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CARTO vs Google Maps: What are the differences?
CARTO: 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; Google Maps: Build highly customisable maps with your own content and imagery. Create rich applications and stunning visualisations of your data, leveraging the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of Google Maps and a modern web platform that scales as you grow.
CARTO and Google Maps 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, Google Maps provides the following key features:
- Maps Image APIs
- Places API
- Web Services
CARTO is an open source tool with 2.19K GitHub stars and 603 GitHub forks. Here's a link to CARTO's open source repository on GitHub.
We need some advice about the map services provider. We are a mobility app that just launched 5 months ago in Tunisia offering P2P carpooling. We are currently using Google Maps API for maps (Places API, Geocoding API, Directions API & Distance Matrix API). Thus, we received expensive bills from Google Cloud following the number of requests we are using. We are looking forward to reduce the number of requests in general because we can't afford these large bills at this stage, knowing that they are going to increase proportionally to the active users of the app. We tried to optimize multiple times but it isn't enough. We are searching for optimization advice or ideas on how we use the APIs, or other map providers (like OpenStreetMap or similar) that offers free or cheaper options than Google Maps, without lacking quality of information (we are in Tunisia and we have to choose options that have enough data about Tunisia). Thanks!
Besides OSM and Valhalla, you can also look into a combination of Google ORTools and OSRM. I personally haven't used Valhalla but OSM and ORTools is a powerful combination that can solve for use cases beyond routing, distance, and duration.
I would like to input a spreadsheet with names and associated addresses into a map program to; pinpoint all of the locations on a map. How can I do that? On which map? Are there field size limitations? All help would be appreciated.
There is a subdivision that is about one(1) mile by 3/4 mile in size. Is there a map program that would create the most efficient way to drive all of the streets in the subdivision without a lot of doubling back?
You could use a low-code platform to read the spreadsheet and use them as input for the pin pointing. The most expert provider would HERE or TomTom for the best routing algoritmes. Input parameters would be dependent on the chosen provider.
I see your stack is mostly Google and I am not familiar with that. But we have implemented this through the M365 Teams/SharePoint, Excell, MS PowerPlatform, our WMS and Azure.
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 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.
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 OpenStreetMap because that has a strong community. It takes some time to catch up with Google Maps, but OpenStreetMap will become great solution.
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 Google Maps
- Free253
- Address input through maps api136
- Sharable Directions81
- Google Earth47
- Unique46
- Custom maps designing3
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Cons of CARTO
Cons of Google Maps
- Google Attributions and logo4
- Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete1
