Shapefiles are a tabular format developed by Esri. They are the most popular file format for GIS data. A shapefile is actually 3-4 individual files, commonly bundled together as a ZIP archive:
Choose to export Shapefiles if you need the broadest compatibilty among GIS software.
OGC Geopackages store geospatial data in a single SQLite database. Geopackages are very similar to Spatialite-enabled SQLite databases. They should be usable in most major GIS applications. Geopackages support practically unlimited file sizes and numbers of columns in tables, and have full support for Unicode. They're especially ideal if you need to run SQL queries over the data.
GeoJSON is an open standard geospatial data interchange format that represents simple geographic features and their nonspatial attributes. Based on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), GeoJSON is a format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures. It uses a geographic coordinate reference system, World Geodetic System 1984, and units of decimal degrees.
FlatGeobuf is a binary file format for storing geospatial vector data in a compact and efficient manner. It uses a hierarchical structure to organize features into layers, and stores attribute data in a separate file.
CSV is a file format for storing tabular data in plain text format. Each row of data represents a record, and each column represents a field of that record. CSV files are widely used because they are simple and easy to create and manipulate, making them a popular choice for data exchange.
SQL files are plain text files that contain SQL commands to create, modify or interact with a relational database. They can be used to define database schemas, constraints, and indexes, as well as to insert, update, and query data.
A .IMG file contains all information needed to render a map on a Garmin GPS mobile device. A .IMG is a disk image containing several files:
The KMZ file is a compressed version of a KML file. KML is an XML-based foramt for modeling points, lines, polygons and associated attributes.
OpenStreetMap's canonical data format is an XML document of nodes, ways and relations. The Protocol Buffer Binary Format (PBF) is an optimised representation of OSM XML, which is smaller on disk and faster to read. This format is only compatible with OpenStreetMap specific tools, such as OSM editing software. Each .PBF provided by the export tool should be referentially complete - that is, any node, way or relation referenced by a way or relation will appear in the PBF.
MBTiles is a file format for storing map tiles in a single file. The Export Tool allows users to create MBTiles containing tiles from OpenStreetMap, which can be used as sources of offline context within applications that support them.
POSM bundles are intended for bootstrapping Portable OpenStreetMap instances. Bundles are tarballs containing OSM PBFs (with all features in the area of interest) and any other formats that were selected.