README

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 a