--- title: CARTO Reviews meta_title: 'CARTO Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 78 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how CARTO works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.5 review_count: 78 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-17' parent_category: name: Business Intelligence url: https://www.g2.com/categories/business-intelligence --- # CARTO Reviews **Vendor:** CartoDB **Category:** [Location Intelligence Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/location-intelligence) **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 78 ## About CARTO CARTO is the leading cloud-native spatial analysis platform. Unlike other GIS systems, CARTO eliminates data fragmentation and technical bottlenecks by letting you build and deploy everything from AI Agents and geospatial workflows to interactive maps directly within your data warehouse. CARTO breaks down the silos between technical and business teams, making spatial analysis accessible to everyone - from technical specialists like data analysts, GIS analysts & developers, to business analysts and decision-makers. This makes Location Intelligence more accessible, scalable, and governable, helping companies turn their data into business value for use cases like optimizing network planning, assessing risk, and identifying growth opportunities. ## CARTO Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **ease of use** of CARTO, enabling quick and intuitive creation of interactive maps without GIS expertise. (3 reviews) - Users love the **ease of map creation** with CARTO, enabling intuitive and interactive visualizations without GIS expertise. (3 reviews) - Users commend the **user-friendly 3D visualization** of CARTO, enabling effortless mapping and insights without GIS expertise. (2 reviews) - Users value the **powerful data visualization options** in CARTO, facilitating easy, intuitive map creation and insights. (2 reviews) - Users praise CARTO for its **user-friendly visualization tools** , converting complex data into actionable insights effortlessly. (2 reviews) - Users praise CARTO for its **efficient data management** , making big-data access and visualization seamless and quick. (1 reviews) - Design Quality (1 reviews) - Ease of Learning (1 reviews) - Easy Access (1 reviews) - Easy Learning (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users face challenges with **big data issues** , like needing SQL knowledge and slow performance with large datasets. (1 reviews) - Users find the **customization difficulty** challenging, needing SQL skills and facing performance issues with large datasets. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited customization options** of CARTO challenging, especially requiring SQL knowledge for advanced features. (1 reviews) - Users find CARTO **slow when handling large datasets** , impacting performance and user experience significantly. (1 reviews) - Users experience **slow performance** with CARTO, especially when managing large datasets, affecting usability and efficiency. (1 reviews) ## CARTO Reviews ### 1. Most used tool in my geospatial stack **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Denise M. | Principal - Geospatial Services Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 19, 2025 **What do you like best about CARTO?** My experience with CARTO has been overall positive, and the tools have been my top resource and the reason for much of my career success over the past year. Compared to my other go-to platform for online mapping, Esri, CARTO offers much faster visualization returns for my projects. The ease with which I can access my big-data warehouse has alleviated much of the headache that typically comes with data hosting. Additionally, re-engineering data to fit my use case is far quicker and easier on CARTO than doing the work on my desktop. I would also like to commend CARTO for providing high-quality training resources through YouTube, webinars, and CARTO Academy. My learning curve was minimal, with only a few hours needed to get up to speed. **What do you dislike about CARTO?** There isn't much I dislike about CARTO. They are constantly improving their platform and very open to feedback about their products and services. **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** Visualizing the massive amounts of location-based data for my company. ### 2. Intuitive Mapping Made Easy, But Advanced Features Need SQL Know-How **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 22, 2025 **What do you like best about CARTO?** CARTO’s platform is extremely user-friendly and visually intuitive. I really like how easy it is to create, style, and share interactive maps without needing heavy GIS expertise. The visualization options are powerful, and the platform makes it simple to turn complex spatial data into actionable insights **What do you dislike about CARTO?** Some advanced customization features require SQL knowledge or workarounds. The platform can also be slow when handling very large datasets. **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use CARTO primarily for pre-planning Out-of-Home (OOH) campaigns. It’s a valuable tool for visualizing and analyzing data spatially. I use it to show audience indexing, inventory indexing, and conduct proximity analysis. These insights help identify the most effective locations for media placements and ensure alignment with target audience behaviours and key points of interest. ### 3. A great way to communicate mapping information to clients **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** patrick b. | Director, Insights and Solutions, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 19, 2025 **What do you like best about CARTO?** The fact that you can send someone a link to a map you created and they are able to zoom and move around the map, anyway they want. We can now target 15 to 20 households per postal code. When clients see that precision on a map, it really brings home the value of what we're doing" “With CARTO, we transformed geospatial analytics from a technical bottleneck into a fast, intuitive workflow that makes targeting and performance obvious to our clients **What do you dislike about CARTO?