A fully featured, user friendly, open source Geographic Information System (GIS) with similar power to ArcGIS and MapInfo.




The best open source alternative to ArcGIS is QGIS. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to ArcGIS and 15 is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to ArcGIS are R (programming language), GRASS GIS, Placemark and SAGA GIS.
A fully featured, user friendly, open source Geographic Information System (GIS) with similar power to ArcGIS and MapInfo.




R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be consider.



GRASS GIS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is an open source, free software (FOSS) Geographical Information System (GIS) with raster, topological, vector, image processing, and visualization functionality.


The Placemark application. This is a web application that lets you import, create, export, visualize, and publish geospatial data. It supports many geospatial data formats, and many editing operations, both algorithmic, like buffering, and drawing-based.

SAGA - System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses - is a Geographic Information System (GIS) software with immense capabilities for geodata processing and analysis. SAGA is programmed in the object oriented C++ language and supports the implementation of new functions with a...


MapServer is an Open Source platform for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping applications to the web. Originally developed in the mid-1990’s at the University of Minnesota, MapServer is released under an MIT-style license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows...
PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS), much like ESRIs SDE...

OpenLayers is a high-performance, feature-packed library for all your mapping needs.



OpenJUMP is an open source Geographic Information System (GIS) written in the Java programming language. It is developed and maintained by a group of volunteers from around the globe.



uDig is a GIS software program produced by a community led by Canadian-based consulting company Refractions Research. It is based on the Eclipse platform and features full layered open source GIS. It is written in Java and released under GNU Lesser General Public License.


MapWindow is a fully free and open source geographic information system project. It includes an open source programming component, MapWinGIS ActiveX, and an extensible desktop application that supports plug-ins written in .NET (C# and VB.NET).

QGIS can read geodatabases. The software is frequently updated and print composer is very good alternative to ArcGIS for map layouts.