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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.

discuss

atoav|5 months ago

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

ecommerceguy|5 months ago

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.

showcaseearth|5 months ago

+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.

bcraven|5 months ago

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.

mastermage|5 months ago

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.

Spooky23|5 months ago

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.

thirtygeo|5 months ago

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

mystraline|5 months ago

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.

jiggawatts|5 months ago

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.

rthnbgrredf|5 months ago

> 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.

AuthorizedCust|5 months ago

> ArcGIS Enterprise (Portal, hosting servers, datastore, geoevent) all also run on Linux

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.

LeFantome|5 months ago

> even met Jack a few times

The Danger Man!

Yes, I know his name is Jack Dangermond.

detourdog|5 months ago

What about GRASS?

https://grass.osgeo.org

boxerab|5 months ago

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.

zokier|5 months ago

GRASS is integrated to QGIS https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/user_manual/grass_integra...

groby_b|5 months ago

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.

billfruit|5 months ago

What about library support/APIs if you want to embedd gis functionality in other applications? Does QGIS provide widgets etc?

ericcumbee|5 months ago

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

tomrod|5 months ago

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.

ulrischa|5 months ago

No one doing serious cartography uses qgis. Also geostatatistics like kriging is fully supported and easy to use in ArcGis

usgroup|5 months ago

That no one doing serious statistics uses QGis is false as evidenced both by community and sponsors. Try searching “who uses QGis”.