If you are in an enterprise setting and you currently evaluate ArcGIS vs QGIS, pick QGIS and thank me later. ArcGIS Enterprise is a piece of software that feels straight out of the 90s and has no native linux binary (can be started with wine). It is expensive as hell and resource hungry.
+100. There is very little QGIS cannot do as well or better than ArcGIS. For any shortcomings, there are generally other specialized tools that can fill the gaps. It's really just a training issue more than technical one at this point imo.
YES. I made the switch 10 years ago and my professional life improved overnight
Yes, that's one missing piece. Excellent software but there is a steep learning curve, and it has its own format that you need to convert back and forth from.
My brother is a GIS expert and does this for a living. At his workplace (trans-european electrical project) they use ArcGIS and privately he uses QGIS. He said he'd pick QGIS over ArcGIS every single day.
ArcGIS is very polished, but everything costs extra. QGIS has less polish but is supremely hackable and there are plugins for nearly everything.
Having used QGIS as a non-expert to extract mountain heightmaps from a border region between two datasets from different national bodies and looking up some property borders I can really recommend it. Took me less than an afternoon to get started
I come from the ArcView 3 / ArcInfo days. I still maintain a non professional home license which is nice, however they killed off ArcMap for non-enterprise and I just cant for the life of me get into Arc Pro or QGis. Old dog, no new tricks for me I guess.
Uh, that is demonstrably not true. ArcGIS Enterprise (Portal, hosting servers, datastore, geoevent) all also run on Linux.
Now where ArcGIS enterprise succeeds is being in an actual enterprise (thousands of users), having groups collaborate, data control, and more. None of the enterprise-y bits exist.
And QGis is more akin to ArcGIS Pro, not Enterprise.
Now, yes, it is definitely resource hungry. And also, if you administer it, HA isn't really HA. Theres tons of footguns in how they implement HA that makes it a SPOF.
Also, for relevancy, I was the one who worked with one of their engineers and showed that WebAdapters (iis reverse proxy for AGE) could be installed multiply on the same machine, using SNI. 11.2 was the first to include my contribution to that.
Edit: gotta love the -1s. What do you all want? Screenshots of my account on my.esri.com? Pictures of Portal and the Linux console they're running on? The fact its 80% Apache Tomcat and Java, with the rest Python3? Or how about the 300 ish npm modules, 80 of which on the last security scan I did showed compromise?
Everything I said was completely true. This is what I'm paid to run. Can't say who, cause we can't edit posts after 1 or so hours.
I would LOVE to push FLOSS everywhere. QGIS would mostly replace ArcGIS Pro, with exception of things like Experience Builder and other weird vertical tools. But yeah. I know this industry. Even met Jack a few times.
Speaking of ArcGIS and reverse proxies, they were circulating a single-file .ashx script for about a decade that ended up being the single worst security breach at several large government customers of mine… ever. By a mile.
For the uninitiated: this proxy was a hack to work around the poor internal architecture of ArcGIS enterprise, and to make things “work” it took the target server URL as a query parameter.
So yes, you guessed right: any server. Any HTTP to HTTPS endpoint anywhere on the network. In fact you could hack TCP services too if you knew a bit about protocol smuggling. Anonymously. From the Internet. Fun!
I’m still finding this horror embedded ten folders deep in random ASP.NET apps running in production.
I played with it some last year. not much has changed since I used it in a GIS class in 2007 in college.
As a hacker, a really fun thing to do with QGIS is locate your local government’s GIS data portal. At least in the US, most data is freely available and can be pulled into QGIS as layers. Fun things like lidar surveys, flood zones, property boundaries. If you’re at all interested in geography and want to explore your locality it can be great fun.
I spent the better part of a month doing just this. Really fascinating. There are also several public satellite imagery repos (mostly European sources, but they’re satellites, so they aren’t limited to Europe).
QGIS is a very useful tool that I often rely on for quick exploration of datasets in my work. But dear god the UI is in desperate need of a huge overhaul by someone who knows what they are doing.
Massed rows of toolbars with tiny icons, lots of unintuitive behaviour, and a few weird quirks.
It's a very powerful tool, but so much of its utility is completely inaccessible without tutorials and videos to explain it.
Used QGis for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Could only used it with the help of ChatGPT. But, I got what I wanted in a reasonable amount of time.
When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL, JTS, udig, geoserver, open stree maps, open scene graph, FWtools etc. Open source GIS has awesome list of projects and people, QGIS being only one of them. It really fascinates me.
