Vizualization
Stop using Folium for your mapping needs
KeplerGL is a million times better
Once upon a time, Microsoft excel allowed us to make pie charts, and for decades presentations used and abused them. But the truth is pie charts are pretty bad. Well, we have the same problem for mapping data. The tool we learned to use are bad, but we’re stuck in the habit. Yes people, I am asking you to drop both pie charts and Folium. To this day, one can find new articles promoting its use.
Folium was an incredible tool when it was introduced. But it remained rudimentary while others developed much more advanced and user friendly tools.
The truth is, while Folium is still being developed, it is still at version 0.12.1. In the mean time deck.gl is up to version 8.12! So why is it not more widely used?
Intro
Deck.gl was developed by Uber for their own needs. They released the v3 in March 2016 as open source software. The library uses OpenGL to render a vast amount of data points, both 2 and 3D using your computer’s graphic card. It can handle millions of points seamlessly while folium usually stops working at 20k points due to memory limitations of notebooks. On top…
