Maptitude Reviews 79

Recommended!

I emailed the sales team with three questions about Maptitude, inquiring as to whether or not it would be useful for my PhD project. In under 10 minutes they replied with helpful answers to my questions. Excellent customer service, and look forward to using their product!

The Best I have used!

I emailed Caliper asking a question, and I received a reply in less than 30 minutes. I was very impressed to receive such a quick, helpful reply. I really appreciated it!

My experience thus far has been quick and easy. i received fast responses to my inquiry emails, and look forward to remaining in contact with the Maptitude team.

Caliper is an elite company in the world of GIS. Other than there incredible software, it is there customer service that truly sets them apart from the rest. As a GIS student, I am currently using Maptitude at my University to make analysis through spatial modeling. I needed a personal copy so that I could work on school projects off campus. I contacted Caliper and they were very helpful by giving me a student license. Great company.

Our academic research team reached out to Maptitude with questions about a student license. We received an immediate response with detailed instructions on how to obtain the software download. When additional information was needed, we called customer service and were quickly directed to the proper staff members. Customer service was knowledgeable and swiftly answered all of our questions. We are looking forward to working with Maptitude in the future.

I am in the Master of Science in Real Estate (MSRE) program at the University of San San Diego, and I am using Maptitude to prepare maps of real estate data for a presentation on Medical Office Buildings. I have found the people at Caliper to be exceedingly generous with their time in helping me use their Maptitude software, and I can honestly say that I could not graphically demonstrate the most important aspects of my presentation without their software. I highly recommend Caliper and its mapping software.

I contacted Caliper's customer service inquiring to buy a student license.
I received an almost immediate reply from a Caliper's customer service representative indicating that Caliper can provide me with a 1-year student license for Maptitude free of charge! I cannot wait to begin using Maptitude and telling my friends in my MA Geography degree program courses about it! Learning to use Maptitude will add to my geography-related skills -- I look forward to a great learning experience using the Maptitude software!

I am relatively new to GIS, however, I have found this platform extremely user friendly and cost effective.

Maptitude – United Kingdom
I started using Maptitude in December 2008. Until then I had been using Microsoft MapPoint. I did not want to change from MapPoint as it had been a good servant, but it became increasingly obvious that the software was not a priority for Microsoft. Each new version of the software failed to provide the tools that the business community were asking for.
After much research I decided to purchase Maptitude from Caliper, the relatively comparable cost and flexibility made it the obvious choice. Moving to a GIS system was something I was a bit concerned about. However, I needn’t have worried as my knowledge of MapPoint and the excellent 90 day support for Maptitude made the learning curve reasonably painless – most of the time. (If you get the UK version make sure your terminology is very precise when you have a question of support + make sure they know your level of competency.) I am not a developer; all I want is to be able to use the software out of the box.
So how did my experience of Maptitude turn out – well it’s fantastic. Everything I wanted to be able to do re analysing business data for all sorts of industries I have achieved and more.
You can change virtually any aspect of a map with just a few clicks, something MapPoint continually failed to provide. In fairness to MapPoint it is/was very intuitive and the menu choices were very obvious what they did.
The one big thing you need to recognise is that your maps will have layers. Think of your maps as a cake with different layers. If you want to change any aspect of say the roads layer, make sure the roads layer is your working layer. The same if you want to change the cities layer, make sure the cities layer is your working layer.
Although I am still on my original version of Maptitude I have noticed that each new release has added really useful tools and/or increased flexibility, and the availability of video tutorials is a real plus.

It’s now October 2014 and I have decided to get the latest version of Maptitude and I can’t wait to use it. I will give a further update after I have used it for a few months.
MapPoint finishes this year so if you need to replace or start using mapping software I would highly recommend purchasing Maptitude – hang in with it and you won’t be sorry.

Stephen Kilbee
6 October 2014

Maptitude is a great GIS program that is infinitely easier to use than arcGIS. I am a novice at GIS software, and I have access to both arcGIS and maptitude. Maptitude is significantly easier to use. arcGIS is a very powerful sophisticated program, but it would take me weeks to learn to do some things that maptitude does intuitively.

Online mapping has come a long way, but most serious geospatial analysis projects require the power and flexibility of a desktop application. I started using desktop GIS around 1991 when Atlas GIS and MapInfo were battling for the commercial market and only MapInfo ran on Windows. When Maptitude was released in 1995 ($395 with tons of data), I immediately started using it and began developing applications for site selection that became the corporate standard for companies such as The Limited, Dunkin Donuts, and RadioShack.

Although Caliper is a very small company, they have continued to innovate and increase the value of Maptitude by adding features from their transportation planning product (TransCAD,priced from $4,000 to $12,000 per seat), while the price has only increased to $695. The current release (Maptitude 2014) offers more features and data than ever, and it continues to be the best value in desktop GIS.