I think it did to GIS what Sagemath did to free/open source mathematical software. It integrated everything in a nice package, freeing the users from the burden of dealing with countless disparate packages.
and of course the king - PostGIS
and also that qgis installs 1g+ of all these goodies tied together.
Fun fact: QGIS was originally written just to view PostGIS tables.
> When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL (...)
GDAL should be front and center. It's the xkcd 2347 of earth observation and geographical information systems
Yeah out of these GDAL is the one I use the most because it's easy to script. I honestly find it easier to use GDAL on the command line than the QGIS GUI which says a lot about the latter.
QGIS is fantastic - it's the only OSS viewer I know of that can consistently and efficiently display multi-GB TIFF images without crashing. It has been a long journey - 20 years to capture ~8% of the geospatial market. ESRI still rules the enterprise, with 40-50% of the market share. More generally, there are so many excellent open source geospatial projects like Geoserver, GDAL, Geonode, Map GL Libre, kepler.gl, Martin, Mapserver, .... but they still have not managed to disrupt ESRI. I think because they are still too fragmented, and still mostly stuck on the desktop, while everything is moving to the cloud.
We are running mapserver in production in the cloud (AWS lambda) to visualize lots of different data using WMS. We're also doing lots of processing using GDAL in the cloud as well. Compared to ESRI it's amazingly cost effective even considering Amazon's high prices.
nice. If you aren't already familiar, you might be interested in this platform
for Dutch geospatial data: https://github.com/PDOK . They use mapserver on the cloud at massive scale, and all of their infra is open.
I do all my GIS work in R, and prefer it to a GUI first approach to be honest.
What R modules do you use for that?
QGIS is great. It's a slightly janky version of ArcMap, but ArcMap has always been janky anyway, so it doesn't matter for most things. And QGIS is super extensible.
There have been so many random times that QGIS has helped me out over the years. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it!
QGIS is janky? It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today. Most built-in tools run way faster than AG Pro, and once the move to QT6 with 4.0 is complete this october, we'll finally get native builds on M-series Mac as well.
I couldn't even know where to start listing the upsides compared to ESRI offering, fron PostGIS integration all the way to the simplicity of plugins.
>It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today
lol, the bar is not high. It can be both the smoothest and extremely janky at times. Let's be honest with ourselves here. (and I do agree, it's among the best running... but also janky).
Arcmap is sooo janky. Looks like a refugee from Win 3.1 era with minor cosmetic updates (although I know the engine received big updates 2010-2020).
If people want QGIS to be pretty, just become a member and sponsor that initiative.
Do you work in GIS field and it is useful? I am trying to see how a GIS tool will help a typical audience here that may be a little interested in maps + data.
I taught myself QGIS for spatial analysis of map data-- coming at it from a coding perspective. It has great Python integration. It's also surprisingly useful as a spreadsheet alternative for certain tasks because it supports a SQL-like interface into CSV data, so you can join CSVs with spatial data or with each other, create views and virtual fields, and so on. Overall, very impressed with the depth, breadth, and ease of use considering how powerful it is.
Check out Atlas.co - kind of like airtable but for spatial data and spatial tools
its good for teaching, otherwise it may be super clumsy with large layers and this is unsolvable in the near future. ref. ticket.
even so, we must admit, is still the most comprehensive opensource something to compete with esri.
So weird to see this comment. QGIS powering government GIS groups and used by major geoscience and mining companies.. working with national sized vector and raster data.
Is this on its way to pushing out the incumbent proprietary solution and becoming the standard a la Blender? Or is this more LibreOffice -it’s there, but missing so much functionality/polish that an expert will immediately find blockers vs the status quo?
LibreOffice vs Office 365/Google Drive is probably the more relevant comparison.
I won’t comment on market share, but even if theoretically QGIS totally displaced ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap/ArcGIS on the desktop, the arena of competition has shifted to ArcGIS Online and its competitors. And once you’re in ArcGIS Online, Pro becomes the convenient choice for desktop editing.
LibreOffice could be miles better than Office on desktop, but the competition is lost because Office on desktop is just an accessory for Office 365 (which competes with Google Docs/Drive).
Disclosure: I work at Esri.
I don't think the comparison is quite apt, because while LibreOffice has no support for collaborative workflows (short of error-prone shared drives), QGIS can connect to quite a few geospatial databases, with third parties offering plugins for their own cloud platforms.
