Maptitude Reviews 79

I have been a Caliper user since it came on Diskettes. I was originally a Transcad user but transitioned to Maptitude in 2013. What an excellent package. It does everything that anyone could want in a GIS, and Caliper keeps adding new datasets and updated data on a regular basis. Plus, it is amazingly inexpensive realtive to its competitors.

As a GIS programmer and consultant I have used Maptitude for 22 years for hundreds of projects having switched from ESRI and a few other GIS products.. Maptitude has become a super-stable, powerful, easy to use, highly productive GIS. The speed at which it can manipulate data and display and label maps is amazing. It makes beautiful, colorful, well-labeled maps and if you really want to customize and automate your app you can use the built in GISDK language which has wonderful development and debugging tools. Their support is great also!

I've been using Maptitude for over a decade in land use, transportation planning, and market research work. Over the years, I've also tried other GIS tools and have to say that I found nothing that comes close to the combination of ease of use, richness of features, and quick application to the task at hand that I have with Maptitude. It is a very well thought out tool with great tech support that will go the extra mile to meet your needs.

Great product. Great value. Wish there were open source maps, but overall it is a great alternative to ArcGIS and other Saas products. I am still trying to figure out how to do useful heat maps, but overall a great product.

Maptitude is simple to use and inexpensive, but is powerful and packed with valuable data. I've used it for over 15 years and love it!

Able Medico provides medical licencing services to healthcare organisations in Australia. Much of our work involves determining new locations for practices or multi-million dollar equipment. Submissions to healthcare authorities using Maptitude have improved our application professionalism enormously, to the extent we have been complimented for making the decision making process easier.

At times we have needed to ask "how do we?" questions of Maptitude. Their response has been fast, polite, professional, comprehensive and completely resolved our query.

We highly recommend the Maptitude product and the Caliper team. They are simply excellent.

I moved to Maptitude from Mappoint in 2016. Maptitude is a far better and more flexible product, although it takes a little while to learn. That is where their learning and technical support comes in handy. They have great 'how-to' videos and webinars and they will quickly answer support questions. I've never had a question that wasn't answered by end of day or following AM. I particularly like their territory manager ... its intuitive and accommodates lots of options. I highly recommend.

In 1995, while working at Miami Children’s Hospital, I saw a review of GIS mapping software companies in a professional journal. Maptitude was a brand new GIS offering from Caliper Corp., which had been in the GIS business since the early 1980s. High marks were given to Maptitude for quality, affordability and ease of use. I was very excited at the prospect of being able to make custom maps of my hospital patient data quickly and with great flexibility. Maptitude exceeded my expectations in both the product and the variety of customer support offered.
With each new update, Maptitude has gotten more powerful over the years yet has maintained its affordability and ease of use. Maptitude was indispensable throughout my health/hospital planning career on a variety of 'decision support' projects. I am now retired from my hospital planning career, but I am still using Maptitude to teach my young grandson about the world.

I have used Maptitude since it first came out in Beta. At the time no other GIS program coiuld handle the environmental justice/toxic mapping that I was doing. I used Maptitude and GISDK to create the very first nationwide toxic mapping for EDF. Maptitude still is the most powerful, easy to use and cost effective solution out there. I highly recommend.

Maptitude strength is it's flexibility to combined multiple layers of information into an easy to presentable format. The tool we built to evaluate market viability has been useful in all phases of evaluation. First pass getting overall market demographics is quick, second loading our own competitor data base to see competitive landscape is a quick three step process. And finally, once real estate has locations to check out, importing those locations along with a city's public transportation routes makes on the on-site evaluation that much more efficient.
Truly a quality product that has excellent support and training.

I have been a user of Maptitude for many years and have watched the product evolve into one of (if not) the most robust and cost-effective GIS software programs in the marketplace. Providing flexible desktop software, the Caliper team behind Maptitude works tirelessly to keep enhancing the product and supplied datasets, producing excellent user documentation, training tutorials and demonstration videos. The Maptitude user community has contributed many free plug-in applications and Youtube videos to help start-up and long-time users apply this powerful and flexible tool to an infinite array of real-world spatial analysis questions. Moreover, Caliper's technical support team has even provided free data conversion (e.g. ESRI .gdb to .shp or Maptitude's dbd formats) to support my need as a program user.

Maptitude™ Review

[Short version] : Maptitude™ excels in the GIS software landscape due to its ease of use, intuitive GUI (familiar Windows interface first developed by Xerox™ and Apple™ in the 1980s), universal cut-copy-paste features (within and outside software, OS complying) and due diligence to database management protocol. It follows strict adherence to topology avoid the geometric pitfalls of shapefile based GIS. Spatial analysis tools are capable of handling very large datasets that are only limited by memory and processor speeds. Unlimited geocoding, complex spatial queries using without programming language knowledge and high quality cartography makes Maptitude™ a few standard deviations above the industry average and the GIS software to beat.

[Long Version] :

One of the fundamental advantages of using Maptitude over other GIS software is the extensive use of ‘Selection Sets’ or what we know in database lingo as ‘view’ (wikipedia defines ‘views’ (SQL) as “ a stored query on the data”. Views or ‘Named queries’ are at the heart of Maptitude™ and hence makes map making and geometric/topological manipulations easy and intuitive.

