Frequently asked questions

Sign up for Mapji, choose one of 10 map types, add your data by importing a file or connecting a Google Sheet, style the map, and it is live at mapji.com/map/your-map straight away — add a free subdomain or your own custom domain whenever you want one. The whole flow is point-and-click in the browser — there is nothing to install and no code to write.

• Interactive map maker →
• Which map type fits my data? →

No. Mapji is entirely point-and-click. You build, style, and publish maps in the browser without writing JavaScript, learning a GIS package, or touching a config file. Embedding a finished map on your own site is a copy-paste iframe snippet.

• How to embed a map →

Yes — Mapji is free to start and no credit card is required. You can build maps, import data, connect a Google Sheet, and publish at mapji.com/map/your-map or on a free yourmap.mapji.com subdomain at no cost.

No. Everything runs in the browser. If you already work in QGIS or ArcGIS you can export your layers as GeoJSON, a zipped Shapefile, KML or TopoJSON and import them straight into Mapji, but nothing needs to be installed to build a map from scratch.

• Supported formats →

A basic map from a clean spreadsheet takes a few minutes: create the site, upload the file, confirm the detected latitude and longitude columns, and publish. Styling, filters, and custom map styles are optional refinements you can make at any time afterwards.

It depends on the shape of your data. Individual points where density matters call for a heatmap or cluster map; values aggregated per region call for a choropleth; a list of branches or venues calls for a store locator; a narrative sequence of places calls for a story map. You can build several map types from the same dataset and compare.

• All 10 map types explained →
• Choropleth vs heatmap →

A choropleth map shades geographic regions — countries, states, counties, or European NUTS regions — by a data value, making patterns in demographic, economic, or election data easy to see. In Mapji — where the type is listed as Region Map — you pick a geography, join your data by region name or code, and choose one of 8 color scales — as a smooth ramp or in 3–8 classes by quantiles, equal intervals or breaks you set; visitors hover a region to read its name and value.

• Choropleth map maker →
• Choropleth docs →

Create a Heatmap in Mapji, add your point data by uploading a file or connecting a Google Sheet, then tune the radius, intensity, and color gradient. There are 10 built-in gradients. By default every point counts equally, but you can weight by any numeric column so higher values burn hotter.

• Heatmap maker →
• Step-by-step guide →

A cluster map groups nearby markers into a single numbered circle that splits apart as you zoom in, so a dataset with thousands of points stays readable. Mapji can also render clusters as donut charts broken down by a category column, and spread overlapping pins apart on click.

• Cluster map docs →
• Mapping thousands of points →

An isochrone map shows everywhere reachable within a given travel time — a 10-minute drive, say — from a starting point. Mapji supports walking, cycling, driving, and public transit, and can draw bands by distance instead of time — preset bands or values you type yourself. You can place up to 5 starting points on one map. In the app the type is listed as Travel Time Map.

• Isochrone map maker →
• Travel-time maps explained →

A story map is a scroll-driven presentation: as the reader scrolls, the map flies between locations while text and images appear alongside. Each chapter has its own camera position, including zoom, bearing, and tilt, and its own entrance animation.

• Story map maker →
• How to build one →

A time slider map animates your data across a timeline. You point Mapji at a date or timestamp column, and visitors can play, pause, and scrub through the sequence. Each step can be one distinct value from that column or a calendar period — hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly — so a column of exact timestamps still makes a timeline you can drag. Choose whether the map shows only the current step, everything up to it, or a rolling window; trailing periods fade with age so movement is easy to follow. Markers can be circles or icons, coloured by a category column and sized by a number column.

• Time slider docs →

A store locator is a searchable, filterable map of your locations with a results sidebar beside it. Mapji supports keyword search across your fields, category filters, per-category marker icons, opening hours that show whether a branch is open right now — with an Open now filter — a Near Me button that sorts results by distance from the visitor, an optional town or postcode search that sorts them by distance from a place the visitor types, a distance filter in kilometres or miles, a Directions button on every location, and optional Call, Website and Email buttons and a link to share each one.

• Store locator →
• Build one without code →

A draw map lets you sketch markers, lines, and polygons directly onto the map — useful for annotating a location, outlining a service area, or building a simple custom map from scratch. It also builds multistop routes that follow the real road network, with each stop added by address search or by clicking the map. Everything you draw is standard GeoJSON, so you can export it and use it elsewhere.

• Draw map docs →

A crowdsourced map lets your visitors drop a pin and fill in a form you designed — for reporting potholes, submitting business listings, logging sightings, or running a photo contest. Submissions land in a moderation queue, and only the ones you approve appear on the public map.

