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.
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.
+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.
There is exactly one thing that I would have ever needed ArcGid for and thats for Non Rectangular Map Borders. That does not yet exist in QGIS. But i managed to do using a GMT.jl.
ArcGIS is a social club that issues software. How do you spot GIS people? They tell you about planning for, going to, or what went on at the ESRI conference.
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.
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.
This comment is especially funny to anybody who's run QGIS
Yes, it has a better UI than ArcGIS, and uses less memory, but only slightly so. It still looks like it escaped from 1995's Neckbeard Labs, is clunky as heck, and eats tons of memory as well.
It's still a great piece of software, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade it for any other GIS tool. But there's a long way to go for GIS software.
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 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.
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.
Also PROJ, the quiet bit closer to the core that does projections.
The sqlite db alone that's packaged with PROJ is a pillar of knowledge that one can only marvel at. The most authoritative and wide-ranging collection of projection/datum information I'm aware of.
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.
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.
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
>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.
That's sort of true, but QGIS could do a much better job of helping you manage this stuff, figuring out the right CRS, helping you make sense of clashing CRS'es etc.
> 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
I haven't come across that one much, but generally I wish the UI around querying data was much better. First it takes me ages to find the one specific tiny little button which lets you query stuff, then you have to remember to pick which layer you want to query, etc etc.
It's the most obvious mode, and should be the default, and not buried amongst a dozen other icons I'll never use.
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.
The website has some really good tutorials you can knock out in an afternoon that teach you the basics of using the interface, along with the more important stuff about GIS terminology and jargon.
Readit News
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
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.
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.
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 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.
This isn’t about what platform an enterprise hosts its cloud offerings on. That barely affects the customer experience, outside of lock-in situations.
The concern was on OS support for customer-run software.
The Danger Man!
Yes, I know his name is Jack Dangermond.
https://grass.osgeo.org
Yes, it has a better UI than ArcGIS, and uses less memory, but only slightly so. It still looks like it escaped from 1995's Neckbeard Labs, is clunky as heck, and eats tons of memory as well.
It's still a great piece of software, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade it for any other GIS tool. But there's a long way to go for GIS software.
Cant's speak much for arcgis, but it is bloated usually for me so I use it sparingly.
and also that qgis installs 1g+ of all these goodies tied together.
GDAL should be front and center. It's the xkcd 2347 of earth observation and geographical information systems
The sqlite db alone that's packaged with PROJ is a pillar of knowledge that one can only marvel at. The most authoritative and wide-ranging collection of projection/datum information I'm aware of.
https://www.osgeo.org/projects/proj/
For folks working on QGis: thank you
There have been so many random times that QGIS has helped me out over the years. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it!
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.
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).
If people want QGIS to be pretty, just become a member and sponsor that initiative.
It is incredible the flexibility QGIS gives you. By paying a couple of developers the company probably saved millions in software.
even so, we must admit, is still the most comprehensive opensource something to compete with esri.
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.
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
That's sort of true, but QGIS could do a much better job of helping you manage this stuff, figuring out the right CRS, helping you make sense of clashing CRS'es etc.
> 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
I haven't come across that one much, but generally I wish the UI around querying data was much better. First it takes me ages to find the one specific tiny little button which lets you query stuff, then you have to remember to pick which layer you want to query, etc etc.
It's the most obvious mode, and should be the default, and not buried amongst a dozen other icons I'll never use.
Is the more info just the coordinate system like WGS84, or am I missing something else?