OrbGIS vs ArcGIS Online, an honest comparison for European organizations

ArcGIS Online is the default web GIS for a reason. It is mature, it is everywhere, and most GIS specialists in Sweden and the rest of Europe learned the trade on Esri software. It is also sold on a model, user types plus credits, annual terms through a distributor, that a growing number of organizations find hard to budget for and harder to explain. And it is hosted by a US company on US hyperscaler infrastructure, which has gone from a footnote to a procurement question.

OrbGIS is a web GIS built in Sweden for the everyday work most organizations actually use ArcGIS Online for: hosted layers, web maps, dashboards, surveys and story maps. This is our comparison of the two. We build OrbGIS, so read it with that in mind, but we have tried to keep every statement about ArcGIS Online to how Esri describes and sells it, and we have written down where it is still the better choice.

Who this comparison is for#

If your organization uses ArcGIS Online to host layers, publish web maps, build a few dashboards, run surveys and tell stories with maps, and pays for it once a year with a mixture of user types and credit top-ups, this comparison is for you. That describes a lot of municipalities, agencies, consultancies and research groups.

If your work leans on ArcGIS Pro for heavy analysis, on 3D scenes, on Field Maps and Workforce in the field, or on integrations with other Esri products, OrbGIS is not a drop-in replacement today. We say more about that in where ArcGIS Online is still ahead.

The short version#

Pricing: a flat rate versus user types and credits#

ArcGIS Online is licensed per named user, and every named user has a user type. Esri currently sells six of them, from Viewer at the bottom to Professional Plus at the top, and each one grants a set of capabilities and an annual allowance of credits. Credits are the second currency. They are consumed by storing feature data, running analysis, geocoding, routing and using premium content, and when the allowance runs out you buy more in blocks. The result is a bill made of two moving parts, one of which you cannot fully predict at the start of the year.

OrbGIS has two numbers and both are fixed:

• Storage: 1 000 kr per year for every 5 GB you keep.
• Users: 8 000 kr per year for every person who builds and edits.

Viewers are free and unlimited, whether they sign in or not. There are no credits, no license tiers and nothing to top up. A team of three editors with 20 GB of data pays 28 000 kr a year, and that is the whole invoice. If you want guaranteed service levels, a service agreement with a 99.9 % uptime SLA, priority support and a named technical owner is a flat 95 000 kr per year, and contractual Swedish data residency is an add-on at 20 000 kr per year. Without the service agreement the subscription runs month to month and you can cancel whenever you like. The pricing calculator on the start page shows the sum for your own numbers.

Where your data lives, and whose law applies#

ArcGIS Online is a service Esri runs on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Esri offers regional hosting, so your content can sit in a European data center, but the provider is a US company, and the US CLOUD Act lets American authorities compel US providers to hand over data they control regardless of where it is stored. For a municipal GIS, which describes water mains, the power grid, schools and social services in detail, that is not an abstract concern. We have written about the legal and strategic side of this in Your maps know too much.

OrbGIS AB is a Swedish company, and OrbGIS runs on European cloud providers within the EU. If your organization needs Swedish data residency written into the contract, it is an add-on, not a special project. Our standard Data Processing Agreement, the security measures and what they mean for a municipality are covered in Cloud and geodata security for municipalities.

The apps, side by side#

Most of what a team publishes from ArcGIS Online has a direct counterpart in OrbGIS. All of the OrbGIS apps work from the same layers in the same portal, with one sharing model.

Two things are worth calling out. Web Maps in OrbGIS stream every layer as vector tiles with level-of-detail pyramids built at upload, so a dense countrywide dataset renders smoothly instead of timing out. And you work in your own coordinate system: SWEREF 99 TM and the other Swedish, Nordic and European projections are supported for display, not only Web Mercator. The full list is in the coordinate systems reference.

Desktop GIS: a QGIS plugin instead of ArcGIS Pro#

Esri's desktop is ArcGIS Pro, and access to it is part of the higher user types. OrbGIS does not ship a desktop of its own. Instead, the free OrbGIS Connector plugin puts your whole portal inside QGIS: browse folders, load layers into a project, edit features and upload new data from your computer. QGIS is free, open source and the most widely used desktop GIS in the world, and many organizations already run it beside ArcGIS Pro. If your analysts prefer to keep ArcGIS Pro for analysis, they can: OrbGIS reads and writes open formats, so the results of a Pro workflow are one upload away from the portal.

Where ArcGIS Online is still ahead#

We would rather you find this out here than after a migration.

• Breadth. Esri's platform is far larger: Field Maps, Experience Builder, Insights, Hub, Workforce, 3D scenes, imagery, network analysis. OrbGIS covers the core publishing workflow and a QGIS integration, not the whole catalog.
• Analysis in the browser. ArcGIS Online runs spatial analysis tools on hosted layers (for credits). OrbGIS is built around visualization, sharing and data collection; analysis happens in QGIS or your database.
• Ready-made content. The Living Atlas and Esri's basemap gallery are extensive. OrbGIS ships a smaller set of basemaps and lets you add your own.
• Ecosystem. Consultancies, integrators and training courses for ArcGIS exist in every Swedish city. OrbGIS support comes from the developers themselves, which is faster but smaller.

If those are the parts of ArcGIS Online your organization depends on, keep them. Many teams end up with both: OrbGIS for the everyday publishing and sharing, Esri for the specialist work.

Moving from ArcGIS Online to OrbGIS in five steps#

1. Take inventory. List the hosted layers, maps and apps people actually open. Most organizations find that a small share of their content carries almost all the use.
2. Export your layers. From each item page in ArcGIS Online, export the hosted feature layer as a File Geodatabase, shapefile or GeoJSON. You own the data, and the export is yours to keep.
3. Convert if you need to. Shapefile, GeoJSON, GeoPackage, GeoParquet, KML and CSV upload straight into OrbGIS. A File Geodatabase goes through our free Esri converter first, which turns it into GeoPackage and writes a report of exactly what was carried over.
4. Upload. Drop the files into the portal. OrbGIS reads the coordinate system from the file, indexes and tiles the layer automatically, and multi-gigabyte datasets are welcome. See uploading data.
5. Rebuild and publish. Recreate the maps and apps that made the list in step one, set the sharing, and publish. Connect QGIS through the plugin for editing from then on.

Do it during the trial, with ArcGIS Online still running, and switch over when your users prefer the new version.

Common questions#

Can we run both for a while? Yes. Nothing in OrbGIS asks you to cancel anything else, and the trial does not need a card.

Do we have to convert shapefiles? No. Shapefiles upload directly. The converter is for File Geodatabases and the other Esri-only formats.

What about our ArcGIS Pro projects? Keep using them. Export the layers you want to share in an open format and upload; the QGIS plugin is there when you want live editing against the portal.

Is our data locked in if we leave OrbGIS? No. Export is free and in open formats, and if you would rather keep published apps live after cancelling, you can pay only the storage cost to do so.

Try it on your own data#

Create your organization at app.orbgis.se and upload the layers you exported. If you would rather talk it through first, book a meeting or write to info@orbgis.se.

OrbGIS is not affiliated with Esri. "Esri", "ArcGIS", "ArcGIS Online", "ArcGIS Pro", "Survey123", "StoryMaps" and the other product names are Esri trademarks, used here only to describe compatibility and to compare offerings. Descriptions of ArcGIS Online reflect Esri's public product and pricing information as of September 2026.