Carto (formerly CartoDB) in Brooklyn, New York offers their location intelligence solution.
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Maptitude
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Caliper Corporation headquartered in Newton offers Maptitude, designed to be a robust and easy-to-use professional Location Intelligence (LI) tool. Maptitude provides features that allow the user to take advantage of the geographic elements of enterprise (or government) data, and to effectively explore information.
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.
Maptitude has proven to be an easy tool got banker to analyze their lending patterns for CRA and HMDA. In addition, it helps refine and target potential customers based on segmentation models. Given the new 2020 census data, Maptitude is ideal for understanding the changing demographics.
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.
Ease of use, the learning curve is steeper than normal; however, once you learn it, it is simple.
The tools can be glitchy. There are times when you add say a radius to the map and go to move it; the tool tries to resize the area and not move it. You have to re-click on the tool that you want every time; it is cumbersome at times.
The zip code areas should be smoother. If you market via zip code and not DMA, you will have this issue. It is not the systems fault, so-to-say, it is the way that the system maps these zips, using zip area.
Caliper are really good at responding to any difficulties you're having ...even if it's your own fault! If I was a US user, I'd immediately give it 10/10, but because I'm in the UK and am an early bird, there are those occasions where I've needed support in our morning, but had to be patient. But it's not an issue.
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.
I was a MapPoint user and was looking for a simple GIS tool to replace it when Microsoft announced that they weren't going to update it any further - actually Maptitude can do masses more than I ever need it for, and it does what I need really well - masses better than MapPoint could do.
