Carto (formerly CartoDB) in Brooklyn, New York offers their location intelligence solution.
N/A
Mapbox
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Mapbox is the location data platform for developers building custom geospatial features into mobile, web, and on-premise applications.
$0
Per 1000 users
Pricing
CARTO
Mapbox
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starting Price
$0.00
Per 1000 users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CARTO
Mapbox
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Designed for businesses of all sizes, Mapbox is free to start building with and offers free tiers for most products. As usage grows, volume pricing is applied automatically, no negotiation necessary.
Pricing is based either on pay-as-you-go usage or negotiated sales contracts that unlock additional discounts for annual commitments.
Paid support plans are also available.
I have not seen a better mapping tool than CartoDB. You get the familiarity of Google Maps with arbitrarily complex geographic data visualization on top. CartoDB excels at large data sets where Google Maps API completely chokes when attempting to handle more than ~1000 data points. I was able to plot 500,000 points on a map with reasonable speed and able to perform complex aggregations to display boundaries of areas containing certain types of data, intersections of those sections, and more.
Mapbox is great if you have a BI or Data Visualization problem while working with either large datasets or you want a high level of control on the design of your geospatial data. Also fantastic options for integrating maps onto your website or into your Android or iOS app. Basically, if you need a map in any shape, way, or form and you want a lot of detailed control over it, Mapbox is the way to go.
Excellent documentation and worked examples makes it easy for newbies to get started.
Works well across web or mobile platforms.
Clean looking default map styles make your designs look professional.
Since it is built on top of Leaflet.js, it is easily extensible. So any feature or function that is not available within the Mapbox.js API can be imported from other API's.
Learning curve - CartoDB might be difficult to use if you don't have a bit of SQL or data structures background. If you're not familiar with floats, strings, etc., you might upload an Excel file and be confused about how to manipulate it to get the software to create the maps that you want.
Performance - When I used it, there were some occasional issues with loading and parsing large data files.
It is a good tool to use. We can perform various customisations; I always end up exploring and finding a new feature that can be used in my work somewhere. And one good thing is that is actually quite reasonable in terms of cost, with the free tier being quite adequate
Python is definitely a more powerful tool for data munging and analysis, but the python packages for geo-related data viz (bokeh, matplotlib, seaborn) are cumbersome to use. I would recommend doing your data analysis in Python and then exporting the final data to CartoDB for visualization. One benefit of doing this is that CartoDB can automatically publish your viz to a link or object, so you don't have to export it and host it yourself. Another benefit is that CartoDB automatically updates the viz once you change the data, eliminating the need to continuously regenerate image files. I haven't used Tableau too extensively, but from the experience I've had with it -- Tableau is better suited for traditional analytical visualization (charts, graphs, etc.) than for geospatial mapping and visualization.
Mapbox provides many more services, like the Navigation SDK, Vision SDK (currently in beta), and Styles Gallery that allows companies to create a much more design-friendly frontend for a very low cost. Mapbox has also put a lot more resources into their search-related APIs to make them just as quick and accurate as the Google Maps search products. There is also a lot more innovation happening at Mapbox, with new geo/map products released regularly. Innovation and growth at the Google Maps API seems to be happening much slower.
I don't think this is a fair question for me to answer. Apart from our time we have not invested anything into Mapbox - so from that perspective the ROI is great! Great returns without any investment!
