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A free-to-use Spatial Analysis Tool you should give a shot!
November 11, 2019

A free-to-use Spatial Analysis Tool you should give a shot!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with QGIS

QGIS is the go-to tool for us to work with the spatial files. It is being used to create and modify shapefiles, generate spatial data, and create maps. We have been using it to add or remove layers in the shapefiles and extract data to and from SQL Server.
  • A major strength of QGIS is that it has a very simple and effective GUI making it easy to work with.
  • It has numerous plugins covering a huge number of functionalities spanning across multiple systems.
  • It is seamless to connect with databases and export and import spatial data to and from.
  • Some of the even simpler tasks need a bit of digging around to find the proper procedure to perform them.
  • There are some quirks in making the OGR work. You need to search and find the best appropriate version if you wish to work with OGR as some of the latest versions don't work too well.
  • I guess the version updates need a bit more work as sometimes it doesn't link with the shapefiles and if you try to open the shapefiles directly you get an error message.
  • As it is a free software, I could say that the ROI has been positive throughout.
  • Though, sometimes the time required to learn or find a way through solving a business problem using QGIS is a cost we have to pay.
Frankly, QGIS is an inferior tool as compared to ArcGIS as ArcGIS is a market leader in spatial data analysis, offers a family of GIS Suite catering to different needs, has a huge repository of training exercises and tutorials, an organized catalog of data if you need further help and a dedicated support team. But, QGIS has a major advantage that is it is free and that's why we chose it.
Even though there is a no dedicated support team for QGIS (or at least we are not aware of it), there is a huge online community and a large number of forums catering to every question you may have regarding any particular functionality of QGIS. So, you have a lot of help available but you will have to sift through it on the web.

Do you think QGIS delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with QGIS's feature set?

Yes

Did QGIS live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of QGIS go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy QGIS again?

Yes

QGIS is very well suited for simpler operations like editing, modifying shapefiles, labeling and coloring it, changing projections. But if you want to export or import data to and from SQL databases, you need to OGR and that's a bit of a hit and miss because of the version incompatibility and whatnot.