GeoSprocket Live Survey on GIS Tools

The first round of results of a recent GIS user poll from GeoSprocket, asking about GIS tool used and frequency of use, are available:

Bill Morris surveyed GIS users via several feeds including a Vermont GIS listserv, ESRI and O'Reilly conference hashtags and the author's social media accounts. An interesting survey, but difficult to get a good read on who the sample represents. Not knowing how many people follow a specific Twitter hashtag, it is difficult to measure how many of the respondents might have found the survey via the ESRI versus the O'Reilly hashtag.

With those caveats, let's look at the numbers.

In the first release, 55% of the respondents are primary ESRI users, 24% use open source GIS tools, 16% are Google Map users and 8% use some other tool, including FME, MicroStation, ENVI/IDL, GIS Cloud, AutoDesk, Maptitude, Idrisi, Mapserver, Geocortex and others. Bill noted surprise at how many Google users there are. Frankly, I would have thought there would be more, but perhaps Bill's social network skews toward ESRI or that more people follow the ESRI hashtag than the O'Reilly one.

Overlap in product use is what I find most interesting about this survey.  It seems a larger proportion of people who use non-ESRI tools like Google Maps or open source products also use ESRI tools (80% versus 40%). However, 75% of ESRI users also use Google Maps. This  indicates that there is value for a lot of people in using a mixed approach.

The second round of Bill's survey remains open and live results indicate that there are indeed more Google users than the first round suggested. As of today, ESRI users remain the majority with 48% of users versus 30% Google Maps. The other categories are relatively the same.

It will be interesting to see how these numbers change as more people enter the survey.

It would also be more interesting and indeed useful to see why certain tools are used over others as opposed to simply which tools were used. Clearly with up to 80% overlap of use there must be reasons why certain tools are chosen for certain tasks. Hopefully, Bill will add that question in a subsequent survey.