Everything Cartaveo Maps does
A map plugin for WordPress where the map is a shared record: your readers add places, you decide what goes live, and search engines can read all of it. Free, GPL, no API keys.
What map plugins rarely list
- Readers add places from the map itself
- You approve what goes live, or let it go live at once
- Owners, editors, contributors and viewers on one map
- A public read API and webhooks
- Structured data search engines can read
Every feature, one line each
The map
- A Gutenberg block and a [cartaveo] shortcode
- Six widget designs, from a list beside the map to a map alone
- Light, dark or automatic theme, following each reader's own setting
- Four basemaps: minimal, streets, midnight and tinted
- An accent colour for links and the selected pin
- Pins coloured by a field you choose, with a legend
- Routes and areas as well as points
- Routes drawn solid, dotted, dashed or with direction arrows
- How far the map shows around a place when it opens
- OpenStreetMap-based tiles, no API key to set up
- The same map on any other site with a script tag or an iframe
The location record
- Your own fields per collection, sixteen types to choose from
- Opening hours as a field, laid out by day
- Up to ten photos per place, each with its credit and licence
- Addresses looked up as you type, and filled in from a dropped pin
- Up to three categories per collection from a shared list
- Status from open to in progress to resolved, when you track one
- Ratings from one to five, when you turn them on
- Places that expire after a time you set
Contribution and moderation
- Readers add places from the map: open to anyone, by invitation, or closed
- Anonymous submissions on open collections, behind a captcha
- Every submission goes live at once, or waits for your approval
- A moderation queue: review one at a time, or reject several at once
- Readers add photos to places that already exist, moderated the same way
- Readers report a place that has closed, moved or is wrong
- A short brief contributors read before they add anything
- Only accept places inside a region you set
Roles
- Owner, editors, contributors and viewers on each collection
- Invitations by email
- Private collections only the people you invite can open
API and webhooks
- A public read API that answers JSON or GeoJSON
- Personal access tokens for your own scripts
- Webhooks when a place is added, edited, approved, rejected, deleted or reported
- CSV import, and CSV export of the whole collection
- Atom and JSON feeds for every collection
Search engines
- A crawlable list of places printed under the map, with schema.org ItemList and Place data
- A page of its own on cartaveo.com for every collection and every place
- Those pages rendered on the server, with titles and structured data in the HTML
- Sitemaps, and changes announced through IndexNow as they happen
Licence and credits
- The plugin is free and GPL, with no API keys
- A content licence per collection, which new photos inherit
- A credits block for funders and partners, logos included
- A methodology note on how the collection was built
Beside the other map plugins
Only features each vendor states on its own pages, checked against them. Where a feature comes with a paid version, the table says so. See the roadmap for what Cartaveo Maps doesn't do yet.
Checked against each vendor's own pages on 2 November 2026. "Not stated" means those pages don't say, not that the feature is missing. Sources: MapSamurai wordpress.org, features; Open User Map wordpress.org, site; MapifyPro wordpress.org, pricing.
Start a collection, then put it on your site.
The collection works on its own from the first place: a page readers can visit, a map you can share, and the block for your posts.
Create a collection