• Crowdsourced maps →
• Collecting submissions →

A compare map puts two datasets on the same viewport and keeps both maps locked to the same camera, so you can hold one against the other. Drag a swipe divider across to reveal what is underneath, or split the screen and give each map its own half. It suits before-and-after pairs — land use in two years, coverage from two providers, a proposal against what is there today.

• Compare map docs →

Yes. Only the camera is shared. Each side takes its own file, draws it its own way — raw geometry, a heatmap, clusters, or a travel-time area — and picks its own basemap, so satellite on one side against a street map on the other is a normal setup.

• Compare map docs →

Every map type reads the same set: CSV, Excel (.xlsx and .xls), GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, KMZ, GPX, and zipped Shapefiles. That covers exports from QGIS, ArcGIS, Google Earth and most GPS units without converting anything first. Coordinates are reprojected to WGS84 wherever the file records which projection it uses. You can also skip files entirely and connect a Google Sheet as a live source.

• Turn a spreadsheet into a map →

Create a map, choose Import Data, and upload the file. Mapji reads the first sheet of a workbook, detects your latitude and longitude columns automatically, and lets you pick which columns become the title and description. Confirm the mapping and your points appear; afterwards you can choose exactly which columns the popup shows, and how they are formatted, under Settings → Popup.

• CSV and Excel to map guide →
• Data maps →

Yes. Mapji recognises the usual naming patterns — lat, latitude, lng, long, longitude, y, x and similar — and pre-selects them. If your columns are named something unexpected you can pick them manually from a dropdown.

Mapji plots points from latitude and longitude columns and does not convert street addresses into coordinates for you. Run your addresses through a geocoder first — many are free for modest volumes — then import the file with the resulting lat/lng columns. You can still keep the address as a text column and display it in popups or search. A typed place is looked up in only four spots, each for one point: the Draw map's route builder (a stop), Story Map's chapter location picker, the Store Locator editor's address box for adding one location, and a Store Locator's optional town or postcode search, which sorts the list by distance from the place a visitor types. None of them imports an address column.

Up to 10,000 features per data source, from an import file of up to 25 MB. Cluster maps and heatmaps stay smooth well into the thousands. If your file is larger, filter or aggregate it before importing — for regional totals a choropleth is usually the clearer choice anyway.

• Choropleth vs heatmap →

They are skipped rather than silently plotted in the wrong place. Rows with no geometry, or with coordinates outside the valid range of real-world latitude and longitude, are filtered out during import so a stray zero or a swapped lat/lng pair doesn't drop a marker off the coast of Africa.

Yes, on every map type. Paste the service URL and Mapji reads what it publishes, then lets you pick which layers to draw. WMS 1.1.1 and 1.3.0, WMTS, ArcGIS MapServer and ImageServer, TileJSON, PMTiles archives and plain {z}/{x}/{y} tile templates (image or vector) all work. This is not an import — the tiles are fetched live from the publisher each time your map loads, so the layer stays current, nothing is stored on your map, and it doesn't count toward the 10,000-feature limit. If you don't have a service URL, the built-in layer catalog covers the common cases with one click.

• Adding a background layer →

Yes. Paste the URL of a .pmtiles archive hosted anywhere that supports byte-range requests — S3, Cloudflare R2, or most static hosts. Image archives draw as imagery. Vector archives list their layers so you can choose which to show and pick a colour; they are drawn as shapes in that one colour rather than fully styled, so they work as a reference layer rather than as a basemap replacement.

• Adding a background layer →

Yes. The Layers button on every map opens a catalog of public layers you add with one click: yesterday's satellite view of the planet, a cloud-free Sentinel-2 mosaic, hillshade and US topo maps, ocean depth, surface water and forest loss, live US weather radar, precipitation, population density, administrative boundaries, and hiking, cycling and ski routes. Every layer in it works on any website and may be used on commercial maps, and its credit is added to your map automatically. Layers run by volunteer projects are marked, since those projects ask very busy maps to host the tiles themselves.

• Adding a background layer →

The credits are added for you. Every map shows a small attribution line in its corner naming the basemap's source and the publisher of each background layer, on your public map and in embeds. For a service you connect yourself you can edit that credit in the layer's settings — check the publisher's terms for what they ask for.

Those layers — hiking, cycling and mountain-bike routes, bike infrastructure, ski pistes and sea marks — come from volunteer OpenStreetMap projects that run their servers on donations. They are fine for everyday maps, but the projects ask very busy or commercial sites to host the tiles themselves, so plan for that if your map draws heavy traffic. Everything else in the catalog comes from government and research services built for public reuse.

Almost always because the service doesn't allow browser access. Web maps fetch tiles from the browser, so the publisher has to send CORS headers — and plenty of services that work fine in QGIS or ArcGIS Pro don't. Mapji fetches a real tile when you add the layer and refuses it with an explanation rather than saving something that would silently render nothing. The other common causes are a service offered only over HTTP (HTTPS is required) or one that doesn't publish in Web Mercator.

