Kepler.gl is an MIT-licensed, TypeScript geospatial analysis tool that renders large-scale geolocation data sets in the browser at million-point scale, built for data analysts, GIS practitioners, and React developers who need to explore trip and point data without assembling their own rendering stack.

What it is

Kepler.gl is a data-agnostic, high-performance web application for visual exploration of large-scale geolocation data sets. It is built on top of MapLibre GL and deck.gl, and it can render millions of points representing thousands of trips while performing spatial aggregations on the fly. It is also a React component that uses Redux to manage its state and data flow, which means it can be embedded into other React-Redux applications and customized extensively. The project lives in the Data and Analytics category under Business Intelligence and Reporting, is written in TypeScript, and ships under the MIT licence.

The concrete problem it solves is the assembly work that surrounds large geospatial visualizations. Rendering millions of points and aggregating them in the browser normally means hand-writing deck.gl layers, spatial aggregation logic, map state, and the Redux plumbing that keeps them synchronized. Kepler.gl supplies that stack as installable modules: a reducer that owns the map state, a component that renders it, and middleware for asynchronous side effects. The specific thing it replaces is the bespoke deck.gl plus MapLibre GL mapping layer that a team would otherwise build and maintain itself.

Key capabilities

• Renders millions of points and thousands of trips in the browser, with spatial aggregations computed on the fly.
• Ships as embeddable React components and Redux reducers through the modules @kepler.gl/components and @kepler.gl/reducers.
• Provides enhanceReduxMiddleware and a built-in taskMiddleware for handling asynchronous side effects in the Redux store.
• Exposes component props including id, mapboxApiAccessToken, and getState, where getState defaults to state => state.keplerGl and id maps each instance to its own slice such as state.keplerGl.foo.
• Publishes precompiled production UMD builds in the umd folder on unpkg, so the library can be loaded with a script tag without a module bundler.
• Includes the @kepler.gl/sqlrooms module, exercised by the SQLRooms demo that tests a collapsible application shell and modular panel layout.
• Offers a Jupyter widget with its own user guide, alongside the App User Guide, API Reference, and Roadmap documentation.

Who uses it and how

• Analysts interactively explore point and trip data sets through the hosted demo application at kepler.gl/demo.
• React and Redux developers embed the component into existing applications by mounting the reducer with combineReducers and supplying a Mapbox access token.
• Notebook users load the Jupyter widget to explore geospatial data alongside analysis code.
• Teams evaluating layout options run the SQLRooms demo with yarn start:sqlrooms on port 8083 next to the original main demo with yarn start on port 8080.
• Projects without a bundler deploy the UMD build from unpkg by adding a script tag for a chosen version.

Getting started

Install the module with npm install --save @kepler.gl/components or yarn add @kepler.gl/components, then follow the documentation at docs.kepler.gl. Kepler.gl is built on Mapbox and requires a Mapbox Access Token for base map rendering.

How it compares

The facts do not name a competing paid product that Kepler.gl replaces, and no direct peer tool is listed in this registry. Kepler.gl layers on top of deck.gl and MapLibre GL rather than competing with them, and it depends on Mapbox for base map rendering through an access token, so the rendering foundation and the tile source are both external dependencies.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must supply a Mapbox Access Token, which means a third-party account and service sit underneath the deployment. Development is pinned to Node 20.19.3 as recorded in .nvmrc, because newer Node versions can make yarn install and yarn bootstrap compile the gl dev dependency from source and fail. The project carries 452 open issues, and the supplied README is sparse on production deployment specifics, so teams that need a fully self-contained stack with no external token should look elsewhere.

npm install --save @kepler.gl/components
// or
yarn add @kepler.gl/components

<script src="https://unpkg.com/kepler.gl/umd/keplergl.min.js" />

<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/umd/keplergl.min.js" />

import {createStore, combineReducers, applyMiddleware, compose} from 'redux';
import keplerGlReducer, {enhanceReduxMiddleware} from '@kepler.gl/reducers';

const initialState = {};
const reducers = combineReducers({
  // <-- mount kepler.gl reducer in your app
  keplerGl: keplerGlReducer,

  // Your other reducers here
  app: appReducer
});

// using createStore
export default createStore(
  reducer,
  initialState,
  applyMiddleware(
    enhanceReduxMiddleware([
      /* Add other middlewares here */
    ])
  )
);

// using enhancers
const initialState = {};
const middlewares = enhanceReduxMiddleware([
  // Add other middlewares here
]);
const enhancers = [applyMiddleware(...middlewares)];

export default createStore(reducer, initialState, compose(...enhancers));

import KeplerGl from '@kepler.gl/components';

const Map = props => (
  <KeplerGl id="foo" width={width} mapboxApiAccessToken={token} height={height} />
);