Public beta soon
Driades is a collaborative geospatial canvas that runs entirely in your browser. Drop in cloud-native data, draw together in real time, and scrub back through years of satellite imagery. It's all one map, with nothing to install and no server to run.
Open source and self-hostable from day one. Built at h4ck1ng.science, for the research it was getting in the way of.
01 — Presence
A Driades room is just a URL. Send it to anyone and they open it geo-anchored to the same map, at the same zoom and coordinates as everyone else. No invite, no account, no setup.
You can literally point at something. Cursors carry names. Click an avatar and your camera glides along with theirs until you take the wheel back.
02 — Data
Drag PMTiles, Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF, GeoParquet, GeoJSON or Zarr datacubes in from your desktop. Or paste the URL of an S3 bucket. Driades reads the data where it sits, using HTTP range requests, so a gigabyte layer is on the map in seconds and no server is involved.
Layers work like Photoshop: reorder them, set opacity per layer, lock the ones you're done with. Anything loaded by URL is shared with the room automatically, so everyone sees what you see as soon as it lands.
03 — Clipping
Draw a boundary and anything you drop is clipped to that exact shape. Vectors filter to the polygon instantly. Rasters are properly masked: every tile is composited in pixel space, so the edges outside really do go transparent.
Move a vertex and every layer bound to that area re-clips live, on everyone's screen. The boundary stays editable.
04 — Annotation
Click any shape to get its geodesic area, perimeter and length. The numbers update as you draw, for everyone in the room. Name an area "Sector B" and the name travels with the document.
Drop sticky notes pinned to exact coordinates. Two people can type in the same note at once. Every action goes into a shared history you can filter and rewind with Ctrl+Z, or scrub back years to read what was said at the time.
05 — Time
Time is just another dimension here. Everyone in the room shares one timeline and moves it together. Drag the slider: dated observations come and go, drawings from that year vanish, old notes surface again.
Stack satellite imagery by year and press play. Flip through it, cross-fade between frames, or average it per pixel. Everyone watching sees the same thing at the same moment.
06 — Analysis
DuckDB-WASM runs spatial SQL right in your browser. Query any loaded layer, filter by geometry or attribute, then mount the results back onto the canvas as a new coloured layer.
SPARQL works the same way: point it at any endpoint — Wikidata, your own triple store, or a graph published as a
.rete file — and the bindings land as
geo-anchored, time-aware features. The query travels with the layer, so every peer runs it themselves.
For heavier work, pipe a drawn area into your own API or a hosted Gradio app. The inputs arrive prefilled, results land as layers, and the whole job history is shared with the room.
07 — Dryads
Scripts and AI agents join a room as full peers. We call them dryads, and each one moves its own 🧚 cursor across the map. A Python client and an MCP server give them everything you can do: draw, annotate, mount layers, set the time, fly the camera.
Everything a dryad does lands in the same document as everyone else's work. You don't read a log. You watch it work, next to your human team.
All of it ships in the open-source app, and all of it is free.
Points, lines, polygons, rectangles and freehand, all geo-anchored and streamed live, including shapes still being drawn.
Stack as many layers as you like, with per-layer opacity, visibility and reordering.
Dropped files stream peer-to-peer to the whole room, survive reloads, and reach whoever joins later.
Geodesic area, perimeter and length on any shape, with shared names that travel in the document.
A shared log of every action, filterable by person, layer or area. Click an entry to fly there.
See everyone's live cursor, and click an avatar to ride their camera across the map.
Play stacks of imagery as a flipbook, blended, or as a true per-pixel mean, in sync for the whole room.
Choose who you're time-synced with: co-edit a shared timeline, or follow someone read-only.
Point at an xarray-style store and scrub its time axis with the shared slider.
Elevation your data already carries extrudes into columns and elevated paths, with an exaggeration slider.
Deep-link layers by URL or push them live from a node editor over postMessage.
Workspace JSON, GeoJSON annotations, Markdown and PDF reports, PNG snapshots, video recordings.
Rotate the canvas without moving the data. It's your own view, so nobody else's map turns.
Your workspace persists locally and merges automatically when you reconnect.
Responsive layout with touch drawing, touch notes and finger-position presence.
No accounts, no tracking, no analytics baked into the canvas. Rooms can be end-to-end encrypted.
The canvas is free and open source. Paid plans add what needs someone else's servers: private hosting, persistence, curated data, hosted AI and team management. MCP, agents and self-hosting are free on every plan.
Free, forever
€0
The complete open-source geospatial canvas.
Collaborate, analyse spatial data and work with humans or AI agents in your browser. No account needed. Self-host it anywhere.
Hosted, personal
€5/ month
Your maps, always there.
Everything in Sapling, plus private hosting, persistence, curated data and hosted AI, without running a server or managing an API key.
Professional
€20/ month
More compute. More automation.
Everything in Canopy, with more hosted AI, server-side compute and automation for serious spatial workflows.
Working as a team? Grove adds a shared workspace, roles and one bill — editors pay, viewers never do.
Who we are
Driades comes out of h4ck1ng.science, a research collective led by Carlos Vivar Rios, a biologist and data engineer who works across genomics, microscopy and satellite imagery.
The limits of our research are the limits of our tools. So we build better ones. Every question you cannot ask because the software will not let you is a question the field simply does not get answered — and widening that is the whole point of the collective.
The canvas began as one of those questions: why does sharing a map still require a GIS degree and an IT department? Driades is the answer we wanted to already exist.
No venture funding, no growth team, no exit strategy. Just a maintained open-source tool funded by the people who find it useful enough to pay for hosted extras.
Sponsorship
The canvas is free, open source and carries no tracking, and we would like to keep all three of those true at once. Company sponsorship is how: it funds the hosting and the work, and it buys a sponsor slot in the free public rooms — a name and a link, never an ad network.
€50,000 · €100,000 · €250,000 a year, plus promoted datasets and a data marketplace.
Not public yet
Driades is already in use on real research, and opens to everyone soon. Join the waitlist to hear first. You'll also get founding pricing on Canopy and early access to the dataset catalog.
No. It's the actual open-source app, unlimited, with no expiry. The paid tier adds hosted services on top. It doesn't unlock the canvas.
You paste an API key from your own provider account into the app. It's stored in your browser and requests go straight from your machine to that provider. We never see the key or the conversation. On Canopy, we run the model for you instead, so there's nothing to set up and nothing to pay for separately.
Hosting a map that stays online costs something, and open geospatial work is worth more when others can see it. Public maps get hosted at no charge; private ones are the paid feature. You can always keep a map to yourself by not sharing it. Unshared rooms are peer-to-peer and never touch our servers.
Yes. npm run build produces a static bundle you can host anywhere, or bring the app, signaling server and agent bridge up together with docker compose up -d. The only moving part collaborators need is a reachable signaling server.
Not by default. Layers loaded by URL are read straight from wherever they live; files you drop are streamed peer-to-peer to the people in your room and cached in each browser. Nothing passes through a server unless you choose hosted maps.
Not decided yet. We want it to be affordable for research groups and small teams. Waitlist members get founding pricing and will hear the number before anyone else.