It would be nice to have better support for browser-based sharing and editing, but the desktop-based parts are there already.
That’s an important point. The collaboration model is more complex in GIS because it’s not just documents (maps and map projects) but the underlying data is coming from databases that are independently editable.
The comparison still works in some ways though, because ArcGIS is selling you both the software (ArcGIS Pro, Map Viewer, Field Maps, etc) and the backing services (hosted feature services, basemaps, locators, etc), similar to how Office is selling you data hosting, sharing, and mobile + web app integration.
You can accomplish the same things with QGIS, GeoServer, QField, etc, but then you’re in the position of building a GIS from parts. Whereas with ArcGIS, setting up a new map and database (feature service) for data collection is a point-click workflow.
Of course you pay a premium for that level of integration.
That's an insightful nuance. I've seen you just create divisions in organisations because while it is a really fully featured desktop application, it implies a way of working that doesn't play well with the cloud, which creates barriers between experimenting and production.
I work in the mass appraisal space, and I use QGIS all the time. The professional alternative is ESRI's ArcGIS.
A lot of shops I know (private and public) will use ArcGIS still, but I'm noticing an increasing number of people (particularly younger researchers/analysts) who are exclusively using QGIS.
QGIS is powerful and full featured, but it is admittedly a bit rusty around the edges, especially when working with very large datasets. If they keep working on fixing some of the sharpest edges I think it will go on to have a good future. Just in the past few years I've noticed significant improvement.
In many ways it feels like Blender -- long ignored and dismissed, but slowly but surely improved over time, and then suddenly became quite a big deal.
If companies that use ESRI cancelled one license a year and instead sponsored qgis development with the money...
https://qgis.org/funding/
I think the answer depends on the country: In places where the government uses QGIS it is like Blender. In places where ESRI has a stronghold it is like LibreOffice.
I work at a university and we do a lot of moving data around, inspecting the files and columns, scripting, etc. so we have everyone use QGIS. Governments and other major consumers have open-ended long-term contracts for whatever Esri products they can think of, so those are solid.
For me the real ongoing question is the role of MapBox, MapLibre, to some extent Google Maps API, and other web-first solutions. It's difficult for Esri to connect with the average web developer or researcher who just wants to start with clickable pins on a map.
It is becoming more and more Blender. Europe relies on it more than Americans, but most GIS specialists use both this and ESRI.
Probably closer to the first situation. It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community. When I started working with GIS at work, expensive ESRI products were default in this market, a la matlab in another field. Most coleages of mine had not heard about QGIS. Now QGIS is ubiquitous. It did to ArcGIS and its countless paid add on modules what scipy/numpy did to matlab.
>It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community
Maybe for home or casual use, sure. I use a ~$4500/y Esri license level and it's worth every penny.
Also, plenty of people are still using matlab!
Interesting. I see a lot of people around me using QGIS and all kinds of both free and paid gis tools. I never worked with ArcGIS, except for importing their files, but it seems to be universally loathed around here, even if licensing and money is not the problem. So what are the places where ArcGIS does better?
I totally disagree. I switched off this license, and also ALSO saved additional because Spatial Analyst costs extra (all included by default in QGIS)
The scipy/numpy to matlab is a good example. In my opinion it is on its way but in many places the timing is more like 2010-2013 where a lot of people knew python was the future but universities still used only Matlab.
QGIS is a gold standard to verify you tools works fine and data is in a correct format ...
if you are a web based first, you have even better options to build and extend
lot great webtools are comming for sure and you still can be 100% of most of your geospatial pipeline
p.s. want to extend the above list with self-hosted tools with minimum or none dependencies on paid APIs, and recommendations are greatly appreciated
When I have to do anything with geo data i think this is a one of the first tools i reach for. Integrates with lots of formats, storages. Have lots of plugins and scripting functionality. And it's free like in speech.
My wife uses this a lot. ArcMap used to be de-facto software in her field, but QGis has overtaken that completely. It might not be as polished as ArcMap, it's missing a few guardrails that would prevent you messing up, but it has more features, extensions, better platform support and is free as in beer.
For folks working on QGis: thank you
I work with QGIS, but until recently I’ve only skated over the surface. In the last year or so I’ve found LLMs increasingly useful as a companion to help me code automation scripts or just to ask “how can I do this?” questions. QGIS is deep and powerful but that power can be hard to access. LLMs make it a lot easier.
