Choosing a GIS software isn’t just another technology decision for your organization – it’s about how you’ll make your biggest calls, like investing in a new retail location before your competitor does, modeling a new transport route that will de-congest logistics, or foreseeing where the network demand would surge, and many more.
Pick the wrong one, and you risk being stuck with clunky maps, incomplete data, and missed opportunities. Pick the right one, and you’re turning location data into insights that guide million-dollar decisions and bring meaningful improvements to the lives of countless people.
The opportunities with geospatial software solutions are endless. Thus, in this blog, we will explore what makes a GIS mapping software great and how you can choose the best GIS software for your goals.
So let’s get started!
What is a GIS software?
A Geographic Information System (GIS) software is a tool that captures, processes, and visualizes geospatial data to unlock crucial insights for businesses, researchers, and policymakers. It works by combining data like satellite imagery and maps with attributes like weather, demographics, and more.
As a result, it reveals relationships, patterns, and trends that can inform decisions like planning new public transport corridors in growing cities, identifying underserved markets for retail expansion, mapping flood-prone zones for disaster preparedness, optimizing telecom tower placement to meet rising demand, and managing agricultural resources more efficiently.
What are some common applications of GIS software?
Geographic Information System (GIS) cannot be confined to just impacting a single industry. The use cases are endless, and decision-makers from across industries are using it for things like forecasting demand, optimizing retail locations, planning smarter cities, solving environmental challenges, and improving the quality of life for people.
GIS is the backbone of any technology that shapes decisions via geospatial or geographic data.
Here’s how it drives impact across key domains:
1. Urban and Infrastructure Planning
Perhaps Urban and Infrastructure planning is where GIS mapping software can have the most impact. Whether it’s about finding the right location for new housing projects or planning an infrastructure network to sustain the growing needs of the population, GIS can help urban planners tie development with the right policies, regulations, and the needs of tomorrow.
That’s not all, planners can also model scenarios to highlight risks and visualize long-term urban expansion impact to drive better urban and infrastructure outcomes, like:
- Preventing traffic bottlenecks by mapping how new developments will change commuting patterns
- Keeping utilities reliable by predicting where water and power demand will spike in the future
- Preserving green cover by predicting future expansion trends
- Reducing costly rework by ensuring new infrastructure doesn’t clash with existing infrastructure
2. Environmental Monitoring
It is only when we can monitor how our environment is changing over time that we can identify issues and trigger action plans to mitigate threats like water scarcity, deforestation, rising pollution, and extreme heat. With GIS, we can close that gap. Decision-makers can deploy GIS-based solutions to analyze satellite imagery, geo-sensor, and geospatial data to model responses that can:
- Assess deforestation and direct reforestation efforts to where they have the most impact
- Combat air pollution with informed, data-backed policies
- Mitigate water-body pollution by guiding wastewater treatment efforts and planning buffer zones to prevent contamination
- Identify environmental risk zones like floodplains or erosion-prone slopes before development approvals
3. Transportation and Road Mapping
The best GIS software brings the right insight-how traffic builds up along key corridors, what terrain makes network expansion difficult, and where demand surges repeatedly to help design transport infrastructure that’s safer, more efficient, and built to withstand long-term pressure.
Here’s how it brings clarity to complex transport decisions:
- Utilizing real-time and historical movement data to mark chokepoints
- Finding the most efficient and impactful routes to iteratively expand public transport
- Building safer roads by layering crash data, road network design, and infrastructure to find relationships and inform redesigns
- Planning new freight and transport corridors by overlaying land use data, population growth, and economic zones, ensuring future roads support how the city will actually grow
A GIS software like ArcGIS powers the transport networks of tomorrow.
4. Smart City Development
Smart cities are dynamic, living urban areas that constantly respond, adapt, and serve the population to offer an optimum quality of life. With GIS, you can analyze vast streams of telemetry data, IoT feeds, utility maps, and service records to get a 360-degree spatial view.
Think powering everything from energy-efficient lighting and predictive maintenance, to real-time traffic rerouting and smarter waste management.
