An Alternative to the Collector App
We have a customer who we have helped perform geospatial data collection projects for the past few years. Their business has grown substantially this spring and they will be very busy this summer. The past few years we have been helping them use ESRI’s Collector App and syncing their data with ArcGIS Online. They are at their maximum limit of named users with their ArcGIS Online account and with their new business they are looking at adding about 12 new named users. ESRI is now charging $500 per new named user per year. So, in addition to what the currently pay for their basic 10 named user accounts ESRI wants to charge them another $6,000 to add 12 new accounts. You can see how this gets expensive quickly.
To help our customer out we have been researching alternatives to the Collector App. We have been looking for Open Source software that is either inexpensive or free to satisfy our customer’s needs. In addition to cost, we are looking for more freedom in licensing options using Open Source Software. We have been using QGIS more frequently the last couple of years and we think we have found a possible Open Source software solution for our customer using QGIS as the backbone of their system.
We are doing field testing of the Input App paired with Mergin that will allow it to sync up with QGIS desktop to provide a map of the data collected through the Input App. We believe using this workflow we can create shapefiles we can then visualize on the web via our VerticalGeo web mapping portal that runs on GeoNode. That way we can provide them with an end to end Open Source Software solution that will be less expensive, more freely available, and customizable to their needs.
The process of collecting and displaying field geospatial data seems a bit more complicated using this process than using the Collector App and ArcGIS Online, but ESRI continues to find more ways to over charge their customers for software use and the licensing restrictions are getting more and more difficult for us to navigate around. Plus when you contact ESRI and ask them about how they charge for ArcGis Online and their credit system that users purchase no one at ESRI seems to be able to give us a good answer on how the credit system works. It seems like they are making up the charging process as they go along. It is too expensive and I am not sold on the ArcGIS Online product look and feel.
We are just getting started with GeoNode and are new at using the software. Here is an example we have done recently with displaying data on our web mapping portal. In this instance it was our surveying task at Greers Ferry lake, near Heber Springs, Arkansas. Please feel welcome to click on the map below. It will take you to the live map on our mapping portal where you can test drive GeoNode. We are still new at using GeoNode and hope to have a better selection of maps hosted on our portal in the near future.