** Not enough people have heard about it!!! **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** It brings all of our data together to visualize it on a map ### 4. One Stop GeoSpatial Shop **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jenny J. | Director Of Operations, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 23, 2023 **What do you like best about CARTO?** Carto is intuitive, well programmed and constantly improved. Before I realize the need for a feature of functionality, there is an upgrade that evolves the quality of my work. The support staff is responsive and thoughtful, and I enables my company to level the field of competition with organizations having much larger budgets and dedicated staff. We have been with Carto for 5 years now, and look forward to utilizing our subscription in more areas of our business. **What do you dislike about CARTO?** The user documentation can be hard to navigate, so we create more support tickets than self-serve. The response time from support is faster than locating on my own. **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** Making maps that distinguish our company above our competitors. ### 5. Great experience with a super reactive team! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Charlene M. | Programme Officer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2021 **What do you like best about CARTO?** We would like to say a big thank you to the entire CARTO team for their efforts, dedication and availability for our mapping project. Working with a number of people involved on our side means a lot of comments, a lot of back and forth, etc. but CARTO team was always super reactive. We learnt how to work together, and like all new collaborations, it took some time to be aligned on a method that worked on both sides, but the result is successful! **What do you dislike about CARTO?** Receiving clear instructions and understanding expectations helped us better understand what worked best for CARTO so we could work accordingly. On the other side, understanding the role of each of the CARTO staff and meeting/involving all of them early on is a recommendation we would give, as well as making sure all staff have well understood the requests, considering English isn’t their first language. Overall a great experience and would recommend them! **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** CARTO created an interactive mapping tool with numerous technicalities and was very good at listening and making sure the tool was aligned with our expectations. ### 6. Sports & Entertainment - Stadium Indoor Mapping **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sports | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2022 **What do you like best about CARTO?** - Visually enriched information through the raw data. - Good service provided by the Carto team. **What do you dislike about CARTO?** - Some errors are sometimes displayed, probably derived from the data source. **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** - To cover a use case that offers a better live tracking scenario for a sport that usually does not enjoy as many options as others. ### 7. Great bespoke service capability **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ellen P. | Director, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 02, 2021 **What do you like best about CARTO?** We had a custom mapping design developed and the CARTO team made this easier than I expected, with the end result produced in time and with continual communication between our management and the CARTO team. We were not able to implement everything we we wanted in the end, but through good communication and a clear plan the CARTO team were able to effectively deliver the vast majority of our requested depictions, and made changes we needed as development took place. Definitely the best bespoke IT development experience we have had thus far and with the large amount of data we use on a regular basis it is essential to have mapping that work with our data set in the way we want it go. The whole team doing the work for our bespoke requests are all very professional and we really have enjoyed watching our data become more effectively usable! Lucienne and Dani are both great and a pleasure to work with :) **What do you dislike about CARTO?** The billing department is not easy to deal with. There are discrepancies in how the billing is conducted and a disconnect between billing and those doing the marketing and negotiations. We have had issues trying to chase up feedback and issues with billing. The marketing team has been great about providing pricing considerations, which we really do appreciate, but when it's time for regular payments or there is discussion, the feedback loop from whomever the final decision maker is can be long and at times not logical. The marketing team needs to have more leeway to make decisions and work with the clients they get to know. The directions for how to imbed, make and alter maps could be easier for users. Our analysts have to get a mini crash course in programming each time there is a change. **Recommendations to others considering CARTO:** Make sure to have someone with a relatively sophisticated level of technical ability, and programming experience is a big bonus. The mapping is not a simple thing to implement, but if you can get it to work it looks good. That said, if you go for a bespoke product the CARTO team can assist and make it work for you as you want. **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed good bespoke visualization for a significant amount of data and CARTO had suggestions to further enhance what we wanted to say in the data, in addition to just the basics of what we asked for. The method of depiction and integrating our information directly into the platform once the dashboard is completed will be a very valuable tool for our personnel to use the data and then present it in a visually effective way. ### 8. Drawing custom maps in your browser? Yes please. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brandon M. | Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 02, 2021 **What do you like best about CARTO?** It was really important for our company to be able to manipulate geospatial data in an easy to use way. Carto Builder was exactly what we needed to be able to make small changes to our geometries, on the fly, from just about anywhere. **What do you dislike about CARTO?