ESRI is built for engineers. Here is what a small water system can use instead.

What is the best ESRI alternative for a small water utility?

For most small systems, it is a field-first app that puts the map and the work in one place, not a second copy of ArcGIS. ESRI gave you a map. It did not give you a way to run the work.

That is the real problem, and it is not the map. The map sits on a desktop in the office. Out in the field, where the work happens, the crew cannot pull it up. So they call the office, or they guess, or they wait. A small system does not need a more powerful map. It needs the map, the work orders, and the asset history together, on a phone, in the field.

Ziptility is built for that. Every main, valve, hydrant, meter, well, and lift station is a point your crew taps to see the whole record and log the work right there. The record stays current because the work rides on the asset, not because someone remembers to update a second system.

For a small utility, that adds up to about 95 percent of what ESRI does day to day. The rest is engineer work, flow modeling and the like. ESRI keeps that, and we say so plainly below.

Where does ESRI fit, and where is it a lot for a small system?

ESRI is the biggest name in mapping for a reason. For a big city or district with a GIS department and engineers on staff, ArcGIS is powerful and worth the money. We will give it that plainly. And the rule we sell by: if you run ESRI and use it well, keep it.

Some of what ESRI does, Ziptility does not do and will not pretend to. Flow modeling and engineer-grade analysis live in ESRI, and they are not on our roadmap. And if you share map data with a county or a regional program that runs on ESRI, staying tied into it can be the right call.

The trouble starts when a small system tries to run ArcGIS on top of everything else. Keeping the map current takes real hours, and on a crew of a handful of people those hours do not exist. In our experience ESRI starts to make sense once a system is up around 10,000 to 20,000 connections and brings GIS in-house. Below that, you are buying an engine built for a different job. Esri does offer a Small Utility Enterprise Agreement, a fixed yearly price by system size, quote only, so it is not only about the sticker. But even at a fair price it is still GIS-first, and the hours to keep the map current still have to come from somewhere.

Ziptility vs ESRI / ArcGIS for a small utility

Here is the honest side-by-side. ESRI is the better map for a big GIS shop. Ziptility is the better fit for a small crew that needs to run the work from the field.

What does it really cost to keep ESRI running?

The license is the start, not the whole bill. Keeping the map current takes hours, and those hours get billed, often to an engineering firm. We have seen $180 to $275 an hour. The field forms are often a second app on top, and credits for stored data come up during the year. Add it up and the software is the cheap part.

We watched this play out with a water district of about 350 connections. They lined up what they paid for ESRI against what they would pay us. By their own math, the consulting, engineering, and technical support around the map came to roughly double their actual ESRI subscription. Not double the software. The software plus the hours it takes to run it, against our one yearly price. That is the line nobody puts on the quote.

There is one more line that showed up in 2026. Esri changed some licensing terms, and we watched that one change land on two Wisconsin systems through the GIS partner that kept their maps running. One event, not a rule, and not a knock on Esri's product. But it is what being small on a big company's terms can feel like. Ziptility does not run on Esri's engine, so a change like that does not change what you pay for Ziptility.

We already have ESRI. Do we have to rip it out?

No. You can keep the map you like and run the field work alongside it. A lot of utilities do exactly that. One of our customers still has its engineering firm in ArcGIS for hydraulic models while the crew runs the day-to-day work in Ziptility.

Be clear on how it works, because we will not oversell it. You bring your ESRI or shapefile data into Ziptility with an import. From there, Ziptility is where your crew logs the work and the asset history. Or you leave ESRI as your map of record and use Ziptility for the field side. Either way your data stays yours, and you can export it whenever you want. This is data import and coexistence, not a live two-way sync. ESRI does not make live connections easy for smaller tools, and we will not pretend it does. One more honest note: Ziptility runs on its own mapping engine, not Esri's. That is on purpose, and it is why an Esri licensing change does not change what you pay for Ziptility. (One technical note on imports: strip the .xml metadata file out of a shapefile package before you upload it. It carries ESRI metadata the app cannot read.)

Why does ArcMap's end of life matter right now?

ArcMap was retired on March 1, 2026. No more patches, no more support, no new licenses. If you are still running it, you are making the call whether you want to or not. As your operating systems update, the old version gets harder to keep alive.

The options are real ones. Move up to ArcGIS Pro and take on the per-user licensing. Look at Esri's Small Utility Enterprise Agreement. Or switch to a field-first app like Ziptility that you can run yourself. Doing nothing is no longer a choice ESRI is leaving open.

What does Ziptility cost compared to ESRI?

One yearly price based on your number of service connections, with unlimited users. No per-seat licenses, and no engineering firm on retainer to keep it running. Pricing by connection instead of by seat is on purpose. Every operator and field tech gets the app on a phone, so the whole crew feeds the map and it stays alive. (Looking at the price? Here is rough pricing.)

What does the switch actually look like? A small system that did it.

The City of Central, Colorado, a mountain town of about 450 connections, ran ArcGIS for years. The map lived on a desktop. The crew could not pull it up in the field, and every small change meant a wait on the engineering firm. They moved to Ziptility in 2025 and now their operators keep the map current themselves.

What changed for them is what changes for most small systems. The map stopped being a thing the engineer owned and became a thing the crew uses every day. A valve exercise logs the turns to close right on the valve. A hydrant flushing logs the chlorine residual and the flow right on the hydrant. The record builds itself out of the work you already do.

Honest about who this is for. Ziptility fits a small water or wastewater system with a handful of staff, where the map has to live in the field, not on a desk. If you are a big city with a GIS department and engineers on staff, ESRI is probably the right call and we will tell you so. And if you are the one at a small system who does know GIS, this is not a knock on your work: when the crew logs work in the field, the data you analyze finally gets good. We do less than ESRI on purpose, and we do the part a small crew actually touches.