esri2open, a toolbox for exporting data from ESRI arcmap to various open formats. You can get it from github here, it doesn’t require administrative rights to use it and nothing needs to be installed. If you scroll to the bottom of this post there are detailed instructions for installing and using it. This project wouldn’t have been possible without Mike Byrne getting the ball rolling and the other contributors.

Edit: if you want to easily view your geojson you output you can try leaflet workspace (supports drag and drop) or geojsonlint, (thanks to Christopher Pollard for the idea to include this).

The goal of this tool set has been to make it easy for the people that make data to export that data in a way that is useful. Standard ESRI products do not make that easy to do as you have the choice of formats like personal/file geodatabases that are not open, or formats like shapefiles that have technical restrictions which prevent them faithfully reproducing data.

This toolbox aims to have sensible defaults and produce data that people who do not use ESRI produces can consume whether that is a web map in the browser or somebody doing serious geoprocessing with some other program. In that spirit it converts all data from whatever projection you’re using to WGS84 lat/lngs and removes all fields from json and geojson output that are null or undefined.

Just download this zipfile (https://github.com/project-open-data/esri2open/archive/master.zip), extract the folder it contains and put the folder anywhere you want. Then inside arcmap in the toolbox

window right click on and choose ‘Add Toolbox’, then navigate to where you unzipped the folder and select ‘esri2open.tbx’

click open or hit enter.

You should have a new toolbox,

if you open it up you’ll see 3 scripts,

the first one ESRI to Open looks like this,

the first field takes a standard feature class or layer just like the standard tools, the second field is what you want the output file to be, the extention here determins what type of output file you get, in other words if it ends in ‘.geojson’ you get geojson, if its ‘.csv’ you get csv, ‘.sqlite’ gets you sqlite, and ‘.json’ gets you json that isn’t strict geojson. The last field is for the geometry type. Unless you know what you’re doing you shouldn’t touch this. This allows you to choose the format you want to output your geometry in, it only does anything for csv and for json formats and allows you to choose geojson, WKT, or to omit geometry.

The second script is ESRI to Open (merge),

it allows you to put in multiple features classes which are combined into one geojson file.

The last script is Esri To Open (multiple),

which allows you to queue up multiple files to export, the options are the same with the exception of type, since you are specifying a folder you want to output to it is here you specify what type of output file you want.