Welcome to CARTO
You probably got here from a map.
The small credit you clicked means that map, or part of it, was made with CARTO. Here is who we are, what you were looking at, and where to go next.
Everything happens somewhere.
CARTO makes software that helps organisations understand where things happen, and why there.
A bank deciding where to open a branch. A city planning bus routes. An insurer measuring flood risk street by street. A retailer choosing the next store. A delivery company routing its vans. They all have data with addresses in it, and CARTO turns that data into maps, analysis and answers, working directly on the data where the company already keeps it.
Founded in 2012 in Madrid, based in New York and Madrid, used by hundreds of thousands of people across banking, cities and government, insurance, retail, logistics, telecommunications and utilities.
Maps and dashboards
Interactive maps anyone can explore: click, filter, zoom. Most likely what you were using.
Analysis without code
Drag-and-drop workflows that answer questions like "how many people live within ten minutes of here?"
AI agents
Ask a question in plain language and get a map and an answer back, inside the company's own data.
Tools for developers
Maps, tiles and libraries that software teams build their own applications with.
A map is made of layers. CARTO may have made any of them.
The credit does not tell you which, so here are the three things it can mean. The information shown on the map belongs to whoever published it, not to us.
The background map
The streets, rivers, parks and place names under everything else. Ours are drawn by our cartographers on data from OpenStreetMap, a free map of the world made by volunteers, a bit like Wikipedia for maps. That is why the credit also says "© OpenStreetMap contributors".
Want these maps on your own website? →The map itself
The page you could click, zoom and filter may have been built with CARTO's tools, the way a report is built with a spreadsheet. The publisher chose what to show and how; we made the tools.
How organisations use CARTO →The analysis behind it
The colours, areas and numbers on the map may come from analysis run with CARTO: which neighbourhoods, how many people, how far. The conclusions are the publisher's; the method is often ours.
What location analysis is →Fix it on OpenStreetMap →
Whatever brought you here
Four doors. Pick the one that sounds like you.
See what CARTO can do with it
Maps, analysis and AI agents on the data you already have, without moving it. Try it free, or ask us for a walkthrough.
Discover the platform → I make maps or websitesUse our background maps
The same maps, free for most uses. Request a key with your e-mail and add one line to your map. No account needed.
Get a free API key → I am just curiousStories from the map
How location explains things: where cities grow, how deliveries move, why a shop works on one corner and not the next.
Read the blog → I write softwareThe documentation
APIs, deck.gl and MapLibre, the basemaps, and how to build applications on top of a cloud data warehouse.
Open the docs →Attribution
The credit is how the people who drew the map, and the volunteers who mapped the world, get recognised. It is required on every CARTO plan and on the free basemaps, and it is what brought you to this page.
| If you use | Show on the map | How |
|---|---|---|
| CARTO basemaps in Leaflet, MapLibre, deck.gl or any other library | © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO, both linked, visible on the map itself | The layer's attribution setting. Snippets for each library are on the basemaps page; the terms are the Basemaps Terms. |
| CARTO Builder maps, shared or embedded | Added for you: the basemap credit and, if you set one, the credit for your own data | Keep the attribution control visible. Add your dataset's source in the layer's Attributions field; how to. |
| Applications built with CARTO for Developers | The credits of the basemap and of any CARTO-served data, in the map's attribution control | deck.gl and MapLibre show them by default; do not remove the control. If you use another provider's basemap, follow their rules as well. |
| Data from the Data Observatory, or your own | What the dataset's licence says | Each Data Observatory dataset shows its licence and credit line. Data you upload is your responsibility, including the right to publish it. |
- Visible on the map, legible, in any corner. Not hidden, faded or behind a click.
- The word CARTO links to this page; OpenStreetMap links to its copyright page.
- A text credit is enough. We do not ask for our logo on your map.
- Print or a static image: put the same credit in the image or its caption.
- Maps without the credit can have their basemap key suspended under the Basemaps Terms.
© <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors, © <a href="https://carto.com/attribution/">CARTO</a>
OpenStreetMap data is open under the Open Database License; the credit and the link to its copyright page are what the licence asks of everyone who uses it.
Maps are how we make sense of where things happen.
If your organisation has a question with a "where" in it, we would love to show you what CARTO does with it.