QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

I played with it some last year. not much has changed since I used it in a GIS class in 2007 in college.

+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.

What about GRASS?

https://grass.osgeo.org

YES. I made the switch 10 years ago and my professional life improved overnight

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 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.

> 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

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.

I do all my GIS work in R, and prefer it to a GUI first approach to be honest.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.