Atlas.covsQQGIS
QGIS: Free, far deeper analytically, but desktop-bound and with no collaboration layer
Atlas.co
Browser-based collaborative GIS with published per-seat pricing and a free tier
As of 1 September 2026, Atlas.co has a free plan and paid plans start at $23/month. An Oslo startup selling GIS as a collaborative web tool at $23 per user per month, aimed squarely at people who need spatial analysis but will never learn ArcGIS. Softwr lists it under Maps. Atlas.co is available on Web.
Overview
What Atlas.co does
Atlas.co is a browser GIS for visualising and analysing location data. Users import spreadsheets, shapefiles, GeoJSON and live sources, geocode addresses, run buffers, joins, isochrones and other spatial operations through a workflow builder, style the result and share it as a map or embed. Everything runs in the browser with no install and no desktop licence. The interesting commercial fact is the pricing, because almost nobody in GIS publishes it. Atlas.co lists a free Starter tier with three projects and three editors, Pro at $23 per user per month, and Team at $72 per editor with viewers at $7 each. Set that against Esri, where a Creator user type runs several hundred dollars a year before any add-on. Atlas.co is explicitly targeting the analyst in renewable energy siting, urban planning or property who currently exports data to a colleague with an ArcGIS licence and waits. Buyers are small teams in climate and renewables, urban planning, real estate and consultancy. The company was founded in 2021 by a Norwegian team and remains at pre-seed stage with roughly $2m raised, which is the trade-off. The tool is fast and priced honestly, but the depth is nowhere near a mature GIS, and a buyer is betting a spatial workflow on a very small company. The viewer seat at $7 is the detail worth noting: for organisations where most people only need to look at a map, that pricing beats almost every alternative on the market.
What people use it for
- A renewables developer screening sites against constraint layers who needs an answer this afternoon and has no GIS analyst available
- A planning or property team that mainly needs colleagues to view and comment on maps, where $7 viewer seats replace expensive read-only GIS licences
- A consultancy producing client-facing maps and embeds without maintaining desktop GIS installs across a distributed team
- An analyst with an address spreadsheet who needs geocoding, buffering and a shareable map without learning a desktop GIS
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Atlas.co.
- Analytical depth is a long way short of a mature GIS: there is no serious raster analysis, network analysis, topology editing or geodetic control, so complex work still goes back to QGIS or ArcGIS.
- Geocoding and workflow runs are metered per tier, and a single large address batch can exhaust a month’s Pro allowance in one afternoon, forcing an upgrade for a one-off job.
- The company is at pre-seed stage with roughly $2m raised and a small team, so buyers embedding it in a business process carry meaningful continuity risk.
- Annual billing is required to get the advertised prices, which removes the flexibility that would otherwise make a young vendor a low-risk trial.
- There is no offline or field capability at all, so any organisation whose spatial work includes data collection needs a second tool alongside it.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Atlas.co
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- Atlas.covsCARTO
CARTO: A more mature cloud spatial platform for teams that need warehouse-scale analysis
- Atlas.covsEsri ArcGIS
Esri ArcGIS: If governance, depth and an enterprise vendor relationship matter more than price and speed
Pricing
What Atlas.co costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Starter
Free
- 3 projects
- 3 editors
- 1 GB storage
- 5,000 geocoding runs per month
- 20 workflow runs per month
Pro
$23 /mo
- 10 projects
- 10 GB storage
- 10,000 geocoding runs
- 50 workflow runs
- 20,000 AI credits
- PDF and image export
Team
$72 /mo
- Unlimited projects
- Viewer seats at $7 per month
- 25,000 geocoding runs
- 200 workflow runs
- 50,000 AI credits
- Real-time collaboration and project permissions
Enterprise
On request
- Unlimited storage and workflows
- 100,000 geocoding runs
- White-labelled embeds
- Dedicated success manager
- Annual billing only
Capabilities
Features
Browser GIS
Import, analyse and style spatial data with no desktop install
Workflow builder
Chain spatial operations such as buffers, joins, clips and isochrones into a repeatable run
Geocoding
Convert address lists into mapped points with a metered monthly allowance
Collaboration
Real-time multi-user editing with project-level permissions on paid tiers
Data import
Shapefile, GeoJSON, CSV, KML and spreadsheet ingestion
Cheap viewer seats
Read-only access at a fraction of an editor seat for stakeholders who only consume maps
Export and embed
Export to PDF and image, or embed a live map, with white-labelling on Enterprise
AI credits
Assistance features metered as AI credits within each tier
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
How much does Atlas.co cost?
Starter is free, Pro is $23 per user per month and Team is $72 per editor per month with viewers at $7, all billed annually. Enterprise is quoted.
Can it replace ArcGIS or QGIS?
For visualisation, light analysis and sharing, often yes. For raster, network or geodetic work, no.
What is the viewer seat?
A read-only seat at $7 per month on the Team plan, intended for stakeholders who consume maps rather than build them.
Where is the company based?
Oslo, Norway. It was founded in 2021 and has raised around $2m in pre-seed funding.
Is there a free tier?
Yes, Starter gives three projects, three editors and 1 GB of storage with metered geocoding and workflow runs.
Keep looking
Where to go from Atlas.co
- Atlas.co alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Atlas.co pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Atlas.co badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Maps softwareThe full category
- Best Maps softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Maps software for
Compare Atlas.co with
- Esri ArcGIS
- CARTO
- QGIS
- Felt
- Correlator3D
- Foursquare Spatial Studio
- Global Mapper
- GRASS GIS
- Fused
- deck.gl
- Ride with GPS
- Kepler.gl
- Foursquare Places API
- Geoapify
- Google Maps
- Leica Infinity
- Foursquare Spatial Studio
- Fused
Other Maps software
- Q
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Free, then $20/mo13 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Atlas.co, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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