This is a public test instance. Resets to a curated golden state every day at 04:00 UTC.
Sign in with tester-admin / Admin123!, tester-contributor / Contributor123!, or tester-viewer / Viewer123!. Items, users, and edits you create vanish at the next reset. Found a problem? Use the Feedback button in the corner of any page. No account needed.
New here? Open the Sample: Randolph County folder after signing in: a complete demo workspace with styled layers, a map, a form with responses, a field survey, and public apps, all built on one small West Virginia county.
GratisGIS
Self-hosted, open-source GIS. Explore the Randolph County, West Virginia demo below, then run the same workspace on your own hardware.
See it running
Live dashboards, maps, and data GratisGIS has shared publicly. No account needed.
Web app
Elkins in 3D
Every mapped building in Elkins, West Virginia, standing at a height measured from 2018 lidar rather than guessed. Tilt and rotate to read the town's shape. Colour repeats the height so the map still reads looking straight down. Click any building for its height and where that height came from.
Web app
Twenty-five years of West Virginia water quality
1,175 monitoring sites and 285,788 measurements from the gas counties of north-central West Virginia, 1995 to 2019, each reading compared to its published drinking water limit. The counters and charts follow the map: pan or zoom and every number re-answers for what is on screen. Source: WVU GIS Technical Center / EPA water quality project.
Web app
Randolph County Storm Events Dashboard
Thirty years of severe weather in Randolph County, West Virginia: what happened, when, and what it cost. Built from the storm events data layer with indicator and chart widgets; it is an ordinary web app and can be edited like any other.
Web app
Randolph County Bridges Dashboard
Condition, age, and size of the 188 highway bridges in Randolph County, West Virginia. Built from the bridges data layer with indicator and chart widgets; it is an ordinary web app and can be edited like any other.
Open source GIS portal
An open-source, self-hosted GIS portal
GratisGIS is a portal for publishing datasets, web maps, forms, and dashboards on your own infrastructure, with an official QGIS plugin for desktop work. Built on open components (PostGIS, MapLibre, Keycloak). No license fees; your only cost is the hardware (or cloud bill) you choose to run it on.
Self-hosted on your own hardware
PostGIS-backed datasets, web maps, and forms; bring data in from shapefiles, GeoJSON, GDB, or any OGR-supported format. Docker compose, single-command deploy, runs on a $20/month VPS. No license fees, no SaaS lock-in.
First-class QGIS support
An official plugin in the QGIS plugin repository: browse and search the portal, publish layers and whole projects from the canvas, take a layer to the field, and sync edits back. No plugin? Rasters appear in QGIS's built-in catalog browser and layers open over standard APIs, with an API key for private content.
Field-ready PWA
A data-collection app that installs to the home screen, works offline, and syncs when you're back online.
Works with the tools you already use
OGC API Features, Tiles, Styles, and Records; a STAC catalog; CSW 2.0.2; Schema.org JSON-LD; WMS / WFS service references; plus Esri WebMap JSON export so portal maps open in ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, and kepler.gl.
Operational features the portal ships with
Housekeeping that runs itself
Stale items get flagged. Inactive users get auto-disabled. Expiring shares trigger warnings. Spatial extents get recomputed on a schedule. Admins get a dashboard, not a backlog.
Sync that doesn't lose your work
Offline edits go to a per-edit queue with isolated retries. A bad row doesn't poison the rest. Schema changes notify every device that has cached the deployment so the field crew rebuilds before they next sync.
Email notifications you actually control
Built-in templates for shares, expirations, schema changes, form submissions, and field captures. Org admins customize the copy through a guided editor with click-to-insert variables. Routed through one SMTP, not a sprawl of webhooks.
Sharing granularity that makes sense
Share an item with a user, a group, or a folder. Folder shares cascade to every item in the folder. Per-share row scope ('all' vs 'own') and geographic clip (polygon) layer on top. View / download / edit / admin tiers, not a single 'shared' bit.
What's new
- Dashboards, without a separate dashboard app
You can now build a dashboard: big-number indicators, charts, tables, and maps, refreshing on their own once a minute. Start from the KPI Dashboard or Operations Board layout when you create a web app. The part worth knowing: these are the same widgets as everything else, so a dashboard can grow a map, an editing tool, or another page later, and an indicator can sit in the corner of a map app. There is no separate dashboard product to get stuck inside. Charts also got a proper settings panel and now do their counting on the server, so they stay quick on big layers and show totals for whatever each viewer is allowed to see.
- Browse your rasters from QGIS, no plugin needed
Newer QGIS (3.42 and up) has a built-in catalog browser, and this portal now speaks its language. Point it at the portal and your imagery, elevation, and other raster layers appear with their footprints on the map, filterable by area and date, ready to load. Public layers work without signing in; an API key shows everything you can see, with the usual sharing rules applied.
- Search can find your rasters now
Imagery, terrain, and lidar layers never recorded where on the map they are, so searching by area quietly skipped them, and zooming to one from desktop GIS software went to the whole world. Every raster and point cloud now records its map extent, including ones uploaded long ago, so area search matches them and zoom-to lands on the data.
- The QGIS plugin reaches 1.0
The official GratisGIS plugin for QGIS is at 1.0, with every flow tested by hand on a real install, and it is now in the official QGIS plugin repository: open Plugins, search for GratisGIS, and install. From inside QGIS you can search the portal, inspect items, publish vector and raster layers, publish an open project as a portal map, clone a layer to take into the field, and sync your edits back. Private layers work throughout: create a read-only API key under Profile and QGIS sees exactly what you see.
- Private layers open in any desktop GIS
A new signed-in data feed serves every layer you can see, not just public ones, in the standard format desktop GIS software reads. That means private and organization layers open as real feature layers with working attribute tables, using the same API key that already draws them. Sharing limits still apply to every read. Layers also report how many features they hold, so client software can pick real features for small layers and fast tiles for county-scale ones.