Does the World Really Love QGIS?

Introduction

Even as you read this, someone somewhere in the world is probably exploring one place or another with QGIS.

When I first saw QGIS (Quantum GIS) 0.8 in 2007, it was still very much a work in progress. It was so unstable that opening a Shapefile containing Japanese data made it crash, as suddenly as food poisoning from a bad oyster. Back then, I was an ordinary GIS user who knew not even two picobytes' worth about “open source” or “FOSS4G.” I remember thinking, “Looks kind of interesting, but it's a pretty rough ‘free GIS.’”

That casual verdict was overturned in no time. From around the 2010s, worldwide demand tied to “people and location” grew sharply, and the development community contributed enormously. QGIS evolved rapidly into the “ace of open-source GIS.” It felt as if the kid who used to play in the park with my son had become the World Cup top scorer.

But a doubt crosses my mind. Do that many people around the world really use QGIS? Am I just indulging my imagination? Could it be that aliens implanted a small dongle marked with a Q in me back in 2007?

So this article sets out to read the growth and reach of QGIS from data with a global perspective. If someone in your organization or group ever asks you, skeptically, “QGIS? Is that really popular? Isn't it just you who likes it?”, I hope this article is a modest help.

Exploring the growth of QGIS

First, let's look at how many times QGIS is launched worldwide. Adding up the launches in the QGIS Dashboard, which has collected data since 2022, shows a rise every year: in 2025, QGIS was launched about 200 million times worldwide. That works out to about 560,000 launches per day, or one launch every 0.15 seconds.

Next, let's look at interest in QGIS and the results of that activity. The Google Trends index is rising year by year, and if the search is narrowed to PDFs from the main government agencies of each country, as many as about 32,900 results mention the use and application of QGIS. In February 2025, QGIS was also registered as a digital public good (DPG) as a sovereign GIS by the United Nations and others, and it is expected to play a role as a tool that serves the public interest and contributes to the next generation.

Querying the API of OpenAlex, which lets you search academic papers from around the world, returns 41,910 papers that mention QGIS between 2010 and 2025, and the number is rising.

Besides being open source (that is, freely licensed), another important reason QGIS is so easy to use around the world is probably that you can choose the user interface language from 37 languages. You can also actively take part in adding new languages that are not listed here and in improving translations.

Exploring the evolution of QGIS

So how fast does QGIS keep evolving?

With QGIS, users can write their own plugins (extensions) and publish them in the official repository. According to the QGIS Plugin Dashboard, which collects statistics on these plugins, the number of registered plugins keeps growing year by year, and 2,675 plugins are currently available for version 3, the main version today. The most popular plugin, QuickMapServices, has been downloaded more than 10 million times since its release in 2015.

I also visualized data from the QGIS download site and its release plans. Since version 0.1 was announced in 2002, there have been more than 170 updates, and in recent years a long-term release (LTR, the stable version) has come out at least once a year. Updates from v4.0 onward are also planned through 2028, so further growth and stronger functionality are expected.

A strong developer community is essential to sustaining these continuous version updates. The GitHub repository for QGIS itself has received more than 13,000 stars from developers around the world, which shows how highly it is regarded. Looking at the yearly trends in commits and contributors, based on GitHub's statistics on development participation, we see that people keep taking part in development. The numbers fluctuate with major version updates and with the impact of COVID-19, but participation never stops.

Conclusion

The data show that the use and evolution of QGIS are steadily advancing.

Note that I deliberately left out comparison targets such as “R” and “GRASS” this time, which dilutes the meaning of the QGIS statistics somewhat. I ask for your understanding. If you want to dig deeper into the growth and characteristics of QGIS, the data used in this article is open to anyone as of December 2025, so I hope you will try various comparisons and verifications.

Even discounting that, the world seems to love QGIS very much, and the groundless worry that had been nagging at me turned into hope. What a relief.

Still, one-sided love, where only one party blindly consumes, often ends in tragedy.

Not just in QGIS but across open source, might the attitude of “creative and altruistic contribution” that Lakhani & Wolf (2003) speak of also be an irreplaceable kind of love for children around the world?