MapServer

Spec sheet

What it does

MapServer is an open source geographic data rendering engine written in C that creates interactive geographic image maps.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Support

The project directs users to a list of companies offering professional MapServer support.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Cartography

Features include scale dependent drawing, label collision mediation, customizable template driven output, and thematic mapping.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Data formats

Its documentation lists raster formats through GDAL and vector sources including shapefiles, PostGIS, SpatiaLite, GeoPackage, FlatGeobuf, Oracle Spatial, and MySQL through OGR.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Governance

MapServer is an OSGeo founding project maintained by developers and administered within OSGeo by the MapServer Project Steering Committee.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

OGC standards

The project lists support for WMS, non-transactional WFS, WMC, WCS, Filter Encoding, SLD, GML, SOS, OM, and OGC API: Features.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Platforms and languages

The project lists Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and support for PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, and .NET.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Projections

MapServer supports on the fly map projection through the PROJ library.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Related tools

The MapServer suite includes MapCache for tile caching and TinyOWS for transactional WFS requests.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Security configuration

The documentation recommends restricting mapfile access with MS_MAP_PATTERN or MS_MAP_NO_PATH, or hiding the MAP parameter on public servers.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Security history

The project archive says maintenance releases in April 2021 addressed a security flaw involving processing the MAP parameter.Read 5 Oct 2026 · mapserver.org

Plans and prices

Every MapServer plan and price →

Where Specifiction places it

• Location Platform Software#10 of 257.7
• GIS Software#26 of 647.8
• Geo Tools#15 of 267.6