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CARTO is the leading Location Intelligence & GIS platform for cloud natives. See why modern analytics professionals are making the switch.

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Why is CARTO the best Location Intelligence platform?

CARTO vs Heavy.ai at a glance

The cloud-native Location Intelligence platform for teams of all sizes.

General and geospatial analytics using GPU accelerated technologies

Connectivity
CARTO

Direct cloud connections with no limitations on multiple data warehouses and databases. All queries are run natively on the data warehouse and no data is stored in CARTO.

Alteryx

Data is stored in the GPU powered database. Connection service to data sources via foreign data wrappers, foreign tables, and foreign servers. Data is replicated in HeavyDB.

Data

CARTO

CARTO Data Observatory provides over 12,000 public and premium datasets from a variety of vetted data providers.

Alteryx

No data offering.

Analysis
CARTO

Analysis is run natively using Spatial SQL directly in the cloud data warehouse environment.

Alteryx

Analysis via SQL statements against the HeavyDB proprietary database.

Map Tiling/Rendering
CARTO

Create cached map tiles using native data warehouse connections in SQL or in the CARTO Workspace UI. Render tiles on the fly within CARTO Builder. Vector tile support and no server callback.

Alteryx

Render tiles using GPU services in Heavy Render. Currently supports raster tiles only. All renders require a callback to the rendering service.

Data Enrichment
CARTO

Complete enrichment support for all 12,000+ datasets in the CARTO Data Observatory, including area weighted interpolation.

Alteryx

Not available.

Cloud-native
CARTO

Fully cloud-native with serverless connections and deployment.

Alteryx

Not cloud-native. Uses a GPU accelerated database hosted within cloud services.

Deployment
CARTO

SaaS cloud hosted or a self-hosted option deployed with Docker Compose or Kubernetes.

Alteryx

Deployments in CentOS, Docker, and Ubuntu. Pre-built versions in AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Vendor Lock In
CARTO

Data is not stored in CARTO, only returned via API. Flexible enterprise pricing plans, with all inclusive pricing.

Alteryx

Data must be stored in the HeavyDB to use Heavy.AI.

API
CARTO

Single API layer used in all platform products.

Alteryx

No API offering. Some Command Line Interface tools.

Open source
CARTO

CARTO uses and contributes to open source libraries such as Deck GL, React, Geoparquet…

Alteryx

Open source version is available with some constraints.

Rapidly carry out spatial analysis

Data Analysts starting out in location analytics or Data Scientists creating machine-learning models can use the CARTO platform to speed up insight generation. Workflows let you design, execute and automate analytics using a visual, no-code tool. Run advanced cloud-native analysis with our comprehensive Analytics Toolbox.

Easily connect your spatial data

CARTO integrates natively with the leading cloud data platforms and analytics tools, including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift and Databricks.

CARTO Builder for geospatial analysis

Build powerful Location Intelligence apps & visualizations

Visualization shouldn’t just be pretty maps, it should answer a business question. With CARTO, you can rapidly build Location Intelligence apps using our developer resources and templates. Our cloud native Dynamic Tiling technology provides a cost-effective and performant solution for visualizing spatial data at scale.

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Access more than 12,000 geospatial datasets

Our Data Observatory makes it simple for enterprise organizations to access thousands of "always-on" public & premium datasets, enhancing their spatial analysis with data such as demographics, POIs, human mobility, financial and much more.

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Get inspired by our customers

“CARTO makes map making easy. I can quickly pull the data in, get it on a map, do some light SQL & then share. Collaboration is easy & within a couple of hours we can have a really great visual product to share with decision-makers.”

Jason McVay from Indigo
Jason McVay
Associate Data Scientist at Indigo Ag
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“Using CARTO has enabled us to analyze service qualification at a much larger scale due to its comprehensive support for a wide range of functions and libraries including spatial indexes. This is a gamechanger, modernizing our GIS stack.”

Kendra Lord
Kendra Lord
Director of Geospatial Engineering & Analytics at T-Mobile
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You're in good company

Market leaders rely on CARTO to solve spatial problems.

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Jefferies
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Move from seeing where to understanding why.