How big is the QGIS community now?
We took a look at the size of the QGIS community a few years ago in here: https://www.gispo.fi/en/blog/how-big-is-the-qgis-community/
With the newest QGIS 3.30 release we decided to update our look on the QGIS community. How big is it now?
How many QGIS developers are there?
Open source softwares are dependent on the community to find and fix bugs and problems in the programs. As of now (June 2023) there are 488 core contributors listed on QGIS GitHub pages. During the last month 29 developers have pushed 406 commits to the master branch! There are a few key players that have been committing their time to QIS development, the most hardworking is still Nyall Dawson who has 173 commits in GitHub in the last month!
There are also donors and sustaining members that are contributing to QGIS. There are more than 100 sustaining members all around the world, including companies and QGIS user groups and over 8,000 donors supporting QGIS!
How many QGIS users are there?
There still isn’t a good way to determine how many people are using QGIS. Tracking downloads and installations isn’t possible due to the support of multiple operating systems and installation methods. And some (at least me) have multiple different QGIS versions downloaded on their computers. These always skew the real user count.
Since our last overview, QGIS has found a way to track the number of users to some extent by counting how many requests to the QGIS News Feed are made and from what version of QGIS. This way they can transparently and openly gather information about their users. The news feed pops up when you open your QGIS. You can disable this in options but it really gives useful data to QGIS developers and sponsors!
In the last 30 days (May 2023) QGIS has been opened 13,629,896 times!
They also gather data about which QGIS versions and operating systems are in use, this way the QGIS community can prioritise what to develop further.
Looking through the dashboard it is clear that the use of QGIS is growing! Here is one graph that shows how monthly QGIS opens have been growing in one year. From April 2022 to April 2023 the sum of openings has nearly doubled!
In this dashboard we can also take a look at what is the most commonly opened QGIS version in the last 30 days. According to this graph many have already changed to the newest 3.30 QGIS release but the most commonly used are the long term releases, LTR 3.28 being first and LTR 3.22 the second most opened version.
The QGIS dashboard is available here
Support, training & social media numbers
StackExchange is still a great source of instructions and ideas from other users. There are currently 39,000 active questions with the QGIS tag in StackExchange and almost 1000 questions are still unanswered. There are 1.3k watchers for the tag in StackExchange and 3.3k in StackOverflow. New questions are asked more than once a day! Compared to the next biggest tag in Stack Exchange “arcgis-desktop” has 50% less questions and only a few hundred followers.
This might make QGIS sound to be more prone to problems but one could also reason that there are users with different skill levels using the software. This can be seen from the questions asked, they vary from adding data to QGIS to advanced algorithms and PyGIS. Also as an open source software, specified support pages for QGIS users do not exist so StackExchange is a great way to get help. Also the QGIS community is very active and willing to research and answer questions! In addition there are some companies that offer QGIS support (like us! Contact us if you need support with QGIS!)
There are a lot of other places to search information from. If you want to learn the basics without searching for the odd tips and tricks, a course might be your thing. We at Gispo offer different level courses to fit your QGIS needs, online and in person. Of course there is a lot of different online courses available from LinkedIn to Udemy. Also there is a lot of course materials in YouTube for beginners starting from downloading the software to making layouts of maps. There are a few that are very popular and have almost 1 million views. There are also videos on different analyses and tips that are doing well in that area and new ones are uploaded every week!
Conclusions
QGIS has grown quite extensively since it’s initial release in 2002 as Quantum GIS and the roll is not stopping anytime soon. In Finland many governmental organisations are making the big switch to open source software and are in need of training and support. Globally QGIS is used in big and small companies, from higher education to governments and non-profit organisations. There are also some QGIS user stories highlighting how companies have used QGIS in their projects. You can read more in here.
Since our last peek into QGIS community the worth of QGIS project has grown more than 3.5 million USD making it worth 57.5 million USD! This is only looking at the source lines of code, but still quite a number!
These are just a few points derived from different sources. All in all since our last post about the community two years ago many figures have gone up, a lot. The software is being developed continuously by the amazing developer team thanks to funders and of course all the users that report bugs and problems!
QGIS is used worldwide in education, research, planning and business. According to the QGIS dashboard there are definitely millions of users, some of course more active than others.
Few thousand people are concerned with development of QGIS, including core developers, user groups, and others who might write reports, documentation and provide training. These people are daily users who rely on QGIS in their work.
The power of QGIS is in the community. And there is always room for more in the happy community!
This article was initially published at www.gispo.fi by Elisa Hanhirova (Gispo Ltd.).
