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Yes. GeoCat Live started as a geospatial platform, but organisations increasingly use it to manage and publish broader data collections: policy documents, research datasets, administrative records. The catalogue handles both geospatial and non-geospatial data in a single searchable environment. For ministries and agencies that need one place to manage what data exists, who owns it and how it can be used, that flexibility matters.

With cloud hosting, GeoCat runs and maintains the platform on your behalf: a fully managed environment with automatic updates, security patching, monitoring and a 99.9% uptime SLA. With on-premise, GeoCat Live is installed within your own infrastructure, so you keep full control over your environment, meet your internal compliance requirements and decide exactly where your data lives. Both options run the same platform. The difference is location and who manages the infrastructure.

It means the software is transparent, independently verifiable and not controlled by a single commercial party. You can inspect the code, audit what it does and be confident it will not change direction because a vendor decided to reprice or discontinue a product. It also means the software is tested by thousands of users worldwide every day. When one organisation funds a new feature, it goes back to the community, and the next organisation inherits it for free.

No. GeoCat Live is a managed platform. We handle the setup, the hosting, the updates and the security, so your team works with the data, not the infrastructure. For specialists who manage data day to day, Bridge connects directly to QGIS or ArcGIS Desktop. For end users, Find makes data searchable in plain language. No knowledge of WFS endpoints or metadata schemas required.

Esri is a closed, proprietary platform. GeoCat Live is built on open source software and open standards. That means no licence fees for the underlying technology, no vendor lock-in and full control over your data. Your data stays in open formats, published through standards that any system can use, so you are never dependent on a single supplier to keep your infrastructure running. For organisations working under INSPIRE or national geospatial requirements, GeoCat Live meets those standards out of the box.

GeoCat Live is available as a subscription, either as a managed cloud service or installed within your own infrastructure. The cost depends on your setup, the scale of your data environment and the level of support you need. There are no licence fees for the underlying software. What you pay for is the platform, the maintenance and the expertise around it. Contact us for a quote that fits your situation.