A Recent Posting in GISList Comparing Manifold and other GIS Products

The following posting was made in the GISList list by the product manager for Manifold System. This should not be taken as a third party testimonial since the writer is affiliated with manifold.net; however, many users have written to say they found the comparison informative and accurate.  Identifying information has been removed as required by the manifold.net privacy policy.  See the GISList archives at geocomm.com for the original posting:

[Begin Posting]

> You guys seem to be well informed. Would it be possible for you to discuss
> the functionality of these GIS without arguing? I'm sure there 
> are others on
> the list that feel the way I do. I am an ArcView/Info user and have had my
> share of problems with ESRI products, but am interested in MapInfo and
> Manifold as I have no experience with them. I would really 
> appreciate it if
> you guys could make some more constructive comments regarding the common
> uses of GIS and in what way these three are superior or inferior without
> making it personal.
> If you have to flame me please send it to me and not the list.
> thank you,


That's a good idea. I've been whining that a capabilities matrix is a big job and that someone should do one. OK. Today, I'll sit down and begin a matrix for Manifold and then publish the URL for it so anyone who wants can suggest additions or changes or use it as a starting point for matrices for ArcView or MapInfo.

In the meantime, for those who are interested in purely technical comments I'll give my best initial summary of the purely technical issues at hand. If anyone doesn't like that I've responded to [the previous] posting, please flame me directly and not to the list. I'll reply to all flames. If you disagree with what I've written, please discuss the technical issues in your posting. I'd particularly be interested in hearing technical critique from folks like Robert [...] , who have used both packages. I've made the following comparison basing ArcView 8 features on ESRI's published marketing material.

Compared to ArcView 8 (quite a different thing than ArcView 3.x), Manifold 5.00 has weak spots and strong spots:

Weak spots: 

- AV8 has better CAD style editing, for example, the ability to draw a line that is forced to be perpendicular to another feature. Manifold 5.00 has many CAD editing features but not as extensive a collection as in AV8 (or, for that matter, as were in Manifold 4.50).

- AV8 has better printout capability than Manifold 5.00, but the current edition, Manifold 5.50 is much better.  AV8 includes a wide selection of predefined map templates and the built-in ability to export to PostScript. [Cartographic capabilities in AV8 are said to be a major improvement over AV 3.x]. Manifold 5.50 can write to PostScript and PDF.

- If you intend to work with raster images for a display background only (as opposed to actually editing or otherwise manipulating those images), AV8 will do a much better job at displaying large images in a fast way than 5.00.  Manifold 5.50 has superb support for large images, so you should use 5.50 for large images. [Editor's note: 5.50 works with large images well, but is very slow to load or save projects that contain large images.  The spring 2004 update (release 6.00) will include support for very fast load and store of large images.]

- AV8 has a larger collection of predefined symbols and nice highway shields. Manifold has a smaller collection of symbols but better ability to use new symbols from fonts and image files.

- AV8 has metadata generation and search tools. Manifold has no automated metadata tools.

- AV8 includes Crystal Reports report-writing. Manifold does not include a report-writer.

Strong spots: 

- AV8 has better CAD style editing, but Manifold has better Windows-style GUI editing commands such as copy and paste between drawings or different types of things (such as copying a table and pasting it as a surface), or copying a selection from a drawing and pasting it as a new drawing. Manifold also allows combinations of points, lines and polygons within the same drawing.

- Manifold reads many more vector, image and surface formats than AV8, including TIGER/Line, SDTS and GIS vendor formats (like MapInfo and Atlas BNA) not supported in AV8. Manifold can write SDTS for Federal compatibility (AV8 cannot). See http://www.manifold.net/products/mfd50pro/5_formats.html for the full list. (watch the line wraps inserted by email in this and other long URLs).

- Manifold has better interactivity between images, drawings and surfaces as layers in maps. For example, you can transfer selections between images and drawings so that selecting a region of pixels in an image can automatically be used to select any features in a drawing that happen to lie within that region, or selecting the outline of a country in a drawing can be used to select the included pixels in a satellite image of the region, thus allowing "clipping" of images to country boundaries, etc. Selections can be transferred between drawings as well. AV8 appears to have no equivalent interactivity.

