WbW vs WbW-Pro : What is the difference?
Andrew Whitemore
Whitebox Geospatial Inc
Hello Andrew and thank you for your question. It’s strange, but I was just replying to another user who had the exact same question. I suppose given we launched this new product this week, it’s going to be the case that people are wondering about it. So, let me see if I can clarify things for you. Hang in there, this might be a bit longer of an explanation.
We now have four different but related products under the umbrella of ‘Whitebox’. The first set of products are the WhiteboxTools Open Core (WbTOC) and it’s set of extension tools, known as the Whitebox Toolset Extension (WTE). The WbTOC, as the name suggests is open-source and freely available (the source code is on Github). WTE is a set of about 68 extra plugin tools that extended the functionality of the WbTOC in certain areas such as lidar processing, remote sensing analysis, and DEM processing and analysis, among others. We sell licenses for WTE and it is not open-source. Both of these two products are intended to be back-end software that users access via one of the many supported front-ends, e.g. QGIS, ArcGIS, or the scripting front-ends that allow you to access it via R or Python.
Whitebox Workflows for Python (WbW) is somewhat different. It takes the same set of functions in WbTOC and wraps them in a way where they are a native Python extension module. You can look at the WbW page on our site for more details, but essentially, this makes it much, much more powerful for working with Python. Basically, if you’re using Whitebox to create Python-based geoprocessing scripts, you probably should be using WbW instead of WbTOC. Or at least that’s what I would recommend because it allows for much more powerful and natural scripting. It’s the product that I’m using for teaching my remote sensing and graduate-level environmental modelling courses this semester for example. Now, WbW is not open-source unfortunately, but a license for it only runs $10 per seat per year, so it is very affordable as a solution. Compared with WbTOC and WTE, WbW also has the benefit of having a floating-license model, which means that you can access it more easily from multiple computers, over a network, or on cloud-based computing platforms (this is the reason I’m teaching with it this semester).
Whitebox Workflows for Python Pro (WbW-Pro) is based on the WbW platform that I described above but adds all of the tools from the WTE extension to WbW. That is, those same 68 tools that you can purchase in WTE are now available via WbW with a WbW-Pro license. An annual license cost about the same as WTE (I think that at the moment multi-seat licenses are a bit cheaper for WbW-Pro than WTE) and you get the same flexible floating-license model with WbW-Pro as WbW. That’s it really. I hope that that clarifies things for you. I’m sorry if that was a long-winded response. If there are improvements to our website that can make this distinction clearer to you, please let me know and we’ll be happy to revise to help the user community out.
Cheers,
John
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Andrew Whitemore
By the way, you mentioned that you are teaching with WbW and I was wondering if you'll make these teaching resources available?
Whitebox Geospatial Inc
Hello again Andrew.
Yes, I’m sorry, it was certainly a longer reply! The floating licenses for both WbW and WbW-Pro should reflect the number of simultaneous users that you expect will need the product. Depending on your team’s frequency usage of the software, I suspect that you’ll be able to get away with a five-user license for your 8-person team without much issue. But as you say, if you find it’s an issue, you can always add seats later as need later. I’m happy to answer any questions that you might have about it.
As for the teaching resources, for a long while now I’ve wanted to release a ‘lab pack’ of resources to help instructors using Whitebox. I hope that this spring to have some time to convert my remote sensing labs into a set of instructor’s resources that I make available to everyone.
Regards,
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