A couple months ago I needed some info about a home/property. The county publishes a zip file of "geo data", and after downloading it I asked Claude Code how I can work with the files. It recommended QGIS, but I was lost when I opened it and searched GitHub to find this MCP server[0].
20 minutes later it had every piece of data I could possibly want placed onto the parcel on the map. It felt magical.
Yeah I've started doing the same thing with ChatGPT. You know that it's already read all the manuals and tutorials...
I adore QGIS. I just built a map (and corresponding GeoPDF file for offline use) for two local wildlife management areas last weekend (and subsequently used them while on them).
Qgis is great on the desktop. On the browser side I find openlayers to be a well thought out gis framework.
A lot of things are evolving though in the gis world. You can now, even in the browser, render huge datasets with geoparquet, geoarrow, wasm and webgl.
Fabulous software. I used it to create LIDAR map tiles from free UK government LIDAR data of my local area (Hampshire, UK) at https://solentmaps.uk. When used as a layer placed under standard map tiles, you can see all sorts of long-hidden historical artefacts under modern deep foliage. The ruins of a long-forgotten WW1 hospital near me can be clearly seen under the modern day trees. Fun stuff to play with.
I can't help but pile on here. I have had a corporate license of ArcGIS but have used QGIS instead because it simply worked better to process the data I had. ESRI and ArcGIS have a long history of reporting errors with absolutely no helpful information. I swear half the errors are something like "Error 999999: Error executing function." Good luck debugging!!
It sounds weird but QGIS is one of those projects that I don't use but I love that it exists and wish I had reason to use it more. A bit like Blender.
Qgis is powerful and free but it’s slow, has the steepest learning curve and gets in your way. I am happy it exists but it’s not great.
One of the coolest things to do in QGIS is to add a layer from Postgres (PostGIS) directly and just plot an entire table as a layer, live.
It’s made for some really streamlined analysis.
Is there a web version?
QGIS is the shit. I absolutely love it, great for visualizing GeoJSON, GeoTIFF files, open data feeds, etc. My one gripe is that their macOS installers have been out of date for ages now, the best way I've found is to actually install from Conda Forge directly:
> brew install micromamba
> mamba install qgis
It's really crazy the number of open geospatial data feeds that exist out there from NASA, NOAA, and ESA. If you're interested in checking any of this stuff out, I highly encourage following Mark Litwinchik's blog, this guy is a legend and he does most of his work with open tools like QGIS and DuckDB
I had geo data to find a new city to move out, with lat lon, population, price, etc
I just used leaflet, it was fine
spatialite is also good enough as a spatial database
unless you are doing complex stuff with GIS data, I don't see the point of using such a large software
leaflet is a tile rendering library. You can't edit or massage the data in any way, and most GIS work is not that complex--but it does require handling paths and other things that leaflet cannot really do.
I’ve worked in the GIS space for a while, developed mapping services on the backend and frontend, the whole thing.
And yet I’ve never been able to get into QGIS. I’ve used the ogr libraries, I know that there’s an incredible amount of smart work behind these tools. 100% all due respect to everyone involved.
But I’ve found the ui so daunting that I’ve never been able to use it.
I want to be proven wrong. Are there gentle/great tutorials/guides?
I know this isn’t a “vpn software before tailscale” kind of situation. But, you know?
I hate to tell you to RTFM, but the QGIS team has put a lot of effort into the User Guide and very practical Training Manual.
If you're already familiar with typical GIS workflows, you'll breeze through them, and they'll help you wrap your head around the QGIS way of doing things.
If you are in an enterprise setting and you currently evaluate ArcGIS vs QGIS, pick QGIS and thank me later. ArcGIS Enterprise is a piece of software that feels straight out of the 90s and has no native linux binary (can be started with wine). It is expensive as hell and resource hungry.
+100. There is very little QGIS cannot do as well or better than ArcGIS. For any shortcomings, there are generally other specialized tools that can fill the gaps. It's really just a training issue more than technical one at this point imo.
YES. I made the switch 10 years ago and my professional life improved overnight
What about GRASS?
https://grass.osgeo.org
Yes, that's one missing piece. Excellent software but there is a steep learning curve, and it has its own format that you need to convert back and forth from.
My brother is a GIS expert and does this for a living. At his workplace (trans-european electrical project) they use ArcGIS and privately he uses QGIS. He said he'd pick QGIS over ArcGIS every single day.
