[Qgis-user] QGIS vs ArcGIS in Education and Practice

[Jochen Albrecht]

It really depends on who your audience is, Markus.
In general, the advice that you got is (still) true but:
I am not aware of any GIS program from small consultancies to large
multi-hundred seats enterprise systems that don't now also use QGIS.
I have put this question to employers as part of a graduate class, where in
the course of 15 weeks, we visited a range of GIS employers once a week.
Without exception, they told me that we would be remiss if we skipped
ArcGIS completely. But they also, unanimously (public, private, and
non-profit) were adamant that if we don't teach our students open source
software that we would be doing our students a disservice.
So, if this is only one course, and if the audience is in wealthy
countries, then the answer is ArcGIS. If your audience is people who cannot
afford commercial licenses or organizations that are just starting to get
into the GIS business, then the answer would be QGIS. If you are offering
more than one course, then I would recommend to teach both.
Cheers,
       Jochen

Dr. Jochen Albrecht
Computational and Theoretical Geography
Hunter College CUNY
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065

On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 2:07 PM, Markus Weidenbach <landconsult at freenet.de>
wrote:

> Dear List,
>
> I was asked to give a 5 days international GIS training course at the
> university and proposed to do it with QGIS. The program leader finally
> insisted on doing it with ArcGIS arguing  that the students had better
> chances to find a job knowing ArcGIS rather than QGIS. This argumentation
> does not reflect my long professional experience as a GIS consultant at all!
> But how can I proof that knowing QGIS is the better choice for young GIS
> professionals than ArcGIS (or at least that both systems are equally
> suited)?
> Does anybody know any official numbers of GIS users worldwide or on the
> worldwide application of QGIS over ArcGIS?
>
> I know the Master thesis from Boku Vienna (https://geoobserver.
> wordpress.com/2016/02/09/arcgis-vs-qgis/) but it is focused on a
> technical comparison of both systems only.
> Also the link https://www.g2crowd.com/grid_report/documents/gis-winter-
> 2016-report is not really helpful because it is based on some 40 reviews
> only and therefore not representative.
> I really need to know some proven facts on the number of global QGIS users
> and renown companies using QGIS worldwide.
>
> Thanks for your help in advance,
> Markus
>
> --
> Dr. Markus Weidenbach
> *landConsult.de*
> Geographical Information Management
> and Environmental Planning
> D-77815 Bühl
> Germany
> e.mail see: http://landConsult.de
>
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