open source repository on GitHub.
From a StackShare Community member: "We're a team of two starting to write a mobile app. The app will heavily rely on maps and this is where my partner and I are not seeing eye-to-eye. I would like to go with an open source solution like OpenStreetMap that is used by Apple & Foursquare. He would like to go with Google Maps since more apps use it and has better support (according to him). Mapbox is also an option but I don’t know much about it."
I use OpenStreetMap because that has a strong community. It takes some time to catch up with Google Maps, but OpenStreetMap will become great solution.
Google Maps is best because it is practically free (they give you $300 in free credits per month and it's really hard to go over the free tier unless you really mean business) and it's the best!
I use Mapbox because We need 3D maps and navigation, it has a great plugin for React and React Native which we use. Also the Mapbox Geocoder is great.
I use Google Maps because it has a lot of great features such as Google's rich APIs, geolocation functions, navigation search feature, street map view, auto-generated 3D city map.
I use OpenStreetMap because i have the control of the environment, using Docker containers or bare-metal servers.
Pros of CARTO
- Crisp UI1
- Great customer service1
- Comprehensive platform1
Pros of Mapbox
- Best mapping service outside of Google Maps28
- OpenStreetMap22
- Beautifully vectorable15
- Fluid user experience11
- Extensible8
- React/ RNative integration7
- 3D Layers5
- Low Level API4
- Affordable4
- Great customer support3
- Custom themes3
- High data volume rendering2
