CARTO vs GRASS GIS
CARTO
carto.com
GRASS GIS
grass.osgeo.orgSide by side
| Figure | CARTO | GRASS GIS |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · GIS and Mapping Software | 8.0 (#3) | 8.0 (#4) |
| Spec score · GIS Software | 8.1 (#17) | 8.2 (#13) |
| Spec score · Geo Tools | 8.0 (#8) | 8.0 (#10) |
| Spec score · Geographic Information Systems | 8.0 (#8) | 8.1 (#7) |
| Founded | 2012 | 1982 |
| Integrations | CARTO connects to Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, Databricks, and Oracle data warehouses. | GRASS integrates with QGIS and R, and supports PostgreSQL and SQLite database interfaces. |
| Security | CARTO is SOC 2 Type II certified and undergoes annual audits by an independent third-party certified auditor. | The roadmap commits to vulnerability detection tools, fixing reported security issues and maintaining CI workflows for standards compliance. |
| Support | CARTO offers support options ranging from onboarding to ongoing platform guidance, plus professional services for spatial data science, app development, GIS, and cloud architecture. | GRASS offers worldwide community support plus commercial consulting, training and custom-development services. |
Plans
CARTO
- CustomPrice not published
- EnterprisePrice not published
- Pay As You GoPrice not published
- StrategicPrice not published
In their own words
GRASS GIS
GRASS GIS is a geospatial processing system for raster, vector, and other geographic data, including terrain, ecosystem, hydrology, data management, and imagery work. It contains more than 500 modules for processing and rendering geographic data, with tools for 3D voxel, temporal, image-processing, and spatial-statistics tasks alongside raster, terrain, hydrological, and vector analysis. Through GDAL-OGR, it supports nearly all common GIS file formats. Interfaces include a graphical user interface, command line, C API, Python, Jupyter Notebook, and WPS. GRASS integrates with QGIS and R and provides PostgreSQL and SQLite database interfaces; its official Addons repository has more than 300 extensions. It is free and open source under GPL (>=v2), with no warranty. The listed platforms include Linux, macOS, Windows, API, web, and self-hosted deployment. Prebuilt macOS applications are signed and notarized. Support includes a worldwide community as well as commercial consulting, training, and custom development.