Comparison of ArcGIS and Manifold GIS
It is simply a titanic job that has made a Manifold user named tomasfa and has uploaded to the forum of that tool. It reminds me of that work by Arthur J. Lembo when he did a very systematic work of how to with ArcGIS and Manifold the same routine. More than the comparative sense, the number of actions separated by topic has caught my attention, which is a very educational document to make comparisons of GIS tools when making a decision.
The comparison is based on a matrix that separates the integration by routines of normal use, note, it is not based on the routines that Manifold does but those of arcGIS, then it is identified if they are done by ArcReader, ArcView, ArcEditor or ArcInfo. On the right is indicated whether or not Manifold GIS does.
The opinions of the forum are biased and somewhat sectarian, which is not surprising since it is a forum of a specific application and the same would happen if the forum were of the competition. It is also useful to understand some of the philosophy of the Manifold developers.
To this work I see at least these utilities:
- List routines for a GIS application
- List of areas to consider in a GIS application
- Compare what ArcReader does with ArcView, ArcEditor and ArcInfo
- Compare ArcGIS with Manifold
In the end, the document is not conclusive as it focuses on making the comparison that is supposed to serve for decision making. Of course, the one-to-one comparison is not that straightforward, especially since ArcGIS is based on a Basic tool and multiple Extensions or specialized versions oriented to different niches. While Manifold is a tool that tries to make the routines most used by GIS users, in a single tool (although has scalability) so many things that do ArcGIS extensions do not include them but in many of those things ArcGIS exceeds what it does with all its extensions and above all at a price very low.
Here I leave the list that I think is great, only the headers are because each of those routines includes more than 1,100 tasks and not lose the original sense I leave in English.
Map Interaction
map display
Data Editing
Raster Editing and Vectorization
Mobile - GPS Integration
Multiuser Geodatabase Editing
Multiuser Geodatabase Archiving
Distributed Geodatabases
Spatial Referencing Image Data (Georeferencing)
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Data management
Attribute Validation
Topologies
Networks
Linear Referencing (Routes)
Metadata
Coverage Geoprocessing
Geoprocessing
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Although the work is being completed collaboratively by the users of the forum, here you can download the full file