QGIS icon
QGIS icon

QGIS

 111 likes

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

QGIS main window while editing a project

License model

  • FreeOpen Source

Application types

Country of Origin

  • CH flagSwitzerland

Platforms

  • Mac  Requires installation GDAL and GSL frameworks
  • Windows  Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Libraries required
  • Linux
  • Android
  • BSD
4 / 5 Avg rating (6)
111likes
6comments
0news articles

Features

Suggest and vote on features
  1. Microsoft 365 Copilot icon  Microsoft Office integration
  2.  Arc GIS
  3.  Multiplatform
  4.  Table manager
  5.  Ad-free
  6.  Works Offline
  7.  Route Planning
  8.  Community-based

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QGIS News & Activities

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Recent activities

  • Fadikkop and Imalthica liked QGIS
    29 days ago
  • Myrano updated QGIS
    about 1 month ago
  • App icon
    Myrano added QGIS as alternative to Magrit
    3 months ago
  • Pelltrip liked QGIS
    4 months ago
  • App icon
    POX added QGIS as alternative to GeoSpy
    5 months ago
  • fosam liked QGIS
    5 months ago
  • App icon
    tarun21 added QGIS as alternative to MAPOG
    6 months ago
  • fovij13688 liked QGIS
    11 months ago
  • mariusoho reviewed QGIS  
    11 months ago

    Its open-source, and a better alternative than the overpriced ESRI suite

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QGIS information

AlternativeTo Category

Travel & Location

GitHub repository

  •  11,306 Stars
  •  3,125 Forks
  •  4942 Open Issues
  •   Updated May 17, 2025 
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Popular alternatives

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Our users have written 6 comments and reviews about QGIS, and it has gotten 111 likes

QGIS was added to AlternativeTo by Ti on Nov 30, 2009 and this page was last updated Apr 19, 2025. QGIS is sometimes referred to as Quantum GIS.

Comments and Reviews

   
 Post comment/review
Top Positive Comment
caiocco
Apr 30, 2020
3

QGIS deserve a better review, so it goes:

Pros:

  • Very portable, as it is based on Qt toolkit
  • Very extendable, as it supports Python and has a bunch of plugins easily available trough a repository
  • Translated to many languages
  • The long term support releases (LTR) are (usually) stable and good for production usage
    • I've had specially good results with 2.4 (on Debian), 2.16 (on Windows) and 3.4 (on Windows and openSUSE)
    • Even unstable releases can be very usable for daily work, but I also got good results using 3.10 releases as well (on openSUSE and Fedora)
  • Integrates with the right versions of GRASS and SAGA
  • Has a handy processing toolbox panel

Cons:

  • When things break, things break badly: be careful when upgrading, if your version is working nicely and you want to upgrade it, plan accordingly so you won't lose (too much) time and money
  • Some translations not kept up with the development of the application
  • Once a while, plugins may break or don't work without giving a reason
  • Documentation can be a bit scarce in some situations
  • May crash with some incorrectly generated shapefiles, be sure to verify the topology and/or disable some checks before running geoprocessing algorithms

Overall, I like to use QGIS. I work for a urban planning firm and we do a lot of cartographic work using QGIS 3.8. QGIS can be used professionally and academically, for sure.

[Edited by caiocco, September 01]

mariusoho
Jun 20, 2024
0

Its open-source, and a better alternative than the overpriced ESRI suite

Samenaga
Mar 26, 2023
0

I like QGIS because it is free software licensed under the GPL.

Aerson Moreira
Aug 27, 2020
0

As a geoscientist this software was the best that showed up in the last decade. Only weak spot of it is the map editor, it still not so much optimized for complex purposes, IMO. In those cases, I rather export a .pdf of the raw data with the grids and do all the rest on Inkscape.

josalves
Oct 4, 2019
0

Do not use it a lot but is the GIS software I use most.. allways new features... 5 star for 2.8 version

YDoIAlwaysNeedAUsername
Mar 23, 2017
-9

You get what you pay for. Impossibly lousy by default, and through enormous efforts, and I do mean enormous, one may achieve modest results.

What is QGIS?

QGIS, formerly Quantum GIS, is a user friendly open source Geographic Information System (GIS) licensed under the GNU General Public License that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows and supports numerous vector, raster, and database formats and functionalities.

QGIS lets you browse, edit and create a variety of vector and raster formats, including ESRI shapefiles, spatial data in PostgreSQL/PostGIS, GRASS vectors and rasters, or GeoTiff. You can create customised plugins and GIS enabled applications using Python or C++. Maps can be compiled for printing using the print composer.

QGIS supports plugins to do things like import of delimited text data, download tracks, routes, and waypoints from your GPS or visualize OGC WMS and WFS layers.

Official Links