What is GratisGIS

GratisGIS is a portal you run yourself. It hosts the same kinds of things ArcGIS Online does. Maps, datasets, forms, dashboards, and the apps that consume them. And it speaks the same workflows your team already knows. The differences are who owns the hardware and what the license says.

What it does

You upload data (Shapefile, GeoJSON, GeoPackage, KML), the portal ingests it into PostGIS, and you can:

• Style it on a map. Symbology, labels, filters, popups.
• Share it. To specific users, to your whole organization, or publicly with a link.
• Edit it from the field. The field PWA works offline, syncs back when it sees the network.
• Collect new features through forms. The form designer produces a layer-backed survey; submissions land as real features in your layer.
• Publish a web app. Drag-and-drop builder with widgets (map, search, print, export, attribute table).
• Analyze. Derived layers chain steps like filter, calculate, spatial join, group-by, buffer, contour.

What it isn't

• A re-skin of QGIS. The desktop app isn't in scope; GratisGIS is a portal, the same way ArcGIS Online is.
• A drop-in clone. We deliberately don't use Esri's vocabulary where there's a clearer English word. data layer not feature service, map not web map, contributor not publisher.

Who it's for

Small to medium organizations who:

• Want the AGO-shaped workflow but can't or won't pay AGO prices.
• Need to keep data on-premise for compliance or sovereignty reasons.
• Want to extend the system themselves (it's AGPL-3.0).

Where things live

Every addressable thing in GratisGIS is an item. Maps are items. Data layers are items. Forms are items. Even basemaps and themes are items. This consistency means sharing, deletion, dependency tracking, and search all work the same way regardless of what you're looking at.

The full list of item types lives at Reference → Item types.