Yes. Draw maps export the features you've created as a standard GeoJSON file, and crowdsourced map submissions export as CSV from the Pins tab of the map editor. Data you connected from a Google Sheet already lives in your own spreadsheet.

Yes. Choropleth maps have an inline editable data table for region values, store locator entries can be edited and added individually, draw map features can be reshaped and relabelled, and form submissions can be corrected — including their coordinates — before you approve them.

Yes. Paste the spreadsheet URL, pick which tab to use, and map your columns to latitude, longitude, title, and any other fields. Mapji then keeps the map in sync with the sheet, so editing a row updates the published map without re-uploading anything.

• Google Sheets to map guide →

Cluster, Heatmap, Store Locator, Choropleth, and Time Slider maps can all be driven by a sheet. Choropleth maps map a region-code column and a value column instead of latitude and longitude; time slider maps additionally map a time column. Draw, Isochrone, Story Map, Crowdsourced Map, and Compare use their own data flows — Compare holds two datasets, and a sync pairs one map with one spreadsheet.

Never. Mapji requests read-only access to Sheets and treats your spreadsheet as the single source of truth. Nothing Mapji does can modify, reformat, or delete your data.

Mapji checks connected sheets roughly every 5 minutes and updates the map when the content has actually changed. There is also a Sync Now button for an immediate refresh when you don't want to wait.

Yes. The sheet does not need to be public — it only needs to be readable by the Google account you signed in with. You'll be asked to grant read-only Sheets access the first time you connect one.

The first 10,000 mappable rows are synced and the rest are skipped, with the sync status reporting how many were left out. Filter the sheet down, or aggregate it into regional totals and use a choropleth instead.

Yes, extensively. Start from one of 7 built-in themes — light, dark, white, black, grayscale, satellite, or hybrid (satellite imagery with roads and labels over it) — then adjust colors, widgets, and interactions. For full control, the map style editor exposes 45+ color keys with a live preview.

Yes. The map style editor covers colors for water, land, parks, roads, buildings and labels; per-class road widths and casings; dash patterns; label halo and text sizing; zoom bands controlling when each layer appears; and tileable fill textures for parks, water, and beaches. Styles are saved by name and reusable across your maps.

Yes. Markers can use icons from the Maki and Lucide icon sets, set globally for the map or per category — so each filter option on a store locator can carry its own pin, in any colour, drawn as the bare icon, on a white badge, as a dot or inside a pin. Draw map features and story map chapters can also be colored individually.

Yes. Turn on 3D terrain for real elevation and hillshading, and enable extruded 3D buildings and contour lines. Combined with per-chapter tilt and bearing this works well for hiking routes, property tours, and urban planning.

Five map types draw one for you, and a store locator can add one. Choropleth maps show the color scale from the lowest value to the highest, plus the no-data color; heatmaps show a Low → High key; cluster maps list the donut categories when donut clustering is on; time slider maps list the values of the column markers are colored by; and isochrone maps list each travel-time or distance band. A store locator with icons by category can show a legend of those icons, switched on under Markers. On choropleth, heatmap, cluster, time slider and store locator maps you can give the legend a title of your own. The legend is a key, not a filter. Draw, Story Map, Crowdsourced and Compare maps don't render one, so add a caption in the surrounding page if the colors need explaining.

Yes. In the editor, open a location and choose Edit location to change any of its fields, add a new field, clear one, or drag its pin to a new spot; Add location places a new one with the same form — click the map, or type the address to drop it there. A star in the location list marks a location featured. Changes are saved immediately. The one exception is a store locator synced from Google Sheets: the sheet owns its locations, so edit the sheet instead — changes made on the map would be overwritten on the next sync.

Yes, on Draw, Cluster, Heatmap, Choropleth, Time Slider and Crowdsourced maps. Under Settings → Popup, pick the column that titles the popup and the rows to show, put them in order, rename them, and format each one as a number, currency, percent, date, link, image, email or phone number — with units such as m² or /night, a fixed number of decimals, or the short form 1.2K. You can add a photo across the top, a line of text built from your columns ("Built in {year} · {rooms} rooms"), turn a link into a button with its own label, show a tooltip on hover, and add Directions and Copy link buttons. A preview beside the settings shows the popup for your real features as you edit. Empty values are skipped, and only web addresses become links or images — anything else is shown as text. Until you customize it, each map keeps its built-in popup. Store Locator uses its own location cards, set up under its display fields.

Yes, on every map type — up to 5 background layers per map (or per side of a Compare map), picked from the built-in catalog of public layers or connected from any published WMS, ArcGIS, PMTiles or tile service. Reorder and rename them, fade each one with an opacity slider, limit it to a range of zoom levels, adjust its brightness, contrast and colour, and hide one without deleting it. They always draw beneath your own markers and shapes, and beneath the basemap's place names, so nothing you added ends up hidden behind a backdrop.

• Adding a background layer →

Yes. A search and filter panel can be enabled on most map types, letting visitors search across the fields you choose and narrow results with dropdown, multi-select, or numeric-range filters. Matches can be highlighted and flown to, and you can pick which corner the panel sits in.

Every published Mapji map has an embed page and a generated iframe snippet you paste into your own site. Set a fixed width and height or let it fill the container. It works in any CMS that accepts an HTML embed, including WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, and Notion.

• Embedding guide →

It can. Alongside the iframe snippet Mapji generates a small optional listener script; with it in place the embed reports its content height to the parent page and the iframe resizes to match, so there's no inner scrollbar.

Yes. Every map is live at mapji.com/map/your-map from the moment you create it. Under Settings → Domains you can add a free yourmap.mapji.com subdomain, or connect your own domain or subdomain for a fully branded URL. You'll be given the DNS record to add, and Mapji verifies it and issues the certificate.

• Create a custom map online →

Yes. Scroll zoom, drag pan, rotation, double-click zoom, box zoom, touch gestures, and keyboard navigation can each be switched off independently — useful for a kiosk display or for stopping a scroll-wheel from hijacking the page an embed sits in. These settings apply to visitors, not just the editor preview.

Zoom buttons, a compass, a scale bar, a locate-me button, fullscreen, a minimap, and an export button that saves the view as an image or a PDF can each be toggled on or off. Zoom, compass, and scale are on by default; the rest are opt-in.

Public maps — at their mapji.com/map address, on a subdomain or on a custom domain — are crawlable, so they can be indexed like any other page. Set a map to Unlisted or Password in its settings and its pages ask search engines not to index them. The dedicated embed URL is always excluded from search engines, so that the page you embed the map into — yours — is the one that ranks.

Yes. In a map's settings, under Access, choose Unlisted to keep it out of search results while anyone with the link can still open it, or Password to require a password before anything of the map loads — on its own address and in embeds. A browser that has entered the password stays unlocked for 7 days, and changing the password locks everyone out again. Unlisted is not access control: anyone you send the link to can pass it on.

• Access settings →

Use the Crowdsourced Map type. You define where pins may be dropped — anywhere, inside a country, state or county you pick by name, inside a bounding box, or inside a polygon you draw — and design the form visitors fill in after dropping one. Submissions arrive in a moderation queue for you to review.

• Crowdsourced maps →
• Full walkthrough →

Fourteen: short text, long text, number, email, URL, date, time, phone, star rating, dropdown, radio buttons, multi-select, checkbox, and image upload. Fields can be spread across multiple steps, validated with minimums, maximums, length limits and patterns, and shown or hidden based on an earlier answer.

New submissions arrive as pending. You can approve, reject, or mark them as spam, individually or in bulk, and correct field values or a misplaced pin before approving. Only approved submissions are published to the map, and you choose whether they appear as plain pins or open a popup with details. Auto-approval is available if you'd rather not review each one.

Yes, several layers: an optional CAPTCHA, per-IP rate limiting with a daily cap, a hidden honeypot field, an optional allowlist of domains permitted to submit, and content checks on uploaded images. Each submission also records the visitor's IP, its reverse-DNS hostname, browser and device, and approximate location, so you can spot a flood coming from one source or a datacenter.

Yes. Submissions export as CSV from the map editor — exactly the ones you have filtered — and you can register a webhook that fires when a submission is created, approved, rejected, or marked as spam — so new reports can flow straight into your own systems. Deliveries are signed, retried on failure, and logged where you can see them.

10,000 features per data source, 25 MB per import file, and 10 MB per uploaded image. Isochrone maps support up to 5 starting points, store locator entries can show up to 5 extra display fields, and a drawn route takes up to 10 stops. There is no cap on how many maps you create.

Yes, for crowdsourced map submissions. Each submission records the submitter's IP address, a salted hash of it used for rate limiting, its reverse-DNS hostname where one exists, and an approximate country, region and city. Only the site owner can see this, and it is never published to the public map. If your form collects submissions from the EU or UK, treat it as personal data in your own privacy notice.

Yes. Imported data can be cleared from a map at any time, and deleting a site removes it along with its map data and takes the published URL offline. Disconnecting a Google Sheet stops the sync and leaves your spreadsheet untouched.

Administrative boundaries come from geoBoundaries.org (CC BY 4.0), covering 230 countries, with state or province outlines for 197 and county-level outlines for 178. European NUTS 1, 2, and 3 regions come from Eurostat/GISCO (© EuroGeographics) and cover 37 countries.

• Choropleth map maker →