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What are the relative market shares of the various desktop GISes? I'm interested in this within the open-source and non-opensource realm.

One article that I read, is that the market share of ESRI is estimated to be approximately 30% of the global GIS market in 2009 (Daratech, 2011 - dead link unfortunately) but that they have a much higher perceived 'mind-share' (Batty).

I started thinking about this as I wondered which was the most popular open-source GIS program, and assumed it was QGIS but I'm finding it hard to locate any numbers.

To clarify (in response to a comment), I am interested in GIS Desktop tools that allow quantitative analysis (which would exclude Google Earth).

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ESRI is a privately owned company, so they don't release sales numbers. You would need numbers for sales and maintenance contracts. – mhoran_psprep Mar 16 '12 at 23:39
on statistics software more generally: blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/01/… and blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/02/… – Michael Bishop Mar 17 '12 at 0:32
Do you consider Google Earth a Desktop GIS? – johanvdw Mar 18 '12 at 19:38
I wasn't when I wrote the question. I'll edit to be clear that I am referring to desktop gis software that enables quantitative analysis. – djq Mar 18 '12 at 19:50

3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Unfortunately it's impossible to say how many people use QGIS.

Tim Sutton regularly creates download stats for Windows stand-alone downloads:

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Last December, Gary Sherman followed a different approach and counted the number of unique IP addresses accessing the plugin repository and found:

35,603 unique IP addresses of users that accessed the repository between October 23, 2011 and December 17, 2011

In the end, he summarizes:

Considering the number of points that represent an organization and those that represent a country location, I think we can safely assume that the number of QGIS users easily exceeds 100,000 worldwide.

If we are talking about "market share" as % of GIS users using a certain GIS, we would need to know the approx. number of global GIS users.

If we mean "market share" in $ we would further have to put a price tag on QGIS. That's another difficult issue.

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up vote 1 down vote

The market share of ESRI far exceeds any other desktop software simply for the fact that almost all actual product creation is done by state agencies, which are overwhelmingly ESRI.

If you include consumption users then you can start to include QGIS but it is still safe to say that a huge majority of consumption users do not use a desktop tool, but they consume using mostly ESRI online interfaces. I am excluding consumer grade products and users in this napkin math.

Even if ESRI's ArcGIS is not the primary desktop application it combined with their ArcGIS Server UI would likely make up a majority.

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up vote 1 down vote

Supermap, a Chinese competitor, holds a relatively high percentage of GIS market share worldwide.

It competes with and actually beat ESRI in Chinese market last year.

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Do you have any sources for this? – underdark♦ Mar 18 '12 at 21:11
I have the information from International Sales team of Supermap, however I am not sure if I can share the exact shares. – Anıl Çelik Mar 22 '12 at 7:40

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