Comparison of GIS vector file formats

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of vector GIS file formats. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based on the stable versions without any add-ons, extensions or external programs.

	Design Authority	Software license
GML	Open Geospatial Consortium	? Geography Markup Language (GML) - XML based open standard (by OpenGIS) for GIS data exchange AutoCAD DXF - Contour elevation plots in AutoCAD DXF format Shapefile - ESRI's open, hybrid vector data format using SHP, SHX and DBF files Simple Features - Open Geospatial Consortium specification for vector data MapInfo TAB format - MapInfo's vector data format using TAB, DAT, ID and MAP files National Transfer Format (NTF) - National Transfer Format (mostly used by the UK Ordnance Survey) TIGER - Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing Cartesian coordinate system (XYZ) - Simple point cloud Vector Product Format - National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)'s format of vectored data for large geographic databases. GeoMedia - Intergraph's Microsoft Access based format for spatial vector storage. ISFC - Intergraph's MicroStation based CAD solution attaching vector elements to a relational Microsoft Access database Personal Geodatabase - ESRI's closed, integrated vector data storage strategy using Microsoft's Access MDB format File Geodatabase - ESRI's geodatabase format, stored as folders in a file system. Coverage - ESRI's closed, hybrid vector data storage strategy. Legacy ArcGIS Workstation / ArcInfo format with reduced support in ArcGIS Desktop lineup Spatial Data File - Autodesk's high-performance geodatabase format, native to MapGuide GeoJSON - a lightweight format based on JSON, used by many open source GIS packages