ArcGIS is very polished, but everything costs extra. QGIS has less polish but is supremely hackable and there are plugins for nearly everything.
Having used QGIS as a non-expert to extract mountain heightmaps from a border region between two datasets from different national bodies and looking up some property borders I can really recommend it. Took me less than an afternoon to get started
I come from the ArcView 3 / ArcInfo days. I still maintain a non professional home license which is nice, however they killed off ArcMap for non-enterprise and I just cant for the life of me get into Arc Pro or QGis. Old dog, no new tricks for me I guess.
Uh, that is demonstrably not true. ArcGIS Enterprise (Portal, hosting servers, datastore, geoevent) all also run on Linux.
Now where ArcGIS enterprise succeeds is being in an actual enterprise (thousands of users), having groups collaborate, data control, and more. None of the enterprise-y bits exist.
And QGis is more akin to ArcGIS Pro, not Enterprise.
Now, yes, it is definitely resource hungry. And also, if you administer it, HA isn't really HA. Theres tons of footguns in how they implement HA that makes it a SPOF.
Also, for relevancy, I was the one who worked with one of their engineers and showed that WebAdapters (iis reverse proxy for AGE) could be installed multiply on the same machine, using SNI. 11.2 was the first to include my contribution to that.
Edit: gotta love the -1s. What do you all want? Screenshots of my account on my.esri.com? Pictures of Portal and the Linux console they're running on? The fact its 80% Apache Tomcat and Java, with the rest Python3? Or how about the 300 ish npm modules, 80 of which on the last security scan I did showed compromise?
Everything I said was completely true. This is what I'm paid to run. Can't say who, cause we can't edit posts after 1 or so hours.
I would LOVE to push FLOSS everywhere. QGIS would mostly replace ArcGIS Pro, with exception of things like Experience Builder and other weird vertical tools. But yeah. I know this industry. Even met Jack a few times.
Speaking of ArcGIS and reverse proxies, they were circulating a single-file .ashx script for about a decade that ended up being the single worst security breach at several large government customers of mine… ever. By a mile.
For the uninitiated: this proxy was a hack to work around the poor internal architecture of ArcGIS enterprise, and to make things “work” it took the target server URL as a query parameter.
So yes, you guessed right: any server. Any HTTP to HTTPS endpoint anywhere on the network. In fact you could hack TCP services too if you knew a bit about protocol smuggling. Anonymously. From the Internet. Fun!
I’m still finding this horror embedded ten folders deep in random ASP.NET apps running in production.
I played with it some last year. not much has changed since I used it in a GIS class in 2007 in college.
As a hacker, a really fun thing to do with QGIS is locate your local government’s GIS data portal. At least in the US, most data is freely available and can be pulled into QGIS as layers. Fun things like lidar surveys, flood zones, property boundaries. If you’re at all interested in geography and want to explore your locality it can be great fun.
I spent the better part of a month doing just this. Really fascinating. There are also several public satellite imagery repos (mostly European sources, but they’re satellites, so they aren’t limited to Europe).
QGIS is a very useful tool that I often rely on for quick exploration of datasets in my work. But dear god the UI is in desperate need of a huge overhaul by someone who knows what they are doing.
Massed rows of toolbars with tiny icons, lots of unintuitive behaviour, and a few weird quirks.
It's a very powerful tool, but so much of its utility is completely inaccessible without tutorials and videos to explain it.
Used QGis for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Could only used it with the help of ChatGPT. But, I got what I wanted in a reasonable amount of time.
When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL, JTS, udig, geoserver, open stree maps, open scene graph, FWtools etc. Open source GIS has awesome list of projects and people, QGIS being only one of them. It really fascinates me.
I think it did to GIS what Sagemath did to free/open source mathematical software. It integrated everything in a nice package, freeing the users from the burden of dealing with countless disparate packages.
and of course the king - PostGIS
and also that qgis installs 1g+ of all these goodies tied together.
Fun fact: QGIS was originally written just to view PostGIS tables.
> When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL (...)
GDAL should be front and center. It's the xkcd 2347 of earth observation and geographical information systems
Yeah out of these GDAL is the one I use the most because it's easy to script. I honestly find it easier to use GDAL on the command line than the QGIS GUI which says a lot about the latter.
