ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online are two comprehensive products that enable all industries with organization-wide mapping, analysis, data management, sharing, and collaboration capabilities. Both products support these workflows in secure, scalable, and flexible ways that you can customize to meet your organizational and business needs.
When choosing which product is right for you, note that it does not have to be one product or the other. ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online are designed to work together and can serve different purposes in your organization.
ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online similarities
ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online operate around a central website that empowers users to create, customize, analyze, and share 2D and 3D data, maps, and apps. Users can share this information with select groups, the entire organization, or the public.
With both ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online, you have access to templates and configurable apps to get started, as well as a suite of Esri apps for the office and the field. In addition, you can take advantage of a vast collection of geographic data and information through ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.
Administrators can customize the look and feel of the ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise sites, add users, adjust privileges, and set advanced settings and properties through similar web-based interfaces.
For developers, the same APIs and SDKs are available for both ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online.
ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online differences
While there are similarities between the two products, there are also differences in how they are deployed and the set of features and capabilities available.
Infrastructure, installation, and deployment
ArcGIS Online is Esri's highly scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. It is hosted on Esri servers and completely scaled, managed, updated, and maintained by Esri. Because Esri controls the update schedule, users are not responsible for upgrading or patching the system themselves. What is current in ArcGIS Online is always current for any user around the world. As your usage and data needs scale, ArcGIS Online dynamically scales with you without the need for you to provision additional servers or infrastructure, though additional data stores are available to you if required. With ArcGIS Online, all you need is an organizational subscription and you are ready to go.
ArcGIS Enterprise is software that is installed on infrastructure you control and manage, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or on virtual machines. This allows you to design a highly customized system that meets your organization's business needs and service level agreements. You can choose to deploy all ArcGIS Enterprise components on one machine or scale out to many machines. High availability and disaster recovery strategies are supported, as well as deployments that are completely disconnected from the internet. With ArcGIS Enterprise, you have complete control over your system, whether that is when to patch the system or when to upgrade to the next version of the software.
ArcGIS Enterprise typically has one to two releases per year, whereas ArcGIS Online typically updates four times a year. Though ArcGIS Enterprise does not include all features and functionality that ArcGIS Online has and vice versa, you can typically expect to see most ArcGIS Online features within the ArcGIS Enterprise portal in the next few ArcGIS Enterprise releases following an ArcGIS Online update.
Note:
Esri also provides Esri Managed Cloud Services to run ArcGIS Enterprise on behalf of your organization.Features and capabilities
While both products enable foundational mapping and location workflows, there are some differences in what advanced, or additional, capabilities are available. You can extend ArcGIS Enterprise through the use of capability-based server roles: GIS Server, Image Server, Mission Server, GeoAnalytics Server, Notebook Server, and GeoEvent Server. Each of these roles provides unique capabilities such as image and raster processing and analysis, tabular big data analysis, data science and real-time data alerting, processing, and archiving. Future updates to ArcGIS Online will provide similar capabilities in some of these areas.
A key differentiator between the two products is that ArcGIS Enterprise can connect to user-managed data stores, whether cloud storage, folders, or databases. Users can reference the data in place from within these stores when publishing datasets that can be viewed and used on the web. This allows you to bring your own storage and integrate with data there, while also using data storage provided by ArcGIS Enterprise (via ArcGIS Data Store). In ArcGIS Online, all data is hosted by the ArcGIS Online system. To store data in ArcGIS Online that originated in, for example, a relational database, you must copy the data to ArcGIS Online, or use distributed collaboration to share data from ArcGIS Enterprise to ArcGIS Online.
Using ArcGIS Enterprise, users can publish additional types of services such as geocode services and geoprocessing services that you can use throughout your ArcGIS Enterprise environment.
Lastly, both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise support organization-specific logins via SAML and OpenID Connect to streamline authentication between systems. However, ArcGIS Enterprise provides additional security and authentication options through web-tier authentication, Active Directory, and more.
Using ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online together
From within ArcGIS Enterprise, you can use ArcGIS Online services such as elevation, geocoding, geoenrichment, and more. You can also access and incorporate Esri-curated ArcGIS Living Atlas content such as basemaps, imagery, demographics, infrastructure, and environmental data. This requires that your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment has access to the internet.
Many organizations use ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online together by implementing distributed collaboration. Distributed collaboration enables the sharing of layers, maps, and other data from one system to the other. For many, this makes data more accessible across an entire organization and allows for workflows such as managing data in ArcGIS Enterprise and sharing it with the public through ArcGIS Online.
Both products support organization-specific logins via SAML and OpenID Connect so you can streamline authentication between systems.
Considerations
Organizations often implement ArcGIS Enterprise when they require full control over the hardware running the system or when data is prohibited from being physically stored off-site or on infrastructure not controlled by the organization. ArcGIS Enterprise is also an option when servers, computers, and devices in the organization are not connected to the internet or have an unreliable internet connection. In addition, many organizations choose to deploy ArcGIS Enterprise when advanced analytical capabilities and distributed processing power is needed.
When choosing how to use ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise, organizations typically consider the following:
- Do you need to deploy on infrastructure you control or infrastructure Esri controls? What are your service level agreements and expectations?
- Who will need access to your system and where will they be accessing it?
- What analytical capabilities are needed?
- Do you need to integrate with your own data stores or would you prefer that Esri hosts your data?
Tip:
For additional implementation considerations and best practices, see Architecting the ArcGIS System: Best Practices.