** We tried downloading information from a Carto table that included geometry data to add some columns to the data set. This wasn't something easily done in the Carto browser, so needing to export the data and do it on our end was necessary. For whatever reason, when trying to upload the newly manipulated data set, half the geometries would be corrupted and invalid. We ended up needing to figure out the right combination of SQL queries to add the missing columns from another set to the desired one and rename the table we were working with. **Recommendations to others considering CARTO:** If you need a way to easily visualize and manipulate geospatial data without industry expert knowledge of GIS systems and software, Carto would be an excellent option to explore. With some SQL query knowledge, the platform should be able to do everything to fit your needs. **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Carto to visualize police jurisdictional boundaries on our end and ensure that we have them correctly drawn. We care very much about respecting the jurisdictions of the police departments we aim to help. Being able to see and manipulate these boundaries in an easy way is huge for us as no one on our team is exactly a GIS expert. ### 9. Great tool! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Leonardo D. | Head of Data Science, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 11, 2020 **What do you like best about CARTO?** The extra data available and all the insights we can get visually in a simple way. I also love that you can use it as a python library, which really increases the flexibility. It is a real pleasure to use, I did not have a single episode where the application was stalled or not correct, which in my personal opinion is one of the most important aspects. **What do you dislike about CARTO?** I like almost everything, sometimes it could be a bit faster. I would like to see more on the data quality side, maybe some additional features that can check if the data is consistent and if not I would really appreciate some feedback. For example, it could say inconsistent columns If it detects some inconsistency in the data of a particular column. **Recommendations to others considering CARTO:** I would suggest try it out with a. simple map and some of the dataset they make available. **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** Spatial insights are not that easy to gather, especially using traditional dashboarding tools like MicroStrategy. Also gathering data is not the easiest thing, even if you are willing to buy it from vendors. Carto has been a great tool for that and I am sure most of my organization agrees with me. It also looks good, which is. great plus when you want to present information to more senior stakeholders and C-level management. Other tools, including MS, are not as good looking, and even if seems a shallow requirement it does play an important part in the decision of the tool to be used. ### 10. An excellent tool for both beginners and experts in Spatial Data Science **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Isabel F. | Data Scientist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2021 **What do you like best about CARTO?** Huge variety of tools, from friendly UI (builder), to python library (cartoframes), and also a pool of SDKs and APIs. I also value the extensive documentation and the quick response from CARTO support team. **What do you dislike about CARTO?** Regarding the tool itself, I have nothing to point out, so far. The training sessions we had with the CARTO team were also very useful, although I would have started with the builder training first, and only afterwards the cartoframes and APIs sessions. **What problems is CARTO solving and how is that benefiting you?** Spatially visualize the predictions of the machine learning models that in my team we are developing in our Data Science tool, as well as the most important features in those models. ## CARTO Discussions - [I missed the tableau beta test announcement -- Do you know when this integration will be available!?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/i-missed-the-tableau-beta-test-announcement-do-you-know-when-this-integration-will-be-available) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What is CARTO used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-carto-used-for) - 1 comment - [how do i auto refresh my data?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/34112-how-do-i-auto-refresh-my-data) - 1 comment - [View CARTO pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/carto/reviews/carto-review-4258555?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-17+17%3A14%3A41+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=3a6a4b2d-5f35-4496-8c71-8627e110d213&secure%5Btoken%5D=53aff61f44debe3b5a83362de1fb863f2b6c9d3ce4bbf52ba4f8438eab3097f4&format=llm_user) ## CARTO Integrations - [Google Cloud BigQuery](https://www.g2.com/products/google-cloud-bigquery/reviews) ## CARTO Features **Reports** - Reports Interface - Steps to Answer - Graphs and Charts - Dashboards **Data Management** - Data Capture - Data Storage - Data Manipulation - Data Visualization **Cartography** - Map Design - Vector Mapping - Data Visualization - Overlaying **Map Creation** - Geocoding - Buffer Zone Query - Overlaying - Publishing **Analysis** - Predictive Analysis - Distance Analysis - Spatial Analysis - Data Stream **Analysis** - Spatial Analysis - Reporting - Real-Time Streaming **Reporting** - Data Transformation - WYSIWYG Design - API Integrations **Self Service ** - Calculated Fields - Data Column Filtering - Data Discovery - Search - Collaboration / Workflow - Automodeling **Advanced Analytics** - Predictive Analytics - Data Visualization - Big Data Services **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs **Platform** - Mobile User Support - Customization - User, Role, and Access Management - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications ## Top CARTO Alternatives - [Esri ArcGIS](https://www.g2.com/products/esri-arcgis/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (516 reviews) - [ArcGIS Online](https://www.g2.com/products/arcgis-online/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (174 reviews) - [Mapbox](https://www.g2.com/products/mapbox/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (41 reviews)