QGIS is fantastic - it's the only OSS viewer I know of that can consistently and efficiently display multi-GB TIFF images without crashing. It has been a long journey - 20 years to capture ~8% of the geospatial market. ESRI still rules the enterprise, with 40-50% of the market share. More generally, there are so many excellent open source geospatial projects like Geoserver, GDAL, Geonode, Map GL Libre, kepler.gl, Martin, Mapserver, .... but they still have not managed to disrupt ESRI. I think because they are still too fragmented, and still mostly stuck on the desktop, while everything is moving to the cloud.
We are running mapserver in production in the cloud (AWS lambda) to visualize lots of different data using WMS. We're also doing lots of processing using GDAL in the cloud as well. Compared to ESRI it's amazingly cost effective even considering Amazon's high prices.
nice. If you aren't already familiar, you might be interested in this platform for Dutch geospatial data: https://github.com/PDOK . They use mapserver on the cloud at massive scale, and all of their infra is open.
I do all my GIS work in R, and prefer it to a GUI first approach to be honest.
What R modules do you use for that?
QGIS is great. It's a slightly janky version of ArcMap, but ArcMap has always been janky anyway, so it doesn't matter for most things. And QGIS is super extensible.
There have been so many random times that QGIS has helped me out over the years. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it!
QGIS is janky? It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today. Most built-in tools run way faster than AG Pro, and once the move to QT6 with 4.0 is complete this october, we'll finally get native builds on M-series Mac as well.
I couldn't even know where to start listing the upsides compared to ESRI offering, fron PostGIS integration all the way to the simplicity of plugins.
>It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today
lol, the bar is not high. It can be both the smoothest and extremely janky at times. Let's be honest with ourselves here. (and I do agree, it's among the best running... but also janky).
Arcmap is sooo janky. Looks like a refugee from Win 3.1 era with minor cosmetic updates (although I know the engine received big updates 2010-2020).
If people want QGIS to be pretty, just become a member and sponsor that initiative.
Do you work in GIS field and it is useful? I am trying to see how a GIS tool will help a typical audience here that may be a little interested in maps + data.
I taught myself QGIS for spatial analysis of map data-- coming at it from a coding perspective. It has great Python integration. It's also surprisingly useful as a spreadsheet alternative for certain tasks because it supports a SQL-like interface into CSV data, so you can join CSVs with spatial data or with each other, create views and virtual fields, and so on. Overall, very impressed with the depth, breadth, and ease of use considering how powerful it is.
Check out Atlas.co - kind of like airtable but for spatial data and spatial tools
its good for teaching, otherwise it may be super clumsy with large layers and this is unsolvable in the near future. ref. ticket.
even so, we must admit, is still the most comprehensive opensource something to compete with esri.
So weird to see this comment. QGIS powering government GIS groups and used by major geoscience and mining companies.. working with national sized vector and raster data.
Is this on its way to pushing out the incumbent proprietary solution and becoming the standard a la Blender? Or is this more LibreOffice -it’s there, but missing so much functionality/polish that an expert will immediately find blockers vs the status quo?
LibreOffice vs Office 365/Google Drive is probably the more relevant comparison.
I won’t comment on market share, but even if theoretically QGIS totally displaced ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap/ArcGIS on the desktop, the arena of competition has shifted to ArcGIS Online and its competitors. And once you’re in ArcGIS Online, Pro becomes the convenient choice for desktop editing.
LibreOffice could be miles better than Office on desktop, but the competition is lost because Office on desktop is just an accessory for Office 365 (which competes with Google Docs/Drive).
Disclosure: I work at Esri.
I don't think the comparison is quite apt, because while LibreOffice has no support for collaborative workflows (short of error-prone shared drives), QGIS can connect to quite a few geospatial databases, with third parties offering plugins for their own cloud platforms.
It would be nice to have better support for browser-based sharing and editing, but the desktop-based parts are there already.
That’s an important point. The collaboration model is more complex in GIS because it’s not just documents (maps and map projects) but the underlying data is coming from databases that are independently editable.
The comparison still works in some ways though, because ArcGIS is selling you both the software (ArcGIS Pro, Map Viewer, Field Maps, etc) and the backing services (hosted feature services, basemaps, locators, etc), similar to how Office is selling you data hosting, sharing, and mobile + web app integration.
You can accomplish the same things with QGIS, GeoServer, QField, etc, but then you’re in the position of building a GIS from parts. Whereas with ArcGIS, setting up a new map and database (feature service) for data collection is a point-click workflow.
Of course you pay a premium for that level of integration.
