QGIS

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]