One of my recent consulting projects illustrates the power and usability of Maptitude. A company was considering the purchase of development rights for an entire state for franchise restaurants (a multimillion dollar investment). The franchisor provided them with a set of target locations in order to substantiate their estimate of the number of units that could be developed. They needed to quickly assess the quality of these locations to determine whether the opportunity was fairly priced. Using Maptitude, I plotted the locations, computed drive time trade areas and demographic profiles, benchmarked them against the franchisor's existing units, and computed the distance to key competitors. A set of maps showing target locations, key competitors, and trade areas was created for printing on 2X3 foot maps (laminated and foamcore mounted for $52 each). The high resolution (300 dpi) maps were unbelievably beautiful and readable because of Maptitude's advanced labeling features that control overlapping labels but allow "smart alignment." The investors had a meeting to review the opportunity and were able to very quickly assess the risks and settle on a number of units that could be developed.

Maptitude is truly a complete product at $695, including an accurate but not super fast) geocoder, extensive cartography (Navteq streets), and demographic estimates and projections at the census tract level. Optional data sets are very reasonably priced and include further geographic detail and versions for 20 different countries.

For those who have been using ESRI or MapInfo products, .shp and .tab files can be used natively or imported, along with many other mapping and database formats such as excel, .csv, and a variety of graphics formats.

Google Earth integration makes it possible to display Maptitude maps in Google Earth on the fly as well as pull imagery from Google Earth into Maptitude maps.

There are many more features that I could describe, but visit their website or call their excellent support line for further info about how Maptitude might help you with your projects.

I have worked with Caliper products for 10 years as a transportation/urban planner and they have always fulfilled my needs. Maptitude/TransCAD software are easy to use, organized and robust: able to cope with large datasets without any problems. The user interface is very clear and easy to understand. The exchange of data and databases across several formats is also very simple and functional. The two-way direct link with Google Earth makes my projects look really interesting. I have adopted Maptitude in my GIS classes and it has been a great success with the students. They get excited in learning the geoprocessing techniques with such a technology that Maptitude provides.

I am an epidemiologist interested in the geography of disease. Location, location, location is a big part of disease incidence and outcome along with age, gender, ethnicity, income level, etc. Where you live and work, that is, the spots on the ground are a big deal for your health. GIS is the go-to tool for spatial analysis of most anything. The problem with GIS for those who have a lot more to do than work with GIS is the steep learning curve, access to data, and the expense. I have used Maptitude for several years as well as significant periods using other GIS software when consulting with investigators who had a GIS setup already in place, and found that Maptitude is relatively easy to learn (follow the one minute exercises in the excellent documentation), Caliper Corp floods you with data to get started with, and the cost is less than half of the other major vendors. Of course none of that matters much if it does not do what one needs to do. In over 20 years of using GIS for disease studies I have never thought up some idea that I could not implement - usually easily - in Maptitude. I still have several of those ideas which cannot be easily implemented in other GIS software. I have taught other GISs as often other software is already in place, and always I have to drop some of the exercises because they cannot be done in the other GIS. All this said, Maptitude is easier to learn than other software but you will have to spend time in getting up to speed to work at full capacity. The effort is not trivial, after all you are learning to make maps and carry out analyses with maps using a computer. Inherently non-simple. But the documentation that comes with it is excellent. Also Caliper Corp has several excellent videos. And finally, I have found that the technical support is very good. They don't just brush you off like so many other tech supports do but take an interest in your problem and try very had to find a solution and set you straight.

Maptitude is most user friendly (but still powerful) spatial analysis / GIS software on the market. It is also the best value spatial analysis software at a bargain price of us$695 (INCLUDING GIS and Demographic data for your country). I have used Maptitude for over 15 years in both private property / real estate consulting practice and as a University Lecturer. My clients are always impressed with the analysis and the professional presentations. My uni students are impressed how quickly they learn Maptitude and can make quality maps of their analysis in just a few short sessions. I have my post graduate students completing Huff's Probability Retail Gravity Models in just their 4th lesson (can see my video on Youtube).

Hands down, it is the best spatial analysis software for those without degrees in GIS / Computers.

As a user of Maptitute for the past 5 years, I can say that I am continually impressed at the improvements that have been made with each iteration of the software. I use the software primarily for business/retail applications, institutional research, and in transportation geography (logistics) analyses. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to install Maptitute 2016 (64 bit architecture). Previous installations of Maptitude on my computer have used the 32 bit architecture. While the software loads even faster, my initial observation is in the icons and toolbar interfaces on the Maptitude desktop. While the icons are slightly different than in the 32 bit architecture; however, they are intuitive and relatively easy to discern. The most noticeable improvement is the on-screen regeneration speed, which is now super-fast. This is critical, especially when you have many layers on, or are labeling features. The faster speed means better productivity by the end user. Another improvement is in the area of CPU and memory intensive operations such as drive-time rings. Now, one can do drive-time rings out beyond the 240 minute (4 hour) threshold that existed in previous versions. I did an 8-hour drive-time (without running an overlay or report) using the street layer and it only took a minute to run the process and create the rings. The new territory tool looks promising as well, even though I have not had a chance to work with that as of yet. For the price, Maptitude 2016, is hands down the best desktop GIS software on the market.