GeoLibre

GeoLibre

A free and open-source, lightweight, cloud-native GIS platform for visualizing, exploring, and analyzing geospatial data. It runs everywhere you do, in the web browser, on the desktop, on mobile, and inside Jupyter notebooks, all while keeping your data local and private.

It also ships 1,000+ geoprocessing tools that run entirely in your browser on WebAssembly — terrain, hydrology, LiDAR, remote sensing, and vector analysis with no server, no install, and no data ever leaving your machine.

GeoLibre is built with Tauri v2, React, TypeScript, MapLibre GL JS, DuckDB-WASM Spatial, and deck.gl. The same workspace runs as a native desktop app, native Android and iOS apps, in any modern web browser, and adapts responsively to mobile and small screens.

One project can be viewed through four rendering engines: MapLibre GL JS (the default), Mapbox GL JS, CesiumJS, or the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript. Switch the primary map from View → Rendering engine, or mix engines in synchronized split panes, without duplicating the project or its layers. See the rendering-engine guide for capabilities, credentials, and current compatibility.

• Launch GeoLibre Web — the full app in your browser, nothing to install
• Download the desktop app — Windows, macOS, and Linux installers
• Get it on the Mac App Store — the sandboxed macOS build
• Get it on the App Store — the native iOS app for iPhone and iPad
• Get it on Google Play — the native Android app
• Get the Chrome extension — open datasets you find on any webpage in GeoLibre
• Use the Python package — embed and control the full app in Jupyter notebooks
• Use the R package — build interactive maps in RStudio, Quarto, R Markdown, and Shiny
• 1,000+ geoprocessing tools — the full toolbox, in the browser
• Get started — install, run from source, and configure
• Features — the complete feature list
• Rendering engines — compare MapLibre, Mapbox, Cesium, and ArcGIS and learn how to switch or combine them.
• Open data gallery — 105 live projects built from public open data, grouped by theme: health, natural hazards, climate, oceans and water, nature, transport, cities, energy, space, history and culture, society and economy, and food.

Statement of need

Working with geospatial data usually means installing and maintaining a desktop GIS on every machine, or moving data and computation onto a hosted cloud platform behind an account. Both are barriers in teaching and workshops, in the field, on locked-down institutional computers, and whenever data are sensitive. GeoLibre is a GIS that opens from a URL, reads cloud-native formats (e.g., COG, GeoParquet, PMTiles, FlatGeobuf, Zarr, STAC) in place, runs its analysis on your own device by default (an optional, self-hosted Python sidecar can take over some tools), and saves the whole map as an open, documented project file that anyone can reopen, share, or keep under version control.

It is built for researchers and students who need to inspect and analyze geospatial data without setting up a software environment, for instructors who need every participant on the same working tool within minutes, and for data scientists who want an interactive GIS tied to their Python or R code. See GeoLibre vs. other GIS platforms for how it relates to QGIS, ArcGIS, kepler.gl, and others.

Installation

Where	How
Web browser	Open web.geolibre.app. Nothing to install.
Windows, macOS, Linux	Installers and package managers on the Downloads page, or the Microsoft Store, Mac App Store, AUR, and Flatpak links above.
Android and iOS	Google Play and the App Store (links above).
Python and Jupyter	pip install geolibre or conda install -c conda-forge geolibre; optional extras such as geolibre[all] are described in the Python guide.
R	See the R package website.
From source	git clone https://github.com/opengeos/GeoLibre.git && cd GeoLibre && npm install && npm run dev (Node.js 22+; the desktop build also needs Rust). See Run from source.
Docker / self-hosting	See Run with Docker and Self-hosting.

JavaScript dependencies are pinned in package-lock.json and installed by npm install; Python dependencies are declared in python/pyproject.toml and backend/geolibre_server/pyproject.toml.

Demos

Click any screenshot to open it at full resolution, or any animation to play the full-quality video.

3D Tiles

Open the live project

NYC buildings and subways

Manhattan building footprints extruded in 3D and colored by construction era, with the MTA subway lines and stations on top and a legend generated automatically from the layers’ symbology.

The animation below runs the Time Slider along the buildings’ construction year, from 1850 to 2025, so Manhattan fills in era by era. Click it to play the full-quality video.

Open the live project

Planetary basemaps

GeoLibre is not limited to Earth. Planetary basemaps from OpenPlanetaryMap and USGS Astrogeology cover the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, the Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto), Titan, Pluto, and Charon, with a per-project ellipsoid so distance, area, and scale measurements match the body you are mapping. The deep-space starfield behind each globe comes from the Atmosphere Effects plugin.

Earth	Moon	Mars
Mercury	Pluto	Venus
Europa	Callisto	Charon

Switch bodies from the planet switcher in the Layers panel. See Demos for more.

Video tutorials

• GeoLibre 1.0: A Free, Open-Source Cloud-Native GIS That Runs Anywhere (Browser, Desktop & Jupyter)
• Geoprocessing in the Browser: 700+ Free GIS Tools in GeoLibre, Zero Install
• Access Free High-Resolution Disaster Satellite Imagery in Your Browser
• Regularize Building Footprints in the Browser with GeoLibre
• GeoLibre + GeoLens: A Modern GIS Stack for Self-Hosting Geospatial Data
• Create Reusable GIS Workflows with GeoLibre Model Builder and AI Assistant
• Mapping the 2026 Nepal Floods with Free High-Resolution Satellite Imagery
• Building Cloud-Native GIS Workflows with GeoLibre
• Image Georeferencing Using GeoLibre in the Browser
• 100 Interactive Maps from Open Data: Explore, Fork, and Build Your Own with GeoLibre

All of them, with chapters and summaries, are on the Video Tutorials page.

