RustGIS
A fast, free and open-source GIS in pure Rust.
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
RustGIS is a desktop GIS (mapping and spatial analysis software, what planners and ecologists use) written in pure Rust. It runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux, or in a browser tab. It's free under Apache 2.0, and it comes from Qiusheng Wu, the University of Tennessee professor behind leafmap and geemap. Real pedigree.
Nothing to host. Grab an installer (or winget / brew) and open a Shapefile, GeoPackage, GeoParquet or cloud-optimized GeoTIFF. ArcGIS Pro users will recognize the ribbon. Every button is a command you can script from rustgis-cli or Python, or hand to an AI assistant using your own model key. Over 1,000 terrain, hydrology and LiDAR tools come from the GeoLibre and Whitebox suites.
Solo, small teams, larger teams: all free. Worth an afternoon if you pay for ArcGIS Pro just to make maps. For production work, QGIS is still the free default.
The catch: the repo is five days old and on version 0.2. Its own roadmap lists vertex editing, spatial join, intersect and union as not done yet, and those are everyday GIS operations. The feature list reads like ArcGIS Pro; the bug tracker reads like a first release. Try it, don't migrate.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: The whole app, desktop and the web build at web.rustgis.app, under Apache 2.0. The project says it "is free and open source, and stays that way", funded by GitHub Sponsors and Buy Me a Coffee.
Self-hosted: Nothing to host for desktop use: installers for Windows (setup.exe, .msi, portable zip, MSIX), macOS (.dmg) and Linux (.deb, .rpm, AppImage), plus winget, Homebrew, AUR and Fedora COPR. pip install rustgis gives the engine in Python, and rustgis-cli scripts every command. Optional GDAL and DuckDB installs widen format support.
Paid: No paid tier. The AI Assistant uses a model you bring (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, or a free local model via Ollama), so any LLM cost is yours. Web basemaps and online services may have their own terms.
Free at every size with nothing gated; the only possible spend is your own LLM API key for the optional AI assistant.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; install the desktop app or use the browser build
- Small team
- free, for map-making and standard analysis alongside QGIS
- Medium team
- free, but keep QGIS or ArcGIS for production editing until vertex editing and overlay tools land
- Large team
- free to evaluate; too young (v0.2, days old) to standardize on
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Trust Signals
License: Apache License 2.0
Use freely. Patent grant included.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
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- Open Geospatial Solutions (Organization)
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