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Not for small business!
April 14, 2020

Not for small business!

Charles Tremblay | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with ArcGIS

Territory development.
  • Powerful.
  • Intuitive.
  • User friendly.
  • GIS software for big or specialized business.
  • Expensive.
  • Weak service.
  • Weak and slow technical support.
  • Complex method to licensing (6 months later, we don't have access to all purchases).
  • Dependence on technical support.
  • A lot of negative impact due to weak technical support and a lot of time to try to understand the complex method to licensing. (6 months later, we don't have access to all our purchases).
  • Too expensive for a small business.
  • With our needs, QGIS is more efficient and low cost.
  • With 10 years working with ESRI, i'm more productive than QGIS but the fact that this product is a "technical support dependant," this does not meet our needs to be autonomous in a territory with low communication level.
I was working with this software fore more than 10 years. I learned ArcGIS at University and I believed this software to be essential in the management of GIS. It was before I tried QGIS. I regret my purchase by the expensive cost, the complex method to licencing and the weak technical support. I was disappointed with the lack of after-sales service, no email return from the saleperson (Québec, Canada).
Ouch. This hurt. 6 months later, I don't have access to all my purchases. A lot of technical problems, and weak and very slow technical support. (3 weeks of delay for my last call.) I gave up, my suite is still not functional, no emails about my complaints. It took me way too long. Think that 6 months (about 27 hours) is not acceptable. ESRI is not for small business.

Do you think ArcGIS delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with ArcGIS's feature set?

Yes

Did ArcGIS live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of ArcGIS go as expected?

No

Would you buy ArcGIS again?

No

Spatial Analyst and 3D Analyst are very powerful and easy to use. I'm learning QGIS and it can make up to 90% of my needs. I think that this software is for big business; for smaller ones, I recommend taking QGIS and saving money to do complex analyses by a specialized company. In our case, it's more cash efficient.
Licensing methods are very complex and technical support is very slow. Dependent on technical support but it is hard to work with in low communication service territories.