Geoprocessing: 1,000+ tools, zero install

Processing → Whitebox Toolbox opens a toolbox of 1,000+ geoprocessing tools that execute in the browser through a WebAssembly runtime with native raster and vector I/O. There is no Python sidecar to install and no server to call — the tools, your data, and the results all stay on your machine, so the full toolbox is available on GeoLibre Web, on the desktop app, and on Android alike.

The tools come from the Whitebox Next Gen suite plus GeoLibre’s own WASM tools, and are browsable by category straight from the Processing menu:

Category	Tools	Examples
Vector	313	overlays, buffers, joins, cleaning, topology, generalization
Raster	256	algebra, filters, reclassification, zonal and focal statistics
Remote sensing	154	spectral indices, band math, classification, change detection
Hydrology	100	flow accumulation, watersheds, stream networks, depression filling
Terrain	99	slope, aspect, hillshade, curvature, ruggedness, viewsheds
LiDAR	65	point-cloud filtering, ground classification, DEM/DSM generation
Conversion	49	format translation to cloud-native GeoParquet, PMTiles, and COG
Network	26	connectivity, cost distance, and routing analysis
Projection	4	reprojection for raster and vector data

Any tool is deep-linkable with a ?tool= URL parameter that preselects it and pre-fills its form. See the Processing Tools guide for details, and Geoprocessing in the Browser for a video walkthrough.

Documentation

Full documentation, including the User Guide and Tutorials, is published at geolibre.app.

• Getting Started - use GeoLibre on the web, desktop, Android, iOS, or in Jupyter; run it from source; run it with Docker; and configure optional credentials.
• Features - the complete, feature-by-feature list of what GeoLibre can do today.
• Demos - a visual tour: 3D Tiles, 3D city data, planetary basemaps, the SQL Workspace, and embeds.
• Downloads - installers and package managers for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
• User Guide - a feature-by-feature reference for the interface, adding data, layers, styling, the attribute table, map controls, processing, the SQL Workspace, data integrations, plugins, settings, and embedding.
• Tutorials - hands-on, end-to-end workflows: your first map, cloud-native data, vector analysis, terrain analysis, spatial SQL, and sharing and embedding.
• Reference
  • Architecture
  • Android
  • iOS
  • Project format
  • Plugin API
  • UI Profiles
  • Internationalization
  • Python package (Jupyter)
  • R package (RStudio, Quarto, and Shiny)
  • Notebook Panel
  • Roadmap
  • Contributing
  • How to Cite
  • Become a Sponsor

Testing

Every pull request runs the test suites in continuous integration. To run them locally from a source checkout:

npm install                                          # JavaScript dependencies, needed by the npm scripts below
npm run test:frontend                                # TypeScript unit and component tests
pip install -e "backend/geolibre_server[test]"
npm run test:backend                                 # Python sidecar tests (pytest)
pip install -e "python[dev]" && (cd python && pytest)  # the geolibre Python package
npx playwright install chromium && npm run test:e2e  # end-to-end tests against the built web app
npm run ci                                           # the full gate CI runs

See Quality checks for what each gate covers.

Contributing and support

Contributions are welcome. See the Contributing guide for the development setup, repository layout, and quality gate.

• Questions: ask in GitHub Discussions.
• Bugs and feature requests: open an issue.
• Security vulnerabilities: report them privately through GitHub security advisories.

See SUPPORT.md for details. Everyone taking part in the project is expected to follow the Code of Conduct.

Sponsor

GeoLibre is free and open source, and stays that way. If it is useful to you or your team, sponsorship is the most direct way to keep development, hosting, and cross-platform distribution going.

• GitHub Sponsors - monthly or one-time, billed through your GitHub account.
• Buy Me a Coffee - a quick one-off contribution, no account required.

See the Become a Sponsor page for what sponsorship supports and for other, free ways to help.

Acknowledgements

GeoLibre is built on the free and open-source geospatial and web communities — including MapLibre GL JS, deck.gl, DuckDB-WASM Spatial, Turf.js, Tauri, React, and many more. See the full Acknowledgements page for the complete list of projects and community contributors.

• The Atmosphere Effects plugin (deep-space backdrop, parallax starfield, comets, and the globe atmosphere halo) adapts the technique and visual design from Leonel Dias’s article Globe atmosphere, halo, and comets — the layered Canvas 2D approach, the halo gradient and “screen” blend, the limb-sampling that keeps the halo aligned under pitch, and the starfield/comet parameters.
• Community contributors — thanks to Ryanphoenix for many valued contributions, including issue reports, feedback, and improvements.
• Beta testers — thanks to René van der Velde (Netherlands) for early testing, detailed bug reports, and feature requests.

Disclaimer

GeoLibre is primarily built with Claude Opus 5.5, an AI model by Anthropic, working under human direction and review. Its results are tested, but check them for your own use, and please report anything that looks wrong.

Citation

If you use GeoLibre in your work, please cite it. GeoLibre is archived on Zenodo, which mints a DOI for every release. The concept DOI below always resolves to the latest version.

Wu, Q., & Hofbauer, D. (2026). GeoLibre: A lightweight, cloud-native GIS platform for visualizing, exploring, and analyzing geospatial data. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20785400

You can also use GitHub’s “Cite this repository” button (which reads CITATION.cff) to copy a ready-made APA or BibTeX entry. See the How to Cite page for more formats.

Star History

License

MIT