I am seeking examples of gov. organizations using QGIS/PostGIS.

jayt · October 29, 2025, 3:24am

I am looking for any and all examples I can find of government organizations (local, state, federal) that use open source platforms for operations or projects. I’m interested in other organizations too that work with QGIS, PostgreSQL, PostGIS if anything other than gov organizations comes to mind.

I work at a district health department, Environmental Health Section, and have been developing GIS for our department using QGIS and PostGIS. I currently have a robust QGIS project with which to collect GNSS data for our “site features” GeoPackage which includes all site features and attributes for site plans and permitting.

This QGIS project is ready to deploy as soon as it’s approved to purchase GNSS receivers. The PostGIS dev is a work in progress. The PostGIS I’m working on has a consistent schema to our existing DB for interoperability.

The site_features.gpkg used with my QGIS project is already developed with normalization dropdowns, constraints, uuid, timestamps, relations, photo and file fields, site plan templates, dynamic attribute forms etc. I’ve been using it in the field collecting data and it works great.

However, when it came to budget meetings recently, leadership is expressing hesitation in moving forward with an open source platform. “You get what you pay for.” “Commercial software (ESRI) has support that you don’t have with open source.”(We do). “Every other county health department is using ESRI and there are none using QGIS.”

So I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon that I have been preparing for in which leadership expects me to compare the 2 pathways forward. They want me to provide examples of other organizations using open source platforms…among other things.

jcarlson · October 29, 2025, 11:50am

Representing Kendall County, Illinois here.

We use QGIS and PostGIS (and OpenStreetMap!) for everything we can. Admittedly, we do also have Esri for some things, bug we are actively working on replacing those dependencies as we go. Your project sounds a bit more complex than anything we’ve done in Q.

Not sure what else to say, but we don’t regret embracing open source at all. Every project we get moved to QGIS / PostGIS is a success.

You might come back at leadership with some other points:

Esri’s license costs will go up, it’s only a question of how much.
Licensing is all done through user accounts now, so you either have to use ArcGIS Online, or you have to run your own ArcGIS Enterprise. Someone will have to be in charge of adjusting sharing settings, groups, allocating licenses, etc. That’s not a small task, and depending on the size of the org, represents a large cost of staff time.
If you use AGOL, you’ve got a major external dependency over which you have no control. It has had problems in the past, all likelihood will again. Also, AGOL runs on AWS, so if there are qualms there, it’s worth knowing about. That AWS outage recently? That would have affected your AGOL account and anything depending on it.
If you ran Enterprise, you’ll need a much beefier machine than simply running PostGIS, so there’s additional infrastructure costs on top of licensing.
Did you read about the ArcGIS Enterprise vulnerability recently? Trusting that someone else is doing their due diligence when it’s closed source is risky. With FOSS options, you can get the eyes of the entire community on these things, and identify and address vulnerabilities much sooner.
Your org will probably be pressured to sign on to an Enterprise License Agreement. They’ll use their own made up prices to show how it’s a “great value”, and they’ll put it in terms that leadership like. They may even go over your head directly to leadership, and cut the GIS folks out of the decision making. The org may have the bulk licensing bundle, but it will be paying 3 to 4 times as much annually for it. I don’t know how they manage it, but it seems like every org gets roped into an ELA.
Esri support is terrible. I’ve never had them solve my problem, only waste my time.

dnewcomb · October 29, 2025, 1:38pm

Jay,
At least as of 2022, the State of North Carolina Board of Elections was using QGIS/PostGIS https://it.nc.gov/documents/gicc/gicc-elections20220223pdf/open This was also referenced by the State of North Carolina GICC Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) 's overview of GIS software and comparison of functionality between QGIS, ArcGIS , and GRASS GIS , https://it.nc.gov/open-gis-software-guide-understanding-current-gis-software-solutions/download?attachment QGIS and GRASS have gotten much better since then ( 2017).

Census Bureau GUPS https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/bas/technical-documentation/gups-instructions.html , which was just a customized version of QGIS provided nationwide for municipalities who could not afford ESRI software to digitize their updated boundaries for submission to the Census. They were moving to a web-based system, https://youtu.be/2OuVNNoeahY?list=PLXButqX2YO4JNhYweleaZBcwjFvDgqcpC , but who knows where that is now.

A presentation by a land manager in a town in a remote area of Canada from FOSS4GNA 2023 on why they chose QGIS , https://youtu.be/QwwQ-IWLmcQ?list=PLXButqX2YO4IVFL6fZ498DL0gY5z4hU6P .

Sure, it’s easy to set up AGOL, but start down the road of actually quantitatively using the data to answer questions and things get more complicated and more expensive quickly. If your supervisors are saying you need support, you need to quantify what they mean by support.

If your supervisors are thinking of live phone call hand holding support where a software fix can be done and delivered in 24 hours or live fixing of the software while you are on the phone, that is probably a higher level of support than is in the price quoted by ESRI for a basic license. It’s also not possible the way ESRI ( or any commercial vendor) rolls out patches. Be specific about what level of support you get for the price quoted.

If web maps are required, Felt, https://felt.com/ , and GeoCat, https://geocat.github.io/qgis-bridge-plugin/v4.1/index.html are commercial vendors that can publish your maps directly to the web from QGIS . Compare pricing and functionality. At least Felt lets you try it for free first.

I hope this helps,

Doug

On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 11:29 PM Jay via OSGeo Discourse <noreply@discourse.osgeo.org> wrote:

jayt
October 29

I am looking for any and all examples I can find of government organizations (local, state, federal) that use open source platforms for operations or projects. I’m interested in other organizations too that work with QGIS, PostgreSQL, PostGIS if anything other than gov organizations comes to mind.

I work at a district health department, Environmental Health Section, and have been developing GIS for our department using QGIS and PostGIS. I currently have a robust QGIS project with which to collect GNSS data for our “site features” GeoPackage which includes all site features and attributes for site plans and permitting.

This QGIS project is ready to deploy as soon as it’s approved to purchase GNSS receivers. The PostGIS dev is a work in progress. The PostGIS I’m working on has a consistent schema to our existing DB for interoperability.

The site_features.gpkg used with my QGIS project is already developed with normalization dropdowns, constraints, uuid, timestamps, relations, photo and file fields, site plan templates, dynamic attribute forms etc. I’ve been using it in the field collecting data and it works great.

However, when it came to budget meetings recently, leadership is expressing hesitation in moving forward with an open source platform. “You get what you pay for.” “Commercial software (ESRI) has support that you don’t have with open source.”(We do). “Every other county health department is using ESRI and there are none using QGIS.”

So I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon that I have been preparing for in which leadership expects me to compare the 2 pathways forward. They want me to provide examples of other organizations using open source platforms…among other things.

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jayt · October 29, 2025, 8:02pm

I appreciate your reply. I just got out of the meeting with a green light to proceed. I included Kendall county in my meeting among many others. You make good points and I agree. There was a lot that I had put together that we didn’t even go over. We made the points we were trying to make without delving too deep in all the supporting info I had prepared. Demonstrating what’s been developed to date with the functionality and ease of use helped to alleviate concerns that this platform would be “clunky and frustrating for staff to use”. Thanks for your input.

~Jay