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

+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.

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.

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

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.

What about GRASS?

https://grass.osgeo.org

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.

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

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

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