The shapefile dates to the early 1990s and, despite its name, is not a single file but a set of at least three files that must travel together: geometry, attributes, and index, plus optional projection and metadata files. It stores one geometry type per file, limits field names to ten characters, caps file size at two gigabytes, and cannot store true curves or rasters. These limits were acceptable thirty years ago but cause constant friction today, from truncated field names that turn population_density into populatio to datasets that silently split when they exceed the size cap.

GeoPackage, standardised by the Open Geospatial Consortium, stores vectors, rasters, and attribute tables in a single SQLite database file with no practical size limit, field names up to any reasonable length, and support for multiple layers per file. QGIS reads and writes GeoPackage natively, and it is the default format for new layers in current QGIS versions. For almost every new project, GeoPackage is simply the better container.

The main argument for shapefiles is compatibility: nearly every GIS tool ever made reads them, and many government data portals still distribute them, so you will keep encountering shapefiles in downloaded data for years. GeoPackage support is now broad, covering QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, GDAL tools, and most web mapping libraries, but some older or niche software still lacks it. When sharing data with an unknown recipient, a shapefile is the safer bet, while GeoPackage is the better choice for your own working files.

Performance differences are modest for small datasets but grow with size: GeoPackage's spatial index and single-file structure make large-layer rendering and querying faster, and its support for transactions means an interrupted save is less likely to corrupt the file. Field types are richer too, with proper date, time, and boolean fields instead of the shapefile's everything-is-text-or-number compromise, which reduces the silent data-type errors that plague attribute joins.

Use GeoPackage for everything you create, keep shapefiles only for data you receive or must deliver to a system that demands them, and convert incoming shapefiles to GeoPackage at the start of a project so you work in the better format throughout. Conversion in QGIS is a right-click export, and it preserves geometry and attributes while fixing field-name truncation on the way in, provided you rename fields sensibly during export.

If a colleague insists on shapefiles, send both formats and note that the GeoPackage is the master copy. That habit costs seconds and prevents the classic failure of emailing a .shp file without its companions, which renders the data useless on arrival. Formats are infrastructure, not ideology, but choosing the modern default removes a whole class of avoidable problems from your mapping work.

A final consideration is longevity. Shapefiles have survived for three decades precisely because they are simple and widely supported, and GeoPackage benefits from being an open standard maintained by an international consortium rather than a single vendor, which is a strong guarantee for the future. When you archive a project, store the GeoPackage alongside a plain-text readme describing its layers, coordinate system, and source data, and consider exporting a copy of key layers to a text-based format such as GeoJSON for maximum future readability. Archiving is the part of GIS work nobody celebrates, but it is what lets someone open your project in ten years and still understand it, and choosing a modern, open format is the easiest archival decision you will ever make.

When in doubt, test both formats on your own data: export the same layer as a shapefile and as a GeoPackage, check that field names, attribute values, and geometry counts match, and time a simple query on each. That five-minute experiment settles the debate for your specific dataset better than any article, and it builds the habit of verifying format behaviour before committing a whole project to it.