- Manifold has much stronger spatial analytics when working with drawings. These include both geometric and networking constructs not found in AV8 such as Voronoi diagrams, triangulations, critical service centers, relative neighborhood networks, clustering, network decompositions, and many others. See http://exchange.manifold.net/manifold/manuals/5_userman/mfd50Transform_Operators__Drawings.htm for a partial list.

- Manifold has stronger spatial logic, with more extensive and flexible handling of attributes in functions such as Dissolve and Districts (a redistricting function) and automatic transfer of attributes to "child" objects created by any spatial operation (such as centroids or buffer zones) in a very flexible way. Manifold has a stronger spatial engine because it does topology on the fly. This allows "one step" operations such as cookie-cutting one set of points, lines and areas with another set in a simultaneous, single operation that works no matter how complex or muddled the topology may be (ie, areas with holes or islands or even multi-branched line objects).

- Manifold includes many features that with AV8 must be purchased in separate packages. For example, Manifold includes many abilities to work with surfaces and terrains that require ArcGIS Spatial Analyst and ArcGIS 3D Analyst. These include conversion of vector features to rasters, Kriging interpolation, creation of density maps from point features, density surfaces from point features, creation of contours from drawings, images or surfaces, doing slope, aspect and hillshades of surfaces, generating 3D surfaces from attributes, perform interactive 3D perspective viewing, apply data normalization and exaggeration, etc. However, purchase of Spatial Analyst and 3D Analyst will provide some capabilities not in Manifold, for example map algebra between rasters and export of the 3D scene to VRML. [Editor's note: 5.50 SP2 introduced additional capability in the Business Tools and Surface Tools packages, which are priced at $95 each or $145 for both. Although the base set of features in Manifold still exceeds those in AV8, manifold.net also now requires purchase of separate packages to get some extended features.]

- Manifold has much better image editing and manipulation capabilities, literally hundreds of functions (such as resampling), which are not available in AV8. Manifold supports RGB, RGBa, Palette and Grayscale images as well as raster data sets. Manifold can work with RGBa images for per-pixel transparency, just like PhotoShop, and allows you to independently manipulate R, G, B and alpha channels, loading and saving channels and masks independently, including Boolean combinations with channels. The image features allow image fusion as is used in hyperspectral remote sensing applications and other advanced image manipulation, such as feature extraction. AV8 has no significant image processing capability, to the best of my knowledge. In this area, it is better to compare Manifold to ERDAS than to AV8.

- Manifold includes vectorization capability for either "heads up" vectorization or automated vectorization. Presumably one could do "tracing" in AV8 but I am not aware of any automated or semi-automated vectorization tools in AV8.

- Manifold has much better DBMS capabilities than ArcView, including automated neurofuzzy data mining in the Decision Support System, "More Like This", Active Columns, ViewBots and the ability to edit and manipulate tables interactively that is better than most DBMS systems. Active Columns, for example, combine DBMS ideas with spreadsheet ideas so that one can define a column in a table that is a computed column based on some ActiveX formula. When the column appears it can be used like any other attribute column...for labels, thematic formatting, sorting, queries, etc. Manifold includes the ability to form relations between multiple tables that can be inside a Manifold project or linked in from an external provider, and to edit those tables with operations such as one-click changing of types (text to numeric, floating point to int, etc) with automatic conversion. I don't know if AV8 includes full spatial SQL, but Manifold does. Manifold includes SQL Server 2000 desktop edition as well.

- Manifold's layer and transparency controls are better, allowing per-layer transparency for images, surfaces and drawings, all of which can be stacked in maps. Layer transparency can be freely intermingled with pixel transparency and invisible pixels for desired effects.

- Manifold has a better projection engine, with much easier and more powerful georegistration ('rubber sheet' warping) than AV. Any image, surface, or drawing can be georeferenced to any other "known good" image, surface or drawing. In Manifold, any image, drawing or surface can be re-projected either permanently or "on the fly" temporarily. You can pop open a map that includes several different images, drawings and surfaces each of which is in a different native projection yet the map can show them all in yet another projection. Manifold allows additions of new variations of projections using XML customization files.

