Frequently Asked Questions

ArcGIS Experience Builder provides you with a new way of creating web experiences. Its mobile-adaptive design helps you build compelling web applications. Create web apps and pages, design your own templates by performing an easy drag-and-drop operation, and integrate 2D and 3D—no coding required. Like ArcGIS Web AppBuilder, ArcGIS Experience Builder requires the Creator user type or higher to create apps. Experience Builder is available in 3 editions: online, enterprise, and developer.

An experience is about what somebody feels and the cognitive feedback they have when interacting with something. Within ArcGIS Experience Builder, an "experience" is a web app or page that may include sections, widgets, data sources, a theme, and/or a layout. The ultimate goal of this product is to help users create compelling web experiences.

Built with flexibility and performance in mind, Experience Builder has the following key features:

• Capability to visually create web apps and pages by performing a drag-and-drop operation—with your choice of the following:
  • Nonmapcentric or mapcentric apps
  • On a fixed or scrolling screen
  • On single or multiple pages
• Ready-to-use tools to build the apps you need
• A selection of designer-made templates to choose from or design your own
• Mobile-adaptive design
• Integrated 2D and 3D
• A durable URL that contains app state information, so everyone you share the app with can see it in the same state
• Extensible framework for developers to create custom tools

Yes. The ArcGIS Experience Builder developer edition enables Esri partners and developers to build custom widgets and templates.

For the online edition, Experience Builder will not replace Web AppBuilder nor make it obsolete. Both builders will be running and maintained in parallel. Web AppBuilder will continue to be available.

For the enterprise edition, Web AppBuilder follows the ArcGIS Enterprise product life cycle.

For the developer edition, Web AppBuilder follows the ArcGIS API for JavaScript 3.x product life cycle.

Starting with the core and popular widgets, Experience Builder is planned to reach most of the functional parity of Web AppBuilder through incremental releases.

Flexible layouts, a mobile-adaptive design, integrated 2D and 3D, and action triggers are four key features in Experience Builder that are not available in Web AppBuilder. On the other hand, Web AppBuilder is empowered with more than 70 widgets so you can quickly build your own workflow. More specifically:

• Experience Builder provides flexible layouts so you can build apps that are mapcentric or nonmapcentric and display them on a fixed or scrolling screen, on single or multiple pages, whereas Web AppBuilder enables you to create apps that are mapcentric and displayed on a fixed screen, on a single page.
• Experience Builder has been built with a mobile-adaptive design, whereas Web AppBuilder is mobile friendly.
• Experience Builder integrates both 3D and 2D content so you can interact with both within one app, whereas Web AppBuilder separates 2D and 3D content so you cannot apply 2D widgets to a 3D app.
• Experience Builder adds action triggers so you can make a widget respond accordingly based on actions the other widget performs, whereas Web AppBuilder does not have this mechanism built in at the framework. For example, when a 2D map is zoomed in to an area, you can configure a trigger to make the 3D map zoom in to the same area and vice versa.
• Web AppBuilder is empowered with more than 70 widgets, whereas Experience Builder currently is not there yet. We plan to rewrite most of the widgets through incremental releases.

No. You need to reconfigure apps or rewrite custom widgets created with Web AppBuilder if you choose to move them to Experience Builder.

No. While ArcGIS Experience Builder maintains a very similar programming pattern for building custom widgets, all widgets will need to be rewritten to work within the new framework. This is because ArcGIS Experience Builder is built on ArcGIS API 4.x for JavaScript, whereas Web AppBuilder is built on version 3.x. ArcGIS Experience Builder takes advantage of modern web development technologies, including React and TypeScript, which are part of the new widget development platform.