Microsoft Planetary Computer
The Microsoft Planetary Computer is a cloud platform for Earth observation data, built by Microsoft and opened in public preview in 2021 as part of its environmental work. It brings together petabytes of open satellite and environmental data, including Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, Landsat, MODIS, NAIP aerial imagery, ESA WorldCover land cover, and climate layers such as ERA5, and makes them searchable through one catalogue.
Access is built on the open STAC standard (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog). The data catalogue and STAC API are free to use and need no account, so you can query holdings by area, time, and collection and get structured metadata back. The imagery and arrays themselves sit in Azure Blob Storage, mostly as cloud-optimised GeoTIFF, NetCDF, and Zarr, and most assets need a free signed token from the authentication API before you can read them. A hosted JupyterHub environment is also offered to approved accounts for running compute next to the data.
For RAG and AI the pattern mirrors NASA Earthdata and Copernicus, which we also list: the pixels are numeric arrays that belong in geospatial tooling, not a vector index, so the retrieval value sits in the catalogue metadata, collection descriptions, and documentation. Indexing those lets a system help users find and understand the right dataset, then hand off to STAC queries for the data itself.
On licensing, the catalogue and API are free, but there is no single licence over the contents. Each dataset carries the terms of its upstream provider, so commercial use, attribution, and redistribution must be checked collection by collection, which is why we flag this as content-licence-differs. The signing step is lightweight access control, not a payment. Separately, Planetary Computer Pro is a paid Azure product that lets organisations manage their own geospatial data, distinct from this free public catalogue.
Related sources
GeoNames
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Google-Microsoft-OSM Open Buildings (VIDA)
A conflated global building-footprint layer that merges Google Open Buildings V3, Microsoft Global ML Footprints, and OpenStreetMap into roughly 2.7 billion footprints, each labelled by its source. Built by VIDA and hosted on Source Cooperative in cloud-native formats, it offers more complete coverage than any single provider on its own.
Natural Earth
A public domain map dataset built for cartography, offered at three scales: 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m. It bundles cultural data (borders, cities, roads), physical data (coastlines, rivers, lakes), and raster imagery, all ready to drop into a map.
OpenStreetMap
A crowdsourced map of the world, built and maintained by a community of volunteers. It holds detailed geographic data on roads, buildings, land use, points of interest, and much more, which you can download as a full planet file or as smaller regional extracts.