Additional details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Manitou

> Anyone have experience working with their software?

I never used it, for my purposes QGIS was good enough.

And I am willing to put up with a lot to avoid vendor lock-in. See recent story how opening old Adobe files will cause loss of colour info, unless you pay licensing fee to Pantone.

I strongly encourage the same and to consider donating some part of saved funds to QGIS, possibly earmarked for something you want.

Their GUIs aren't bad. But the Python modules they offer for scripting are bad. The old one, "arcpy", was very un-Pythonic (e.g., no class for map layers, functions just returned layer names as strings). The new package, "arcgis", is better, but the documentation is bad. And you'll still need to use arcpy for some tasks.

I haven't used QGIS yet, but I'm probably going to start tinkering with it at home.

They kind of remind me of SAS. Their software isn’t horrible, but it’s not cheap and their licensing is complicated and their products overlap with each other and they are constantly pushing new products that have separate licenses.

I like that the company seems really dedicated to their areas and love GIS, like this article shows, but feel kind of bad because big commercial software is in a tough place.

ESRI offers quite a bit of functionality, but the licensing is notable.