When should you use ArcGIS Online?
ArcGIS Online is a tool with powerful features and unique advantages, but it’s not the only choice for doing work with digital maps or working on web-based projects. Before you get started, consider whether ArcGIS Online is the best choice for your project, or if you might be better served by an alternative.
In short, ArcGIS Online is a good choice when you want to:
- Collaborate on digital projects that use small to medium-sized datasets.
- Create interactive web maps or dashboards (with the option of displaying them publicly on the web).
- Collect or edit data online (for example, creating a data collection survey and then working with the results).
…with the understanding that you should not depend on the ArcGIS Online platform being a permanent home for the project.
Consider using ArcGIS Pro or QGIS instead if:
- You're working with large or complex datasets.
- You don't need to share your work online.
- You're performing complex analysis.
- You're still cleaning or preprocessing your data (content can be uploaded to ArcGIS Online later).
Desktop GIS software (ArcGIS Pro or QGIS) gives you more control, and (with the exception of some ArcGIS Pro workflows that employ server-side resources from Esri) doesn’t consume ArcGIS Online storage or credits.
MDL has some introductory tutorials available here:
• ArcGIS Pro (created by Esri, Windows-only, accessible through university license)
• QGIS (Free, works on Mac, Windows, or Linux)
Geospatial coding in Python or R
Geospatial analysis and visualization packages are available for many popular programming languages, such as Python or R. If you have coding experience, or would like to learn, you can carry out many GIS workflows this way.
The Map and Data Library offers some introductory tutorials on these topics here:
• Geospatial Analysis with Python & Jupyter Notebooks
Other options for web-based projects
If you’d like to work in ArcGIS Online but want to keep your content after leaving the university, the free version of ArcGIS Online (called a ‘public account’) is not tied to an institutional subscription and may meet your needs. It’s also often possible to work in UofT’s ArcGIS Online and transfer your content to a free account later.
As an alternative to ArcGIS Online, effective web-based digital mapping projects can be created with free web-based tools such as Flourish or StoryMapJS.
If you have web development skills (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), or would like to learn them, you could deploy your own custom digital projects, including web maps, to a free web hosting platform such as GitHub Pages. For a beginner-friendly example of this, please see MDL’s Open source web map creation with qgis2web and GitHub Pages tutorial.
Get in contact with the Map and Data Library if you’d like help in choosing the right tool for your project, or assistance in getting started with any of these options.
If you are using ArcGIS Online, the following pages contain guidance on how to manage your data effectively.