Here’s exactly how the best GIS software can make urban spaces smarter with data:
- Waste collection scheduling based on real-time bin fill levels, route optimization, and neighborhood activity patterns
- Mapping consumption trends across sectors to distribute energy where it can have the most impact
- Monitoring sewers and drainage by combining sensor data with terrain modeling to detect leakages and prevent overflows
- Smart parking and traffic control by integrating live vehicle data, road usage, and demand hotspots to ease congestion
How to choose the right GIS software
Geographic Information System or GIS mapping software needs to be at the heart of every retail, urban planning, or infrastructure planning effort in India. The old ways, like relying on spreadsheets, siloed maps, and disconnected insights, can’t keep up with what it takes for a project to be successful in a developing country like India that’s constantly evolving.
Without GIS, Indian urban planners and policy makers would be forced to expand cities with dated maps, roll out infrastructure without a clear picture of terrain-led challenges, and retail businesses would fall back on guesswork to choose the right locations.
Thus, to ensure success, choosing any off-the-shelf platform won’t cut it. The key is to pick the right one, and that decision hinges on a few critical factors.
Here’s a complete guide on choosing the right GIS software:
1. Check for data compatibility
Any GIS software is only as good as the data it can work with. At the very least, your software should support:
- Vector data formats like Shapefile, GeoJSON, and GPKG
- Raster data like GeoTIFF, ECW, or MODIS inputs
- Real-time streams from GPS, weather sensors, national navigational systems like NAVIC, or traffic feeds
- Open standards: WMS/WFS for base maps and layers, STAC support if you work with remote sensing imagery
Don’t forget CRS support. If your GIS software chokes when switching between WGS 84 and a local Indian projection like UTM Zone 43N, that’s a red flag.
2. Look beyond 2D. Evaluate if it does 3D and 4D as well?
In the world of GIS software and analysis, 2D is table stakes. You need 3D analysis to find more granular answers.
For example, in cities like Bengaluru and Pune, 3D city models are being used to simulate future skylines, assess urban heat island effects, and plan infrastructure integration, especially around new metro lines and flyovers.
A good GIS software should let you:
- Visualize and analyze 3D urban models, including analyzing skylines, validating aviation obstacles, and more
- Work with 4D data for things like construction staging, flood modeling, or crop production changes over seasons
- Use Level of Detail settings to render complex structures without throttling performance
For environmental monitoring, urban planning, and policy consultants, 3D GIS software and 4D capabilities are essential.
3. It should work where you work – cloud, desktop, or mobile
Your GIS software should offer your teams the flexibility to run it on the cloud, as a desktop standalone program, or on a mobile device. It has to adapt to their working style:
- Mobile and web GIS software could be an option for field teams that are always on the move.
- Enables offline data collection in areas with weak or no connectivity (For example, rural or remote areas)
- Helps capture critical information on the go
- Syncs data back to the cloud when signal returns, no manual handoffs
- Decision-makers may need web GIS dashboards for real-time monitoring and reporting
- Cloud GIS tools power collaboration and scale, and on-demand compute
- For example, it’s used in Smart City projects (like Surat, Bhopal) to host live dashboards and real-time sensor layers
- Supports shared, version-controlled access to eliminate the chaos of emailing shapefiles back and forth
- Can easily crunch demanding geoprocessing data and large datasets like satellite streams or traffic feeds
- Desktop GIS software for teams that need to run deep analysis and models on their devices.
- Best for teams working on custom models, modeling terrains, or scoring site suitability
- Often used in infrastructure planning firms and government GIS cells
The best GIS platforms of today shouldn’t force your hand to choose between setups. Instead, they need to meet where your team is – so intelligence seamlessly flows across people and projects, informing and guiding big decisions.
4. Open-source or proprietary? Choose based on flexibility vs. support
It all depends on your preference. Both open source GIS software and proprietary software come with their advantages and disadvantages.
Open source GIS software is great if you have an in-house development team that can layer custom solutions on top of it. But if you are looking for an experience that’s ready to perform right out of the box, then proprietary solutions like ArcGIS give you the best enterprise-grade performance.
Here are some pros of proprietary software for you to consider:
- Plug and play experience: 2D/3D, real-time GIS, network/routing, dashboards, indoor maps, you get everything ready to go out of the box
- Managed cloud options (ArcGIS Online) or self-managed (ArcGIS Enterprise) with clear paths for security and access control
- Strong mobile GIS software with reliable offline sync
- Mature admin features like roles, content governance, and sharing rules. It’s like the tool is built for teams from the ground up.
