Kepler.gl

Oh so exciting!!!

I’ve been looking for an alternative to CARTO, their sales reps are awful and their pricing is wildly expensive and opaque.

From earlier post (2018): https://www.uber.com/en-CA/blog/keplergl/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17181879

Nice to see kepler.gl getting some love here!

Funny enough, I just released an open-source, opinionated map editor built on top of kepler.gl with their DuckDB integration — yesterday! If anyone's curious to see how it all fits together, feel free to check it out here: https://github.com/mountayaapp/insight-editor.

I had to look this up. You are talking about Carta Maps? That's different from what this audience will think of when we read Carta but ironically your comment is the same.

The marketing page needs some work on mobile but otherwise a cool library.

Export your phones GPS pings and then use this to render a heat map of the most frequently used locations :)

They probably mean CARTO, formerly known as CartoDB.

https://carto.com/

DuckDB integration is a game-changer for geospatial visualization since it enables client-side processing of massive datasets without server roundtrips, significantly reducing the performance bottlenecks typical in browser-based GIS tools.

Thanks. I didnt know this about DuckDB. I will have to check it out.

Foursquare has another open source project worth noting on DuckDB - SQLRooms

https://sqlrooms.org/

“Build data-centric apps with DuckDB An Open Source React Framework for Single-Node Data Analytics powered by DuckDB”

It’d be great to have contributors join our collaborator summit [0] in the Seattle area this fall!

It’s a free event, supported by the OpenJS Foundation, kepler.gl’s host foundation.

We’re expecting to have a session from Shan, the creator of Kepler.gl as well as Ilya, the creator of SQLRooms. We’re still accepting session proposals as well [1]!

[0] https://deck.gl/events/seattle-summit-2025/ [1] https://github.com/openjs-foundation/summit/issues/450

CARTO is more focused on backend pipelines and large-scale data (where everything needs to be tiled before it can be visualized), while Kepler is a great last-mile visualization tool. It probably makes more sense for enterprises that scale beyond what Kepler can do.

That said, credit where it’s due - their engineering team is a super active contributor to the deck.gl framework powering kepler.gl.

Great to see this. Indeed very useful. I am new learner here. Would you kindly share Which version of kepler you are using as base?

That was a fun mobile challenge! I just exported my Google Maps Timeline, used ChatGPT to convert it to a CSV of points, and then made a heatmap with Kepler’s grid layer.. I had to tweak the color breaks a bit or else it only highlighted my home and (old) office

Which is powered by deck.gl, also a very nice library.

https://deck.gl/

Glad to see it can be useful. The project relies on the latest kepler.gl version, which is v3.1.8.

As someone to whom these kind of awesome visualizations are often presented, let me tell you something. Real decisions do not depend on these nice stuff. I sometimes feel sorry for the folks who spend great effort in producing these, like a children amusing themselves with the great sand castles they built. A lot of times, simple text or numbers could also have more effect on the decisions.

I agree that these visuals rarely drive decisions on their own. They’re more like supporting tools… useful for framing an argument or guiding a narrative in a presentation, especially when static.

Unless it’s interactive or tied to live data the usefulness of the visualization produced is limited.. it’s a shame and it’s something this tools should pivot towards

i love kepler.gl! regularly use it just to visualise trips, good to see it gaining visibility

Excellent. You made me feel lucky