- I don't know if AV is still single-precision. Manifold always maintains all coordinates using double-precision floating point, providing an intrinsic accuracy of 1/250,000,000 meter at the Equator.

- Manifold includes an integrated GPS console for connection to portable GPS devices. This can automatically acquire data, fetch "instant data" and drive a moving map display.

- Manifold includes an Internet Map Server that can automatically serve interactive GIS maps to the web, allowing pan and zoom, turning layers on/off, executing queries and displaying tables of attribute info. No programming is required. AV8 has no Internet Map Server capability, although ESRI's ArcIMS (at substantial additional cost) does. ArcIMS is a more versatile system than Manifold IMS, albeit at the cost of being much more difficult to configure and deploy.

- Both AV8 and Manifold allow programming from compiled languages like VB and VC++. Manifold includes a more flexible scripting environment, allowing scripting in standard Microsoft ActiveX languages (Visual Basic scripting or Javascript, with PERL and Python as free options) with drag and drop forms creation. The $50 optional Debugger provides a dynamic visual debugger with Variables, Call Stack and Watches panes like that in Visual Studio. AV8 allows only Microsoft VBA for scripting and does not allow Javascript, PERL or Python; however, VBA includes an integrated debugger at no additional charge. Earlier AV editions used Avenue and not VBA. The choice of Microsoft scripting environment [Editor's note: 5.50 SP2 uses the .NET framework and provides IMS capability within ASP.NET. 6.00 will support .NET scripting languages as well.]

From a popularity perspective, third party applications appear to choose Microsoft ActiveX scripting over Microsoft VBA at a ratio of about 100 to 1, however both ActiveX scripting and VBA scripting are perfectly adequate scripting environments.

- Both AV8 and Manifold can work within enterprise settings at additional cost. The Enterprise Edition of Manifold ($150 extra) provides geospatial data storage within centralized DBMS systems such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, etc that is built into Manifold itself. In contrast, ArcView requires a middleware layer in the form of ArcSDE and cannot connect directly to the DBMS. ArcSDE does not include a DBMS. Manifold includes Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 desktop engine, which is adequate for most GIS facilities employing a several dozen users. 

- Manifold has more flexible views, including named views, a World pane and Linked Views where panning one view window will automatically pan a different window, even one showing a different layer, drawing, surface or 3D terrain perspective.

- Manifold has better exposure of attributes, with automatically computed "intrinsic" fields such as area, length, bearing, and statistics computation (variance, etc) in the form of ViewBots.

- Manifold has much better selection capabilities. This includes a wide variety of interactive selection modes, functional selections, selection toolbar (such as selecting all duplicates in a table except the first), and selection modes that allow drawing marquees with the mouse and replacing, adding, subtracting, intersecting or inverting the selection. Selections can be made either visually in map displays or within tables and saved for re-use.

- Manifold has achieved "Designed for Windows XP" status with Microsoft. AV8, I believe, has not yet incorporated full XP support as required for "Designed for Windows XP" status.

- Manifold has a lower price, $245, and is the same price everywhere in the world. ArcView 8.x is $1500 only in the US.

In conclusion, Manifold has many more capabilities than AV8, but AV8 does have some capabilities that Manifold does not. For example, AV8 has better CAD editing, print templates, metadata generation and better "image background" capability. Where the capabilities are similar, Manifold's are usually more analytical and more comprehensive. In some cases, such as DBMS capabilities, attributes and tables in general, Manifold has numerous capabilities not found in any ESRI product.

In terms of product evoution, Manifold is producing new editions with more features at a more rapid pace than ESRI, going from rough parity with ArcView 3.x to exceeding ArcGIS 8 and extending into ArcSDE and ArcIMS territory in about two years. Manifold has stated that the next release (this year) will include numerous upgrades in printing and print layout, large fast images and other improvements.

If anyone with personal knowledge of the features of ArcView 8 / ArcGIS and Manifold could provide any additions or corrections to the above list of weak spots and strong spots I would be most grateful.

[End Posting]

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