Web GIS options

Question

Currently use QGISCloud Pro and looking at alternative options to this.

We are wanting maps to be hosted on the Web to allow users with specific access rights to access them.

We have already looked into ESRI.

Answer 1

Other commercial options would be

• Mapbox
• Carto (formally CartoDB)
• mapTiler
• MangoMap The above would probably be considerably cheaper than an ESRI solution (depending upon your location, but given you are mh_Perth, im guessing you also live in Perth!) and obviously usage/requirements. An ESRI hosted online maps solution would also lead to moving to an ESRI Desktop solution as the two work really well together, which im assuming you are currently using QGIS, so take that into account. QGIS > ArcGIS Online has its limitations.

From an open source perspective, this article here below was quite good and relatively current. Albeit written in context of migrating from Mapbox GL, so the solutions listed below are basically open source libraries (ie: They may not offer a hosting solution, you would provide that yourself).

https://www.geoapify.com/mapbox-gl-new-license-and-6-free-alternatives

• Openlayers
• Leaflet
• MAPLIBRE GL
• HARP.GL
• TANGRAM GL
• CESIUM JS

Maptiler is open source (but not free?) and OpenmapTiles offer hosting solutions and are open source.

Answer 2

Take a look at the UMN Mapserver, which was very popular for WebGIS Projects in the 2000s, but it is still around as free software. It has a PHP 7 API which you can combine with the rich set of tools for user-management, authentication and authorization that several PHP frameworks provide, e.g. Symfony

Answer 3

You can try GeoServer which is a free and open source Java Web Map Server (WMS) that you can host yourself or in the cloud. There are also several companies that provide commercial support for it (disclaimer, I work for one of them).