Collector vs. App Studio

[GarrettSmith]

Hello,

I hope that all are safe, healthy, and staying sane.

I work for a small nonprofit and we are looking to develop a geospatial mobile field data collection framework for our volunteers. Initially it looked as though Collector for ArcGIS would be the perfect tool, however I just spoke with an ESRI rep and they informed me that each volunteer who used Collector for us would also have to have an ArcGIS Online Creator account. If that is true, we would need to purchase 10-25 of those licenses and we barely have the budget to purchase one license for our organization. I could have been asking the question, about users, incorrectly. It seems like that would be odd that every company that uses Collector would have to have different user accounts for all their field workers that use it to collect data. But maybe larger companies can also afford the additional users.

It seems then, that our only choice for deploying a non-fee based geospatial field mobile data collection framework is to use AppStudio? If this is the case, how difficult is it to create and deploy an app. It would be pretty simplistic. We are interested in users having the ability to place points and/or draw polygons while also having the ability to fill out a form about the site. 

Any implementation advise would be greatly appreciated and have a great rest of the day.

[Kylie]

Hi Garrett - For Collector, you don't have to have a creator license for each person doing data collection -- however, you do need to have a Collector license. You can have a single Creator account for your ArcGIS organization (and that would be used by the person making maps for data collection) and then have a Field Worker account for each person doing data collection in the field. You can learn more about these licenses here: ArcGIS Online Pricing for Teams & Individuals | Subscription Cost 

You also have the option of using a different app, such as Survey123 (which was built by Esri using AppStudio), which allows anonymous data collection. Then, you can make a survey (or form) to use to collect the data and share it publicly. Then send a link to that form to each person doing data collection for your organization. That said, it is shared publicly - so you could potentially get others mucking with the data.

[DerekLaw]

Hi Garrett,

Just to add onto Kylie's post, you may want to look into this program and apply Nonprofit Program 

Hope this helps,