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.
The _one_ thing I wish would be improved is the georeferencing pipeline.
The fact Arc gives you a transparent live preview of where your image will end up is 1000x better than QGISs, "save a tiff, load it, check it, do it again" approach.
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.
The folks who hired me didn't realize I was also a hacker. I did my due diligence as well, and this was more 10.3 . And yes, it was terrible.
I know that FEMA and EPA both are running their public portals as 10.8 , which is really bad. There's usually between 8-12 critical (cvss 3.0 9 or greater) per version bump. Fuck if I know how federal acquisitions even allow this, but yeahhh.
Also, on Hosting Server install, theres configs with commented out internal ticket numbers. You search this on google, and you'll find out 25% of the IPs that hit it are Chinese. Obviously, for software thats used predominantly in the US government, a whole bunch of folks in opposition to us are writing it. And damn, the writing quality is TERRIBLE.
basically, if you have to run ArcGIS enterprise, keep it internal only if at all possible. Secure Portal operation is NOT to be trusted. And if you do need a public API, keep the single machine in DMZ, or better yet, isolated on a cloud. Copy the data as a bastion, like a S3 bucket or rsync, or something. Dont connect it to your enterprise.
Oh and even with 11.5 , there are a multitude of hidden options you can set with the config for WebAdapter, including full debug. Some even save local creds like for portaladmin.
Oh yeah, and if you access the Portal postgres DB, and query the users table, you'll find 20 or so Esri accounts that are intentionally hidden from the Users list in portal on :7443 . The accounts do appear disabled... But, why are they even there to begin with?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Been using QGIS for about 6 years now for doing manual data analysis, as well as GDAL and Spatialite in C++ for creating/saving datasets and geopandas, Shapely, pyproj, etc for automated analysis.
QGIS is an odd duck. Part of the complexity of using it is the fundamental complexity of GIS software. There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?!) that’s necessary to use it effectively. All of the excellent UI in the world won’t save you if you’re not using the right coordinate system.
On the other hand… yeah, it definitely could use some love. I consider myself in roughly the amateur power user category. I don’t use it every day, but when I do fire it up once or twice a month I’m doing some heavy data analysis with it. Every time I do that I end up tripping over three or four things that seem like they should be obvious to do but aren’t. And man oh man… if there was a single bug I would love to fix: highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them. The fact that you can select a bunch of points and not see them highlighted… so frustrating. You can go in and change the symbology to fix that in a number of ways but dammit it should work right out of the box. /rant
Hard agree on it being odd in both GIS ways and QGIS ways. I just started a new job that pays for ArcGIS Pro and it’s wild how something that seemed intuitive to find on QGIS is buried under menus on Arc Pro, but conversely I’ve definitely seen things that I’m like “that was almost too easy why doesn’t QGIS have this”. And then you have the oddities of GIS
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
This is spot on. I'd love it if it was possible to get the integration with the QGIS ecosystem. It could open source integrations or even a commercial offering that just joins things up in a cohesive way just something that enables a more smooth collaboration model.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I recently participated in a hackathon, and our project was centered around PostGIS. We wanted to work with our queries in a more interactive way without having to fiddle with frontend stuff, so I did a very cursory search and found QGIS. It allowed us to iterate faster and instantly became an invaluable tool. The ability to run SQL queries and see and compare queries results visually saved us days of work.
As a FreeCAD project admin, it's always been interesting to keep an eye on QGIS development, not just with regards to the GIS domain, but more generally how niche applications like this can swim against the current of proprietary incumbent behemoths.
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.
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!!
Ah QGIS. Love working with it (it got me through university + 3 years of being in the planning industry w/o touching Esri)! hated managing it on the Mac admin side (no ARM native build and more importantly no notarized builds). I do hear v4 might fix both issues so I’m looking forward to that next month.
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.
My wife says something similar. She's used QGIS for years, but never as the main part of her job (she's an archaeologist) and has said ChatGPT has opened up loads of stuff that would've taken her ages to work out before. It even got her using Python.
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.
