Here is a link to a great paper from Cornell comparing the performance of common GIS tasks in Manifold 6 & ArcGIS 8.3
The information is slightly out of date now that Manifold is on version 7 & the release of ArcGIS 9.2 is immenent.
I haven’t had a chance to do as much comparing & testing this week as I had hoped. Hopefully this should answer some questions for those who are curious about what Manifold is really like but don’t want to spend ~$250 just to find out.
We bought the Universal Edition & a run-time version. It includes a lot of functionality for less than $1,200. I installed it last week but had not really had much of a chance to play around with it, until this weekend.
I read/worked several of the tutorials and just played with it a bit.
I’m going to put it through some test this week & I’ll be commenting on them. I’ll also try to post some side-by-side screenshots to compare to ArcMap.
Why did I get Manifold?
I got it to help us distribute our multi-county mapping project for Central Texas. It seemed like the most cost-efficient method of creating a web mapping service. Arc Server was just too much money for us at this time & the free open source solutions weren’t able to give us the quality of output that we are looking for.
Now, maybe I didn’t put enough time & effort into getting the FOSS solution to work, and maybe the Manifold output will be no better, time will soon tell. Given our limited budget and my limited time, we wanted something that had at least a semi-out of the box solution. I’d rather spend my time tweaking things rather than re-inventing a wheel to my exact specifications.
Our other goal in getting the software was to attempt to use Manifold to publish an OGC map service that could then be fed into ArcGIS Explorer (whenever it is that it finally comes out of private beta). Then we would create customized ArcGIS Explorer tasks & interfaces for clients with varying needs. Those interested in our data for commercial real estate purposes will certainly want to ask different questions to the data than those using it for habitat conservation efforts.
More to come later this week as I dig into this software and see just how much of the Manifold website is hyperbole.
