eSpatial vs ODL Studio

eSpatial turns location data from spreadsheets and CRM systems into interactive maps for analyzing business patterns and opportunities. Its mapping tools include heat maps, pin maps, filtering, distance measurement, and proximity or radius analysis. Teams can design territories around workload, travel time, revenue, or account count, model scenarios, and manage hierarchies. Route planning optimizes routes and schedules, and the company describes turn-by-turn mobile navigation. Data can be imported from Excel or CSV, and Salesforce integration is two-way; APIs support custom links to cloud ERP and business intelligence systems. eSpatial also offers iSMART, an on-premise server-based GIS accessed through a browser, with web and Java APIs. The company says it is ISO 27001:2022 certified and describes controls including firewalls, intrusion detection, and change management. Application data is stored in Virginia, with backups in California, and is not copied outside the USA. Live mapping-expert support is available by phone, chat, or screen-share. Mapping Pro costs $499 a year per user, with a three-user minimum. A seven-day trial is listed and there is no free plan.

ODL Studio is a free, standalone desktop application for customer-location analysis, sales territory design and fleet routing and scheduling. It stores data in Excel spreadsheets that can also be edited in Excel. The software geocodes addresses or postcodes, displays customers on a map and exports maps to PDF or Word. Users can paint territories on a map or generate them with an optimisation algorithm, then create reports with maps and territory statistics. For fleet planning, it schedules routes on real road networks, reports mileage and drive-time statistics, and shows routes on an interactive map. ODL Connect can call Studio functions from the command line for scheduled or on-demand background tasks, but it is a separate closed-source module. ODL Studio is free and open source under LGPL, with downloads listed for Windows, Linux and Mac. The Linux and Mac package requires Java Runtime 8 or higher, and the maker recommends at least 6 GB RAM and a dual-processor CPU. The downloads page lists version 1.4.1, released 3 November 2017.