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
Strongly recommend apple silicon Mac (if using a Mac) and the Mac ports path. I have an m4 MacBook Pro and the Rosetta powered binary was almost unusable. Mac ports wasn’t too hard for me to figure out though the install (mostly compiling) took several hours. I have had no issues with coexistence of Mac ports and homebrew. Don’t attempt this is you are using beta builds of tahoe - Mac ports isn’t released for Tahoe yet.
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.
If using an Apple silicon Mac, it will be way faster after if you install (compile from source) via Mac ports.
As far as learning curve, I agree, but I have had a lot of luck as a beginner asking ChatGPT how to use qgis to do specific tasks and it walked me through them in detail correctly.
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.
No one doing serious cartography uses qgis. Also geostatatistics like kriging is fully supported and easy to use in ArcGis
That no one doing serious statistics uses QGis is false as evidenced both by community and sponsors. Try searching “who uses QGis”.
+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.
The _one_ thing I wish would be improved is the georeferencing pipeline.
The fact Arc gives you a transparent live preview of where your image will end up is 1000x better than QGISs, "save a tiff, load it, check it, do it again" approach.
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.
> demonstrably not true ... all also run on Linux
I'm not saying that it can't run in Linux, I'm saying there is no native binary for Linux.
They have bash scripts that starts the windows executables in wine.
You can see that when you read the scripts or in htop.
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'm acutely aware of that.
The folks who hired me didn't realize I was also a hacker. I did my due diligence as well, and this was more 10.3 . And yes, it was terrible.
I know that FEMA and EPA both are running their public portals as 10.8 , which is really bad. There's usually between 8-12 critical (cvss 3.0 9 or greater) per version bump. Fuck if I know how federal acquisitions even allow this, but yeahhh.
Also, on Hosting Server install, theres configs with commented out internal ticket numbers. You search this on google, and you'll find out 25% of the IPs that hit it are Chinese. Obviously, for software thats used predominantly in the US government, a whole bunch of folks in opposition to us are writing it. And damn, the writing quality is TERRIBLE.
basically, if you have to run ArcGIS enterprise, keep it internal only if at all possible. Secure Portal operation is NOT to be trusted. And if you do need a public API, keep the single machine in DMZ, or better yet, isolated on a cloud. Copy the data as a bastion, like a S3 bucket or rsync, or something. Dont connect it to your enterprise.
Oh and even with 11.5 , there are a multitude of hidden options you can set with the config for WebAdapter, including full debug. Some even save local creds like for portaladmin.
Oh yeah, and if you access the Portal postgres DB, and query the users table, you'll find 20 or so Esri accounts that are intentionally hidden from the Users list in portal on :7443 . The accounts do appear disabled... But, why are they even there to begin with?
This is horrible!
It's sadly the norm for monopolistic industry-specific software. You see the same lack of due diligence in SCADA software and the like.
> even met Jack a few times
The Danger Man!
Yes, I know his name is Jack Dangermond.
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.
Geopandas and QGIS are my go to. QGIS for basic work, automate with Geopandas.
It makes the work a lot of fun!
Any tips on smoothing the transition between the two that mean work isn't duplicated?
I played with it some last year. not much has changed since I used it in a GIS class in 2007 in college.
I'd argue a lot has changed, though mostly extensions and bottlenecks in QGIS.
Cant's speak much for arcgis, but it is bloated usually for me so I use it sparingly.
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).
For those interested in remote sensing, there's also Landsat with freely available multi-band imagery https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/
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.
That is a fun fact!
> 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.
Thanks, I wasn't aware. I'll definitely take a look.
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?
There are quite a few. https://guides.library.columbia.edu/geotools/R I mostly used sf at uni and also preferd it to QGIS in most scenarios. Far from a pro user though.
I use QGIS together with https://mapshaper.org/ converting shapefiles into geojson to use together with D3js on https://createaclickablemap.com/. It is a very useful tool, I am grateful for it. It is just awesome.
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.
Been using QGIS for about 6 years now for doing manual data analysis, as well as GDAL and Spatialite in C++ for creating/saving datasets and geopandas, Shapely, pyproj, etc for automated analysis.
