Felt
Collaborative web mapping platform. Build, share, and analyze geographic data in the browser — no GIS degree required.
What should journalists know about Felt?
Felt is the closest thing to Google Docs for maps. You open a browser, upload data or draw on the map, and share a link. That simplicity is the product. Traditional GIS tools like QGIS and ArcGIS are powerful but require installation, training, and patience. Felt skips all of that. It handles large datasets well, supports real-time collaboration, and produces clean, embeddable maps. The Washington Post lists Felt-style collaborative mapping among the skills its visual journalists need. For newsrooms covering elections, climate, or breaking disaster stories, the ability to have multiple reporters annotating a shared map simultaneously is genuinely useful. The tradeoff: Felt is cloud-only. Your geographic data lives on their servers (AWS, U.S.-hosted). For public data — election results, census tracts, environmental monitoring — that's fine. For sensitive investigations involving source locations or unpublished geographic intelligence, you want QGIS on a local machine instead. Felt is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant, which puts it ahead of most mapping tools on the trust dimension.
Collaborative newsroom mapping. Election results, disaster response, environmental data, census analysis, any project where multiple reporters need to view and annotate geographic data together. Embedding interactive maps in stories.
Sensitive investigations where geographic data reveals sources or unpublished story angles. Advanced spatial analysis that requires desktop GIS (raster processing, topology, complex geoprocessing). Offline work — Felt requires internet. Budget-constrained newsrooms that can't justify $200/month for the Team plan.
Security & Privacy
Data is scrambled while being sent to their servers
Data is scrambled when stored on their servers
Where servers are located — affects which governments can request your data
Privacy policy summary
Felt collects name, email, and password. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Credentials are encrypted at rest. Employees use multi-factor authentication to access internal systems. Felt does not operate its own servers. The company has SOC 2 Type II certification and GDPR compliance. CCPA compliant. Limited personal data collection. No indication of selling user data to third parties.
How to protect yourself:
For public data projects, Felt is well-suited as-is. For sensitive geographic data — source locations, unpublished investigation coordinates — use QGIS locally instead. Review sharing permissions before publishing maps. Use the Team plan's access controls for multi-reporter projects. Export and back up critical map data locally.
SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant — unusual for a mapping tool at this stage. Encryption in transit and at rest. U.S. jurisdiction with AWS hosting. MFA required for employee access to internal systems. The cloud-only model means your data lives on their servers, but the security posture is genuinely strong for a Series A company. Appropriate for public data journalism. Use local GIS tools for investigations involving sensitive geographic intelligence.
Who Owns This
Pricing
Free: personal maps, limited features. Team: $200/month annually ($250/month monthly) — 25GB data hosting, up to 3 editors, teams up to 25 people. Enterprise: custom pricing — database connections (Postgres, Snowflake, AWS, Databricks), dashboards, API access, JavaScript SDK. Free for educational and classroom use. Discounted pricing for nonprofits.
This is an editorial assessment based on publicly available information as of 2026-04-11, using our published methodology. Independent security review is pending. Security posture can change at any time. This is not a guarantee of safety.
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