That's an insightful nuance. I've seen you just create divisions in organisations because while it is a really fully featured desktop application, it implies a way of working that doesn't play well with the cloud, which creates barriers between experimenting and production.
I work in the mass appraisal space, and I use QGIS all the time. The professional alternative is ESRI's ArcGIS.
A lot of shops I know (private and public) will use ArcGIS still, but I'm noticing an increasing number of people (particularly younger researchers/analysts) who are exclusively using QGIS.
QGIS is powerful and full featured, but it is admittedly a bit rusty around the edges, especially when working with very large datasets. If they keep working on fixing some of the sharpest edges I think it will go on to have a good future. Just in the past few years I've noticed significant improvement.
In many ways it feels like Blender -- long ignored and dismissed, but slowly but surely improved over time, and then suddenly became quite a big deal.
If companies that use ESRI cancelled one license a year and instead sponsored qgis development with the money... https://qgis.org/funding/
I think the answer depends on the country: In places where the government uses QGIS it is like Blender. In places where ESRI has a stronghold it is like LibreOffice.
I work at a university and we do a lot of moving data around, inspecting the files and columns, scripting, etc. so we have everyone use QGIS. Governments and other major consumers have open-ended long-term contracts for whatever Esri products they can think of, so those are solid.
For me the real ongoing question is the role of MapBox, MapLibre, to some extent Google Maps API, and other web-first solutions. It's difficult for Esri to connect with the average web developer or researcher who just wants to start with clickable pins on a map.
It is becoming more and more Blender. Europe relies on it more than Americans, but most GIS specialists use both this and ESRI.
Probably closer to the first situation. It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community. When I started working with GIS at work, expensive ESRI products were default in this market, a la matlab in another field. Most coleages of mine had not heard about QGIS. Now QGIS is ubiquitous. It did to ArcGIS and its countless paid add on modules what scipy/numpy did to matlab.
>It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community
Maybe for home or casual use, sure. I use a ~$4500/y Esri license level and it's worth every penny.
Also, plenty of people are still using matlab!
Interesting. I see a lot of people around me using QGIS and all kinds of both free and paid gis tools. I never worked with ArcGIS, except for importing their files, but it seems to be universally loathed around here, even if licensing and money is not the problem. So what are the places where ArcGIS does better?
I totally disagree. I switched off this license, and also ALSO saved additional because Spatial Analyst costs extra (all included by default in QGIS)
The scipy/numpy to matlab is a good example. In my opinion it is on its way but in many places the timing is more like 2010-2013 where a lot of people knew python was the future but universities still used only Matlab.
QGIS is a gold standard to verify you tools works fine and data is in a correct format ...
if you are a web based first, you have even better options to build and extend
kepler, protomaps, maplibre-gl-js
https://kepler.gl
https://protomaps.com
https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js
the rest can be found on great Qiusheng Wu’s (aka @giswqs) Geo/GeoAI tutorials channels and repos
https://www.youtube.com/@giswqs/videos
https://x.com/giswqs
but what really amazed me is how geo spatial support is growing inside of databases recently
https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/core_extensions/spatial/overv...
all mighty postgis https://postgis.net/docs/manual-3.5/postgis_cheatsheet-en.ht...
https://sedona.apache.org/latest/
https://geoparquet.org/releases/v1.0.0/
and many unlocked dataset compare to other industries
https://docs.overturemaps.org/getting-data/duckdb/
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
https://hub.arcgis.com/search
lot great webtools are comming for sure and you still can be 100% of most of your geospatial pipeline
p.s. want to extend the above list with self-hosted tools with minimum or none dependencies on paid APIs, and recommendations are greatly appreciated
When I have to do anything with geo data i think this is a one of the first tools i reach for. Integrates with lots of formats, storages. Have lots of plugins and scripting functionality. And it's free like in speech.
My wife uses this a lot. ArcMap used to be de-facto software in her field, but QGis has overtaken that completely. It might not be as polished as ArcMap, it's missing a few guardrails that would prevent you messing up, but it has more features, extensions, better platform support and is free as in beer.
For folks working on QGis: thank you
I work with QGIS, but until recently I’ve only skated over the surface. In the last year or so I’ve found LLMs increasingly useful as a companion to help me code automation scripts or just to ask “how can I do this?” questions. QGIS is deep and powerful but that power can be hard to access. LLMs make it a lot easier.
