Looking for an ESRI ArcGIS Enterprise alternative?

Esri's pricing is known for its complexity, with a per-user licensing model that can quickly become expensive. Different user types (such as Creators, Viewers, and Editors) come with different price tags, and costs often increase as you require more advanced capabilities, extensions, or enterprise server products. This can make it difficult to predict the total cost of ownership. CARTO, in contrast, offers a more transparent and scalable pricing model. Our flexible user plans are designed to be more cost-effective for large teams and enterprise-wide deployments. Because our platform is cloud-native and eliminates the need for much of the costly infrastructure and maintenance associated with traditional GIS, the total cost of ownership is often significantly lower.

CARTO is built directly on cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Google Cloud, Databricks, Redshift, and Oracle allowing for real-time analysis on live data without data movement. With ESRI's architecture, data gets copied out of cloud systems which can lead to complex data syncing, data duplication and ETL processes. This reliance on scheduled refreshes rather than live queries can introduce sync lag and data staleness, hindering real-time capabilities.

Yes, CARTO is a SQL-first platform. You can use standard SQL for all your spatial analysis needs, which allows for seamless integration with your existing data stack and workflows. ESRI often requires the use of proprietary languages like Arcade, which can lead to a steeper learning curve and vendor lock-in.

CARTO's no-ETL approach eliminates the need for data duplication, which significantly reduces costs associated with data storage and management. It also improves performance by allowing you to work with the most up-to-date data directly in your data warehouse. ESRI's reliance on data syncing and imports can be time-consuming, costly, and can lead to data silos and versioning issues.

CARTO excels at visualizing massive datasets by leveraging the full power of cloud data warehouses and modern tiling technology, a fundamentally different approach from ESRI's traditional architecture. By using spatial indexes like H3 or Quadbins, CARTO runs analysis and aggregation on billions of records directly within your data warehouse, delivering up to 98% time savings. This 'in-database' processing means only the visualization-ready result is sent to the browser. For scalability, CARTO's tiler is up to 100x faster at processing tilesets than desktop applications, rendering huge datasets with interactive performance without moving data. ESRI's architecture, including ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online, often requires a different workflow for large datasets. To achieve performance, you typically need to extract the data from its source and publish it as a pre-processed, indexed format (like a hosted feature layer, vector tiles, or a scene layer). This creates a static copy of the data within the ESRI ecosystem, which can become outdated and requires a separate data management pipeline.

CARTO's pricing is transparent and scalable, with a flexible user model that is often more cost-effective for large teams. ESRI's licensing is known for its complexity and high costs, with a per-user model and additional charges for advanced capabilities that can significantly increase the total cost of ownership.

CARTO inherits the robust security and governance features of your cloud data warehouse, ensuring that your data remains secure and compliant. Our platform provides granular control over data access and sharing. ESRI's hybrid architecture can create additional security complexities, and managing security across different environments can be a challenge.