QGIS is our workhorse for political mapping.
May 24, 2019
QGIS is our workhorse for political mapping.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QGIS
We use QGIS to visualize US election data sets. We are focused on Florida, and Congressional District 17. We publish maps of registered voter demographic data such as age groups, race, gender, and turnout. We also use QGIS for strategic mapping of voter precincts to better target volunteers and canvassing. The majority of our maps are proprietary.
- Compatibility with ArcGIS allows us to easily use shapefiles published by local municipalities.
- QGIS has a wealth of plugins for data and shape manipulation.
- We found the Leaflet export particularly nice to accelerate the development of our live web maps.
- Compatibility with OpenStreetMap is a great benefit.
- Editing joined datasets is quirky.
- Direct connections to SQL are tough. We needed to export the data to Excel for shapefile joins.
- The print layout is difficult. It's hard to control data marker placement.
- Open source and free software meant we could produce billable work right away without any financial investment.
- Online tutorials were available, and it only took us about a week to be competent enough to produce billable work.
- QGIS opened a new line of business to us that would not be available otherwise. We did not have enough potential work to consider using the competitors.
We explored ArcGIS a bit and realized that we couldn't afford this approach. We fully realize it's a more complete product offering, but QGIS offered all the needed features for our business requirements. We were able to do online mapping using QGIS exports and Mapbox.com for much cheaper than using ESRI.