Moreover, if you’re working in an industry where data security or compliance is an issue, choosing proprietary software is always going to make things easier.
5. Scalability for Enterprise and Government Use
As businesses and organizations grow, the expectations from a GIS platform can drastically change. The cost of transitioning to a new software mid-way can come with huge direct and indirect costs like re-training your team on a different tool, building backups and archives.
It is seemingly impossible to shift gears to a new tool while scaling up. Thus, scalability has to be something that’s built into the DNA of the software, so it’s ready to grow with you when you need it to.
Ensure that your GIS software:
- Can process and handle large-scale deployments that may include thousands of assets and an array of utility layers
- Can foster cross-functional collaboration while handling role-based access and cloud-native workflows
- Supports API integrations with ERP, MIS, and legacy government systems
- Prevents throttling or performance issues as datasets grow in complexity. It can support it via on-demand cloud compute protocols, distributed processing, or caching strategies.
- Ensures continuity during transitions, useful when vendor teams change, departments reorganize, or mandates shift
In high-stakes public sector projects, the best GIS software isn’t the one with the most features—it’s the one that stays dependable as the mission evolves.
Best Practices for GIS Tool Implementation
Choosing the right GIS software is only part of the solution. Making sure it works for your team and use case – that’s the tipping point where a lot of projects either get derailed or succeed.
Because it’s not just about plugging in a GIS tool, it’s about building processes and execution that lead to success.
Here’s what the best practices look like:
- Think about your objectives for implementing GIS . It could be mapping flood areas, planning a transportation network, or analyzing land use.
- Make sure you properly train your teams so they can realize the true potential of the software
- Work with data that’s clean, homogeneous, and up-to-date
- Every GIS software comes with a bit of a learning curve. Start with a limited use case and gradually move up to handling critical workflows to reduce errors
- As a best practice, only work with tools that support compliance and security by default
In the end, a successful GIS implementation is a mixture of planning, the right tools, people, and processes.
Final thoughts
As we discussed earlier, choosing the correct GIS software for your specific use case is a layered evaluation. One that needs to be aligned with the way your teams work and what exact features your organization needs as it grows.
However, as a best practice, pick a platform that can cater to local requirements like gathering regional data and working with local languages, especially when it comes to working in Indian environments.
So, carefully assess the needs of your teams, the scope of your projects, and technical requirements to fulfill them. ArcGIS is one such GIS mapping software that ticks all the boxes. Specially for projects that require analysis of environments unique to India.
FAQs
1. Do GIS tools support real-time data monitoring for infrastructure projects?
Yes, most of the GIS software available in the market can process inputs in real-time from sensors, satellites, IoT devices, and more to visualize data feeds as they come. Users can use this to monitor weather patterns, prevent and coordinate disaster response, manage traffic and infrastructure, and also monitor critical assets.
2. How do I choose a GIS software for my organization?
While choosing a GIS software, you can start by assessing the needs of your team, scoping the project requirements, and understanding the compliance and security requirements in the industry you work in. Once that’s done and you have narrowed down on a few solutions, look at the solutions that can be flexible with web, cloud, or desktop use, and which ones can scale the best as your organization grows.
3. What are the minimum system requirements for running a GIS software?
Minimum system requirements can vary steeply between different GIS software. Some run on cloud, demanding little to no compute requirements locally, some have minimal compute requirements and can run on mobile systems, and some can only work on a desktop. However, on average, it needs a minimum of 8GB RAM, 4GB of GPU memory, and any 64-bit operating system.
4. How does cloud-based GIS differ from desktop GIS?
Desktop GIS software runs on local desktop machines and is limited to the computing and processing capabilities of the system they are running on. But as cloud GIS mapping software runs on remote servers and can dynamically balance its bandwidth depending on the task, you can break past the computing limitations of a desktop setup whenever you need to. And with a cloud GIS like ArcGIS, you can also access your project, visualizations, and data anywhere from any device by just logging into your account.
5. Can a GIS software integrate with drone or satellite data?
A GIS (or Geographic Information System) software can easily integrate satellite or drone data and analyze it to drive outcomes like geo-mapping, environmental monitoring, and even urban planning.
6. Are GIS tools available with offline mobile data collection capabilities?
Yes, tools like ArcGIS come with offline mobile data collection capabilities. This allows you to collect geospatial data even in remote areas that have weak or no internet connectivity.