But first, why Maptitude™? Suppose, each pharmacy in a city is asked to report the 10 nearest hospitals or 1000 middle income ($50-80K household income) customers. The number of steps to achieve this in Maptitude™ is surprisingly small. The ‘Edit-Fill’ function (two key strokes) in the data(view) window (very similar to Microsoft Excel’s ‘Fill’ function) allows you to perform an incredibly vast array of geographic analyses like the above pharmacy example. Competing GIS software either requires programming or large number of steps to achieve similar outcomes. Since all types of geoprocessing can be conceived through programming, the role of GIS software should be to ease any programming burden and allow intuitive geoprocessing to flourish. Maptitude™ excels in this context.

Sometimes I challenge my students to find the shortest number of steps to solve a problem using any GIS of their choice. Maptitude™ wins hands down. For example: I asked students to find a circular band around each town (14 in total) that covers 300 miles of roads for each town (of the 15K miles of roads covering 10 counties assigned). Maptitude™ required no programming and used 5-10 clicks to get a map showing colored circular bands around each of the 14 towns and taking less than 20 minutes of total time on a moderately fast desktop PC. The same assignment done using ArcGIS™ required programming a script using Python™ and required an approximate solution for one town before the system crashed.

Maptitude™ has an intuitive interface with a map view ‘window’ and a dataview ‘window’ (both of these are ‘views’/’‘named queries’ saved in the GIS project). One of the advantages of this database approach is file handling. The original database is not edited (unless one wants to permanently change mistakes, updates etc) but ‘queried’ as in any typical database system. This approach is called ‘non-destructive editing’ like the ones seen in Picasa™ photo editing software or Adobe Lightroom™ software. It optimizes disk space and avoids the bookkeeping nightmare faced in many GIS related projects due to file duplication, file mis-tracking etc. This is also the future of mapping since multiple users and analysts work on the same map database and reuse map data multiple times. In addition, this allows for easy collaboration as we see software moving towards cloud based computing. It does not mean the desktop nature of Maptitude™ is redundant. In fact, Maptitude™ is still heavily desktop based (a few instances of Maptitude™ in cloud based systems like Amazon Web Services is showing up). A fastfood chain recently chose Maptitude™ for the privacy and security provided in desktop systems in addition to other advantages Maptitude has over competing software.

The second reason for Maptitude as a primary choice is their data handling. Big DATA is the buzzword now in science and business and Maptitude™ allows gigabytes size files to work effortlessly. With unlimited geocoding, almost unlimited rows and columns (1 billion by 1 million or more) the analytic capabilities far exceeds spreadsheet limits and most desktop computing. The seamless interface with Oracle™ and other database systems allows Maptitude to be the workhorse GIS.

Exciting 3D modeling (including sunset etc. sky themes, network tools (limited to shortest paths, network voronois and some network redistricting), wide array of cartographic tools, crosstab tools etc. reduces the need for support software (like Excel™, Adobe™) to complete a mapping project. There is a flexible intuitive file-management interface, group editing, workspace save etc. in Maptitude™. A flexible ‘windows’ graphic user interface -- easy to comprehend like the ones pioneered by Xerox™, Apple™ OS and WIndows™ OS (no Windows™ ribbon interface yet) etc makes Maptitude™ an easy choice.

Finally, for $695 with census data at local, regional and country level (from tracts to counties and zipcodes) and the sheer volume of easy to use functionality makes me -- a 20 year veteran of GIS a happy consumer.

I’ve used Maptitude™ and TransCAD™ (form the same parent company Caliper™ Corporation) the GIS of my choice for the very reason that I can complete research in academia and industry (including startups in Silicon Valley) with the minimum of effort and hours. This provides me with enormous economies of scale when enterprise type projects require my expertise.

I am a student at the University of Dallas reviewing the sales team's customer service. I inquired about a student licence of Maptitude around 3pm and had a reply in 5 minutes, it's of course the standard message but that was exceedingly prompt. Then the next surprise was that the company responded with, 'we would be happy to donate Maptitude for Academic Use'. I was originally trying to get an ArcGIS student licence, but it was so complicated to use in the free trial (my only relevant experience with this is a class on analyzing spatial data in R). Also, $100 for the ArcGIS licence, while perhaps fair, was not exactly easy to come up with. My only cost here is the $3 my university will charge to send the documentation. I really appreciate the work done developing Maptitude, I have only worked with the trial for a couple hours but I found it very intuitive and was easily able to load one of my sample data sets straight from Excel begin working with the map.

This looks like the perfect software. As a criminologist I have been looking for software that I can use to map population and housing data against housing data.

I have had nothing but great experiences in my dealings with Caliper's customer service. When I have a question or request it has never been longer than one business day to get a a reply and generally much less than that.

As a student researcher for the summer, I contacted them about a possible student discount. They have donate a copy for free! Thank you for supporting academics!

I am very impressed with Maptitude's response time and service level. It's rare that a company responds to inquiries so efficiently. The assistance they provided me was amazing!

My experience with Caliper was very smooth, the team responded very promptly to our enquiry, and were both accommodating and professional. For a busy research team, their customer service was both helpful and discerning, seamlessly reacting to our situation. Thank you, I look forward to using Maptitude!

I was provided by Caliper with a 1 year student license for Maptitude free of charge! I am extremely grateful and excited to start using it for my research. Thank you Caliper for your help and I definitely will review it once I start to use the sofware!