# Cartopy vs folium

## Key differences

- folium has 4.6× as many GitHub stars as Cartopy (7.4K vs 1.6K).
- Cartopy had more development activity over the last 12 months: 226 commits vs 198.
- folium is downloaded 2.3× as often on PyPI (607K vs 260.3K per week).
- Cartopy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause; folium under MIT.

| | Cartopy | folium |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Cartographic projections and geospatial data plotting with matplotlib. | Builds interactive Leaflet.js maps from Python data. |
| GitHub stars | 1,625 | 7,414 |
| Commits (12 months) | 226 | 198 |
| Contributors | 127 | 190 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Language | Python | Python |
| Status | Active | Active |
| Install | `pip install Cartopy` | `pip install folium` |

Source: https://awesomedataviz.com/compare/cartopy-vs-folium/ · Data updated 2026-11-01 · Content: CC BY 4.0, Awesome Dataviz (https://awesomedataviz.com).