A couple months ago I needed some info about a home/property. The county publishes a zip file of "geo data", and after downloading it I asked Claude Code how I can work with the files. It recommended QGIS, but I was lost when I opened it and searched GitHub to find this MCP server[0].
20 minutes later it had every piece of data I could possibly want placed onto the parcel on the map. It felt magical.
[0] https://github.com/jjsantos01/qgis_mcp/
Yeah I've started doing the same thing with ChatGPT. You know that it's already read all the manuals and tutorials...
I adore QGIS. I just built a map (and corresponding GeoPDF file for offline use) for two local wildlife management areas last weekend (and subsequently used them while on them).
Qgis is great on the desktop. On the browser side I find openlayers to be a well thought out gis framework.
A lot of things are evolving though in the gis world. You can now, even in the browser, render huge datasets with geoparquet, geoarrow, wasm and webgl.
Fabulous software. I used it to create LIDAR map tiles from free UK government LIDAR data of my local area (Hampshire, UK) at https://solentmaps.uk. When used as a layer placed under standard map tiles, you can see all sorts of long-hidden historical artefacts under modern deep foliage. The ruins of a long-forgotten WW1 hospital near me can be clearly seen under the modern day trees. Fun stuff to play with.
I can't help but pile on here. I have had a corporate license of ArcGIS but have used QGIS instead because it simply worked better to process the data I had. ESRI and ArcGIS have a long history of reporting errors with absolutely no helpful information. I swear half the errors are something like "Error 999999: Error executing function." Good luck debugging!!
It sounds weird but QGIS is one of those projects that I don't use but I love that it exists and wish I had reason to use it more. A bit like Blender.
Qgis is powerful and free but it’s slow, has the steepest learning curve and gets in your way. I am happy it exists but it’s not great.
One of the coolest things to do in QGIS is to add a layer from Postgres (PostGIS) directly and just plot an entire table as a layer, live.
It’s made for some really streamlined analysis.
Is there a web version?
QGIS is the shit. I absolutely love it, great for visualizing GeoJSON, GeoTIFF files, open data feeds, etc. My one gripe is that their macOS installers have been out of date for ages now, the best way I've found is to actually install from Conda Forge directly:
> brew install micromamba
> mamba install qgis
It's really crazy the number of open geospatial data feeds that exist out there from NASA, NOAA, and ESA. If you're interested in checking any of this stuff out, I highly encourage following Mark Litwinchik's blog, this guy is a legend and he does most of his work with open tools like QGIS and DuckDB
https://tech.marksblogg.com/
Thanks...
Do you absolutely need `mamba` / `conda`??
Can you use `uv` instead to install QGIS? Any experiences to share?
Thanks!!
brew install --cask qgis
Unfortunately the homebrew cask is still Intel-only so it requires Rosetta, whereas the conda/mamba version has an osx-arm64 build. There are other workarounds discussed here: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/46299 and here https://geo.malagis.com/native-qgis-on-apple-silicon-solutio...
I have nothing but good things to say about QGIS.
I had geo data to find a new city to move out, with lat lon, population, price, etc
I just used leaflet, it was fine
spatialite is also good enough as a spatial database
unless you are doing complex stuff with GIS data, I don't see the point of using such a large software
leaflet is a tile rendering library. You can't edit or massage the data in any way, and most GIS work is not that complex--but it does require handling paths and other things that leaflet cannot really do.
I’ve worked in the GIS space for a while, developed mapping services on the backend and frontend, the whole thing.
And yet I’ve never been able to get into QGIS. I’ve used the ogr libraries, I know that there’s an incredible amount of smart work behind these tools. 100% all due respect to everyone involved.
But I’ve found the ui so daunting that I’ve never been able to use it.
I want to be proven wrong. Are there gentle/great tutorials/guides?
I know this isn’t a “vpn software before tailscale” kind of situation. But, you know?
I hate to tell you to RTFM, but the QGIS team has put a lot of effort into the User Guide and very practical Training Manual.
If you're already familiar with typical GIS workflows, you'll breeze through them, and they'll help you wrap your head around the QGIS way of doing things.
https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/user_manual/
https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/training_manual/
And if you're into books, Locate Press is run by some of the original QGIS authors, and many of their books are very QGIS centric.
https://locatepress.com/books
I recommend asking ChatGPT for help. Tell it what you’re trying to do, and don’t be afraid to ask the dumbest questions.
I have used it in the past, it is excellent.
[dead]