Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a powerful geospatial analysis platform for cloud processing satellite imagery and other geospatial data. With a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth's surface, it’s fast becoming the tool of choice among analysts that need to work at scale.
When considering Earth Engine for your business or NGO, it’s important to understand the benefits and limitations before investing time and money in the technology. In this post, we share with you what we consider to be the main advantages and disadvantages of Google Earth Engine to help you decide if this is the right tool for your geospatial analysis requirements.
Advantages of Google Earth Engine
1. Over 900+ geospatial datasets to choose from
Google Earth Engine's data archive contains more than 40 years of historical imagery and scientific datasets that are updated and expanded daily. It has over seventy petabytes of public geospatial datasets, including Landsat, Sentinel, and MODIS. Whether you are analysing climate and weather data, land cover change, terrain, or croplands, there is sure to be a dataset for you. You can also upload your own raster or vector data. The extensive data calalog can be searched by tags, and if there is a public dataset missing, you can suggest it to the Earth Engine team to include.
2. Faster analyses with cloud processing
Earth Engine runs on Google Cloud, giving you access to high-performance computing, even from a mobile device. And since it is cloud-based, you don’t need a high internet bandwidth as you won’t be downloading large files. This is especially useful for analysts working in countries with poor or unstable internet connectivity. Analyses take minutes to run versus hours, or sometimes days, on platforms like Global Forest Watch and ArcGIS, so there are no more frustrations with buffering, or worse, the program crashing as it tries to process your data. Exporting your results in image, map tile, table, and video formats is fast. Just select where you want them saved - your Google Drive account, Google Cloud Storage or as a new Earth Engine asset.
3. Commercial access is now available
Launched in 2010, Google Earth Engine was previously only available for research and not-for-profit activities. It had the reputation of being a side project for the main Google business, until this year when Google announced it was opening up commercial access to Earth Engine through Google Cloud. This means businesses and governments can purchase commercial licences to use the platform. Read more about what this means for impact businesses in this blog.
Disadvantages of Google Earth Engine
1. Requires JavaScript and Python coding skills
Google Earth Engine is a Developer product with a code interface, meaning you need computer programming skills to use it. While most of the GIS and remote sensing analysts we speak to have learnt to code in R, Earth Engine requires users to code in JavaScript or Python programming languages. We hear stories of analysts spending a lot of time learning these languages, often turning to the various online communities such as Earth Engine on GitHub and GIS Stack Exchange for help. More than one analyst has told us how they copy code examples and try to modify them to suit their project requirements, and then have difficulty debugging the code when it doesn’t work as expected. Even for those familiar with these languages, the Earth Engine functional programming style is a paradigm shift that takes a while to master. It’s not an efficient way to work. If this isn’t an option, you can search Google’s Cloud Partner Directory to find a technology partner, or you can try Earth Blox as a no-code way to use Earth Engine.
2. Limited support
Like any other Google product, Earth Engine’s help and support is designed to be self-serve. In addition to the GitHub and Stack Exchange communities mentioned above, you can dig into Earth Engine’s Developer Documentation for code samples, tutorials, best practice guides, and to access the community forum. This basic level of support is free. For commercial clients, Google offers an option to upgrade to premium support packages which give you direct access to their engineering team.
3. Complex pricing
Google provides two pricing options. The first is based on the consumption of Earth Engine resources (compute units and storage) and the second is a monthly subscription fee based on the number of user seats with consumption limits. The subscription tiers, which will appeal to most SMEs, and are individual, basic, professional, and premium. The basic subscription, priced at USD 500 a month, gives you two user seats, 100 Earth Engine Compute Unit (EECU) hours of batch credit, 10 hours of online EECU credit, and 100 GB of cloud storage. This tier does not include a Service Level Agreement. With any of the subscriptions, if you exceed the usage, you will have additional charges, making it difficult to control costs.
Get no-code access to Earth Engine with Earth Blox
From the breadth of data to cloud capabilities, Earth Engine has a lot to offer. That’s why we built Earth Blox on top of it. But just like any technology, it also has limitations. If the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, you might like to consider Earth Blox. It gives you a code-free interface to Earth Engine’s entire data catalogue. We provide pre-built workflows, and the ability to build your own workflows using the drag and drop blocks and dedicated support for our customers.
Our users are not only GIS or remote sensing analysts. They include project managers, risk managers, commercial and on-the-ground teams made up of researchers, sustainability, and disaster recovery experts. By removing the coding barrier, Earth Blox helps businesses and NGOs bring geospatial analyses in-house to meet the increasing demand for project assessments and monitoring.
With Earth Blox, you get:
- A code-free interface with pre-built and DIY workflows to run analyses quickly and easily.
- The ability to save, re-run and share workflows with your team to save time on repetitive analyses.
- Cloud hosting for fast processing and data exports.
- Over 900+ geospatial datasets from Earth Engine.
- Direct access to our customer success team, who are dedicated to ensuring it works for you and your team.
- A straightforward licence model, based on the number of users, to help you control costs. (We offer great discounts for NGOs.)
See how customers are benefiting from Earth Blox over on our case studies page.