Google Earth Engine
Freemium
Planetary-scale geospatial analysis in the cloud — the data catalogue and compute behind modern water remote sensing.
Microsoft Planetary Computer
ActiveA STAC API and Jupyter environment over petabytes of satellite data — Sentinel, Landsat, MODIS, ERA5, CHIRPS and more.
by Microsoft
- Pricing
- Freemium
- License
- Free catalogue/STAC API; JupyterHub compute requires an approved account
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- STAC, Python, Jupyter, Azure Blob Storage
- Platform
- Web
About Microsoft Planetary Computer
The Planetary Computer pairs a multi-petabyte, analysis-ready data catalogue — Sentinel-1/2, Landsat, MODIS, ESA WorldCover, NLCD, SRTM, ERA5, CHIRPS and dozens more, many of which appear individually elsewhere in this collection — with a standard STAC API and an approved-account JupyterHub environment for running analysis next to the data rather than downloading it.
Its value is consolidation: instead of learning a different access pattern for each agency's archive, Planetary Computer exposes them all through one consistent STAC/COG interface, which has made it a popular default for teams building reproducible remote-sensing pipelines rather than one-off downloads.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Alternatives to Microsoft Planetary Computer
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with Microsoft Planetary Computer.
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The unified search portal across every NASA Earth-observation archive — SRTM, MODIS, SMAP, GPM, GRACE and more.
geemap
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Python + Google Earth Engine without the pain — interactive mapping and analysis of petabyte-scale water data.
wradlib
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The open library for weather-radar rainfall processing — from raw volumes to engineering-ready rainfall fields.
HyRiver
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A Python software stack for US hydrology data: NHD+ networks, gauges, DEMs, soils and climate via one API family.
JAXA's 30m global DSM from PRISM stereo imagery — a strong third opinion alongside SRTM and Copernicus DEM.