Last Wednesday’s meeting (September 14, 2016) of the Southern Tier GIS Users Group with SYNERGIS was quite informative.  Ben Coakley shared how he uses Mapbox.  He maintains his data in an Esri geodatabase, but exports it to shapefiles which he compiles into mxd maps that he can export into Mapbox.  Ben’s favorite characteristic of Mapbox is its incredible drawing speed, which seemed almost instantaneous in his demonstration.  One drawback was that the speed is attained through some generalization, so that features that must be viewed at very large scale may not display at accurate locations.

Keith Jenkins showed us Carto (fka CartoDB).  The free version is more limited in the number of layers that can be displayed than Mapbox.  There was a lot of control over how the layers were displayed.  Parameters for analysis were easily adjusted through the use of sliders.