CARTO vs OpenLayers: What are the differences?

Developers describe CARTO as "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. On the other hand, OpenLayers is detailed as "A high-performance, feature-packed library for all your mapping needs". An opensource javascript library to load, display and render maps from multiple sources on web pages.

CARTO and OpenLayers belong to "Mapping APIs" category of the tech stack.

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, OpenLayers provides the following key features:

• Tiled Layers - Pull tiles from OSM, Bing, MapBox, Stamen, MapQuest, and any other XYZ source you can find. OGC mapping services and untiled layers also supported.
• Fast & Mobile Ready - Mobile support out of the box. Build lightweight custom profiles with just the components you need.
• Vector Layers - Render vector data from GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, GML, and a growing number of other formats.

CARTO and OpenLayers are both open source tools. OpenLayers with 5.17K GitHub stars and 1.97K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than CARTO with 2.19K GitHub stars and 603 GitHub forks.