Marble's developers describe it as a "virtual globe and world atlas." Marble uses OpenStreetMap to provide street maps, satellite maps, and topographic maps. It also pulls in data from other public sources to provide a number of data layers including real time weather, cloud cover information, earthquake measurements, real time traffic, and more. Marble can also display educational and historical maps as well as maps of other planets. It also incorporates a number of routing and navigation tools like car, bike, and pedestrian navigation with turn-by-turn directions. Marble is free software, distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, with source code available under the Developers section of the website. In the Install section of the Marble site, users can locate installers for Windows and macOS systems as well as instructions for how to install Marble on most common Linux distributions.