this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
524 points (98.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43890 readers
1585 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I didn't discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn't budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
Anyway, I've gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we're sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.
As a GIS person all I can is ...fuck yeah. I'm for better or worse deeply embedded in the ESRI world but I've started dabbling in FOSS GIS software and honestly it's all damn good. I don't understand how ESRI charges what they do. Also, FME is amazing if you haven't tried it yet (not free or open source) but awesome for quick visual development and data ETL.
I will give ESRI credit for their online stuff. It's expensive, but it's also pretty great. We're actually thinking about getting an online subscription but no software licenses.
Honestly not a bad way to go about it
They tried to nickel and dime me on a $4000/yr product, but I'm just giving them the nickel.
We've been using QGIS at my company for almost 8 years at this point and I really love it. The python integration and deep plugin repository render it head and shoulders above ESRI. Although I admit for enterprise solutions many will still require the turn-key solutions esri offer.
ESRI is in the position that Microsoft and Adobe want to be in, a de-facto monopoly.
I use this for architecture and it's saved me so much time