How to do GIS analysis without installing QGIS

The short answer: a browser can genuinely do buffers, spatial joins, attribute queries, nearest-distance, and exports on datasets up to tens of thousands of features. It cannot do rasters, projections, big data, or reproducible workflows. Pick accordingly.

QGIS is free, excellent, and a cliff. If your question is "how many parcels are within 500 m of this", learning a desktop GIS package is a disproportionate response. But the honest version of this article has to say where the browser runs out, so here it is.

What a browser can actually do

More than people expect, because the hard parts of GIS analysis are geometry algorithms, and those run perfectly well in JavaScript.

Attribute work. Filtering with real AND/OR conditions, sorting, column statistics (count, min, max, mean, sum), value frequencies, exporting to CSV. This is most of what most people need and it is not really analysis, it is asking the table a question.

Selection. Click, box, lasso. Select by attribute. Select by location, which is the one that matters: features from layer A that intersect layer B.

Real geometry operations. Buffer. Spatial join with counts and sums. Nearest distance. Centroids, dissolve, simplify. Clip and erase. These are exact, not approximations.

Symbology and output. Categorical and graduated classification, labels, legends, PNG export, a PDF map report, and export to GeoJSON, KML, CSV, Excel, or shapefile.

That covers a large share of the questions people bring to a web map.

Where it stops

Be realistic about these, because finding out late is expensive.

Raster analysis. No. Slope, viewshed, watershed, raster algebra, NDVI: not happening in a browser tab. If your question involves a DEM or satellite imagery in any serious way, you want QGIS.

Big data. A browser holds tens of thousands of features comfortably. A national parcel dataset of two million is not going to work. There is no spatial index behind you and no database doing the heavy lifting.

Projections. Browser tools generally work in WGS84 and web mercator. If you need to reproject to a local grid, or your data arrives in one, you will be doing that elsewhere. Distance and area calculations still work correctly, but the coordinate handling is not what a desktop GIS gives you.

Reproducibility. No model builder, no processing scripts, no Python. If you need to run the same analysis every month and prove what you did, you need a real toolchain. This is the one people underestimate: a browser session is a session, not a method.

Topology and editing. Snapping, validation, geometry repair. No.

The honest decision

| Your situation | Use | | --- | --- | | One question, public data, need an answer today | Browser | | You do not have QGIS and are not going to install it | Browser | | Working on someone else's machine | Browser | | The data is a web map you are looking at right now | Browser | | Rasters, elevation, imagery | QGIS | | Hundreds of thousands of features | QGIS or PostGIS | | Repeatable, auditable, monthly | QGIS with a model, or code | | It is going in a report someone will challenge | QGIS |

The browser is not a QGIS replacement. It is the thing for the ninety percent of questions that never justified opening QGIS in the first place, and which therefore mostly went unanswered.

Doing it

Geo Hound does this in a Chrome tab. The workflow it is built around:

1. Browse to a public web map. Geo Hound catches the services behind it automatically.
2. Open the workbench and add a saved service as a layer, or drag in your own GeoJSON, CSV, KML, KMZ, GPX, or zipped shapefile.
3. Filter the attribute table, select what you care about, and run the tools: buffer, spatial join, nearest distance, select by location.
4. Symbolize it, label it, annotate it, and export the result or a PDF map report.

Results chain: buffer something, then select against the buffer, then join onto that, then export. Each result is a normal layer.

It is free, there is no account, and the workbench documentation is the detail.

If you would rather not learn the buttons either

There is a second cliff after installing QGIS, which is knowing that the thing you want is called a spatial join.

Geo Hound's assistant closes that gap: you type "buffer the wells by 500 metres and tell me how many parcels fall inside" and it runs the operations. Ten free questions a month, then credits you buy once.

That is the real argument for browser GIS. Not that it is more powerful than QGIS, because it is not, but that it is available to people for whom QGIS was never going to happen.