QGIS - UCL-ShippingGroup/shipviz GitHub Wiki
I have used QGIS for the ECAs works, and also to measure performance against CartoDB. There are a few visualisation tasks that run much quicker and are more reliable in QGIS, plus there's a lot of plugins that can be used to aid data visualisation. It was a good alternative to CartoDB, however it's more difficult to use and it's getting out of date. I recommend using it in conjunction with CartoDB, which CartoDB being the main tool for ingestion, data manipulation and visualisation.