QGIS is an odd duck. Part of the complexity of using it is the fundamental complexity of GIS software. There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?!) that’s necessary to use it effectively. All of the excellent UI in the world won’t save you if you’re not using the right coordinate system.
On the other hand… yeah, it definitely could use some love. I consider myself in roughly the amateur power user category. I don’t use it every day, but when I do fire it up once or twice a month I’m doing some heavy data analysis with it. Every time I do that I end up tripping over three or four things that seem like they should be obvious to do but aren’t. And man oh man… if there was a single bug I would love to fix: highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them. The fact that you can select a bunch of points and not see them highlighted… so frustrating. You can go in and change the symbology to fix that in a number of ways but dammit it should work right out of the box. /rant
Hard agree on it being odd in both GIS ways and QGIS ways. I just started a new job that pays for ArcGIS Pro and it’s wild how something that seemed intuitive to find on QGIS is buried under menus on Arc Pro, but conversely I’ve definitely seen things that I’m like “that was almost too easy why doesn’t QGIS have this”. And then you have the oddities of GIS
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.
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
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.
I used to work at an ISP based in the UK. They also put fibre in the ground. Their entire "design" tool was basically a huge QGIS python plug-in.
It is incredible the flexibility QGIS gives you. By paying a couple of developers the company probably saved millions in software.
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.
This is spot on. I'd love it if it was possible to get the integration with the QGIS ecosystem. It could open source integrations or even a commercial offering that just joins things up in a cohesive way just something that enables a more smooth collaboration model.
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.
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
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.
I recently participated in a hackathon, and our project was centered around PostGIS. We wanted to work with our queries in a more interactive way without having to fiddle with frontend stuff, so I did a very cursory search and found QGIS. It allowed us to iterate faster and instantly became an invaluable tool. The ability to run SQL queries and see and compare queries results visually saved us days of work.
As a FreeCAD project admin, it's always been interesting to keep an eye on QGIS development, not just with regards to the GIS domain, but more generally how niche applications like this can swim against the current of proprietary incumbent behemoths.
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.
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!!
Ah QGIS. Love working with it (it got me through university + 3 years of being in the planning industry w/o touching Esri)! hated managing it on the Mac admin side (no ARM native build and more importantly no notarized builds). I do hear v4 might fix both issues so I’m looking forward to that next month.
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.
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/
My wife says something similar. She's used QGIS for years, but never as the main part of her job (she's an archaeologist) and has said ChatGPT has opened up loads of stuff that would've taken her ages to work out before. It even got her using Python.
Yeah I've started doing the same thing with ChatGPT. You know that it's already read all the manuals and tutorials...
there's also some open source ways to share spatial data as a website from QGIS like LizMap [1], MapStore [2], and Mundi [3]
[1] https://www.lizmap.com/en/
[2] https://docs.mapstore.geosolutionsgroup.com/en/latest/
[3] https://mundi.ai/
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.
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.
my guy, i have been using it for years and didnt know it could do that, you are a life saver
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...
Strongly recommend apple silicon Mac (if using a Mac) and the Mac ports path. I have an m4 MacBook Pro and the Rosetta powered binary was almost unusable. Mac ports wasn’t too hard for me to figure out though the install (mostly compiling) took several hours. I have had no issues with coexistence of Mac ports and homebrew. Don’t attempt this is you are using beta builds of tahoe - Mac ports isn’t released for Tahoe yet.
I have nothing but good things to say about QGIS.
I’ve recently had a certificate related error on mine.
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.
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.
If using an Apple silicon Mac, it will be way faster after if you install (compile from source) via Mac ports.
As far as learning curve, I agree, but I have had a lot of luck as a beginner asking ChatGPT how to use qgis to do specific tasks and it walked me through them in detail correctly.
Is there a web version?
no you cant do a web version of QGIs but there are alternatives with web versions (that do not do nearly as much and are paid)
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 recommend asking ChatGPT for help. Tell it what you’re trying to do, and don’t be afraid to ask the dumbest questions.
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 have used it in the past, it is excellent.
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