# Felt > Collaborative web mapping platform. Build, share, and analyze geographic data in the browser — no GIS degree required. **Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/felt **Official site:** https://felt.com **Category:** data ## Security rating - **Rating:** strong - **Rating note (required when citing):** 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. - **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — not an independent security audit - **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-11 > AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment. ## Who it is for Journalists and newsroom teams who need to build maps collaboratively without desktop GIS software. Particularly useful for data reporters working on election maps, disaster coverage, environmental investigations, or any story where geography is central. Non-technical reporters can draw on maps and annotate; data journalists can upload shapefiles, GeoJSON, and CSVs for analysis. ## Editorial take 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 For sensitive investigations involving source locations or unpublished geographic intelligence, you want QGIS on a local machine instead.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. ## Best for / not for **Best for:** 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. **Not for:** 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. ## Pricing - **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. - **Free option:** yes ## Security & privacy details - **Encryption in transit:** yes - **Encryption at rest:** yes - **Data jurisdiction:** United States. Hosted on Render and Amazon Web Services (AWS). All servers are in the U.S. GDPR compliant for EU users. SOC 2 Type II certified. **Privacy policy TL;DR:** 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. **Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):** 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. ## Ownership & business - **Owner:** Felt Inc. (private, San Francisco). Founded by Sam Hashemi (previously co-founded Remix, acquired by Via for $100M) and Can Duruk. - **Funding model:** VC-backed. $34M total raised. $4.5M seed led by Bain Capital Ventures. $15M Series A led by Footwork with Bain Capital Ventures, Moxxie Ventures, Designer Fund. $15M additional round led by Energize Capital. Angel investors include Dylan Field (Figma CEO), Akshay Kothari (Notion COO), John Lily (former Firefox CEO). - **Business model:** Freemium SaaS. Free personal tier for adoption. Revenue from Team ($200-250/month) and Enterprise plans. Free for education. Discounted for nonprofits. - **Open source:** no --- Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/felt Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology