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Pin Drop vs Felt
Pin Drop and Felt both put a map at the centre. Felt is designed for collaborative map-making, data visualisation and spatial analysis. Pin Drop is designed for teams running operational work across real-world locations. This guide covers where each platform fits and how they differ structurally.
Work lives on places
Tasks, visits, notes and ownership attach to the location itself — not a data row or a map layer.
Context travels with the pin
Every location holds its own history: who visited, what was noted, what is still outstanding.
Built for the whole team
Accessible to field staff, ops leads and back-office admins alike — not just GIS specialists. Native iOS and Android apps for capture in the field.
Pipelines tied to real sites
Move projects through stages while keeping visibility over what is actually happening at each site.
Felt makes beautiful maps. Pin Drop runs the work that happens on them.
Felt has set a new bar for collaborative mapping. It handles diverse geospatial data, offers real-time co-editing and produces maps that are a pleasure to look at. For analysts, planners and researchers comfortable with GIS tools, it’s genuinely impressive.
But Felt’s power sits in GIS territory. For the wider team — field staff, operations leads, site managers — it’s often too complex to use without a specialist in the room. And as soon as the work shifts from understanding places to operating at them, the problem changes. A site that needs inspection on Thursday. A territory with three reps covering 40 accounts. A project that has moved into its construction phase. This is work that happens at locations, but it isn’t captured by a map layer.
Pin Drop is built for this kind of work, and for the people doing it — not just the specialists. Each pin is an operational record: visits, tasks, pipelines, photos, people and notes accumulating over time. Teams check in and out on mobile. Ownership is clear. Status is visible without anyone having to ask.
If the question is what does this spatial data tell us, Felt is built for that. If the question is what is our team doing at these places and what needs to happen next, Pin Drop is built for that.
Some teams use both — Felt for deep analysis, Pin Drop for the day-to-day coordination the whole team depends on. The distinction isn’t about better or worse. It’s about which question each tool was designed to answer, and who it was designed for.
Side by side
How Pin Drop compares with Felt
The capabilities that matter when you move your map across.
Capability
Pin Drop
Felt
How it works
From heavyweight GIS to a map the field will actually use.
01
Import what you already have
Bring locations across from a spreadsheet, CSV or export. No licences to assign, no data model to design first.
02
Shape it around how you work
Tag, group and add the fields you need in minutes, not a mapping project. The people using it can change it.
03
Put it in everyone's hands
A fast, simple map on the phone your team already carries, not a desktop tool only the GIS analyst can drive.
Why teams switch from full GIS
A map the whole team can use, without the specialist cost and complexity of GIS.
Usable by everyone
No specialist training. Anyone in the field can add and find places on day one.
Set up in minutes
No projection, schema or licence setup before you see value.
Built for the field
Capture and reference locations on site, not just analyse them at a desk.
Less overhead
No seats sitting idle and no analyst bottleneck for a simple change.
Trusted at scale
Used by 10,000+ organisations.
10,000+
Verified organisations
613
At $1B+ revenue
360
10,000+ employees
17+
Sectors represented
Amazon
Nike
Adobe
Oracle
Pfizer
Nestlé
PepsiCo
Mars
Walmart
Whole Foods
M&S
Mastercard
Capital One
Barclays
AT&T
Toyota
Volvo
Bosch
Bayer
BASF
Philips
UPS
Kuehne+Nagel
BT Group
NHS
Abbott
ADP
Cargill
Veolia
Paramount
Made to fit
Built for the field, not just the desk.
Shaped to your team
Some need the whole region at a glance, some record what happened at each point. The pieces are the same, how you assemble them is yours.
No big bang
Import what you have and invite who needs it. No implementation project and nothing to migrate off first.
FAQS
Questions you might have
Does Pin Drop replace Felt?
Not really — they answer different questions. Felt is built for collaborative map-making and spatial analysis. Pin Drop is built for teams running operational work at real-world locations. Some teams use both: Felt for analysis and stakeholder-facing maps, Pin Drop for the day-to-day coordination that happens on the ground.
Is Pin Drop easier for non-GIS team members to use?
Yes. Pin Drop is designed to be useable by anyone on a team, not just GIS specialists. Field staff, operations leads, site managers and back-office admins can all pick it up without training. Felt has fantastic GIS capability, but it’s built for people already comfortable with mapping tools — the wider team often can’t get value from it without a specialist in the room.
Can Pin Drop handle GIS data like shapefiles or rasters?
Pin Drop supports common formats (CSV, KML, GeoJSON) and handles the spatial context operations teams need. For heavyweight GIS analysis — raster blending, custom projections, shapefile layers — Felt is the better tool. Pin Drop is built for teams who need location-aware workflows rather than full cartographic analysis.
Does Felt have a mobile app for field work?
Felt has recently added basic mobile support, but it remains web-first. Its mobile experience isn’t designed for field workflows — check-ins, offline capture, visit logging or on-the-ground updates. Pin Drop has native iOS and Android apps built specifically for field use, with offline support.
Can I import data from Felt into Pin Drop?
Yes. Places and datasets can be exported from Felt as CSV or GeoJSON and imported into Pin Drop. Once in Pin Drop, each place becomes an operational record that can carry tasks, visits, notes, photos and ownership — the activity layer Felt doesn’t cover.
Which tool is better for map-making versus running field operations?
Felt is better for making, styling and analysing maps together — it’s genuinely excellent at that. Pin Drop is better for running the work that follows the map: visits, tasks, status, ownership, and the history of what’s actually happened at each place. If your team’s core question is “what does this data tell us”, Felt fits. If it’s “what is our team doing at each place”, Pin Drop fits.
