Best Photogrammetry Software in 2026, Compared for Drone Mapping and 3D Models

For drone mapping and surveying, the shortlist is PIX4Dmatic and Agisoft Metashape Professional on a desktop, DJI Terra if you fly DJI, and a cloud service such as Lidarvisor or DroneDeploy if you would rather not run a workstation. WebODM is the free option.

For 3D models of objects and buildings, RealityScan is free for most small firms, 3DF Zephyr has a free edition and a cheap perpetual one, and Meshroom is free and open source.

Lidarvisor is ours, so read its entry with that in mind. Its limits are printed next to its strengths, as for every other tool here. Every price on this page was read on the vendor's own site in October 2026.

These tools turn a drone flight into map products: an orthophoto, a surface and a terrain model, a point cloud, often contours and volumes. What separates them is where they run, how they prove accuracy, and how you pay.

Upload the photo folders of each flight, a LiDAR cloud if you have one and your control point file if you surveyed any, then click Process once. Lidarvisor builds the coloured point cloud and the orthophoto, then runs the same processing it uses on LiDAR: ground and vegetation classification, terrain and surface models, contours, and vectors for CAD and GIS.

Two things set it apart from a desktop package. Your control points are found and marked in the photos for you, with no photo to open. And the report measures accuracy on check points held back from the adjustment, so the figure it prints is an accuracy, not a residual.

A textured 3D mesh and a Gaussian splat are two more boxes to tick on the same run, at no extra credit. See how photogrammetry works in Lidarvisor.

Runs on: any browser, processing in our cloud
Price: 1 credit per hectare on every plan. Free: 50 hectares once, to view and share. Downloads from $19 a month billed yearly (pricing)
Gaussian splat: yes, in your project's coordinates, PLY download
LiDAR: yes, in the same project as the photos

PIX4Dmatic is now Pix4D's main desktop engine. It turns aerial and terrestrial captures into point clouds, orthomosaics, DSM and DTM, contours and CAD-ready vectors, and the Standard plan processes drone, mobile and LiDAR data in one project. PIX4Dsurvey was folded into it in January 2026.

The older PIX4Dmapper is ending: no new sales or renewals from January 1, 2027, and support stops on December 1, 2027. PIX4Dcloud is the browser option, with georeferenced Gaussian splats since October 2025.

Runs on: Windows 11, or macOS on Apple M1 or newer; GPU acceleration on NVIDIA only
Price: PIX4Dmatic $2,290, $3,990 or $4,990 a year; PIX4Dcloud $1,290 or $4,490 a year, billed yearly. Free 15-day plan
Gaussian splat: PIX4Dmatic Pro (Windows only) and PIX4Dcloud
LiDAR: yes, in PIX4Dmatic

Metashape is still sold as a perpetual licence, and it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux with NVIDIA or AMD graphics cards.

Pick the edition carefully. Standard ($179) makes point clouds and textured models but has no ground control points and no georeferenced DSM, DTM or orthomosaic. Professional ($3,499) adds all of that, plus point cloud classification, contours, aerial LiDAR support and cloud processing.

Runs on: Windows, macOS, Linux
Price: Standard $179, Professional $3,499, perpetual node-locked licences with 12 months of support. 30-day trial
Gaussian splat: not offered
LiDAR: Professional only

DJI Terra is DJI's own processing software, built around its drones and Zenmuse LiDAR payloads. It makes orthophotos, DSMs, textured models, point clouds and, on Flagship, Gaussian splats, with control point marking and built-in PPK. There have been no maintenance fees since version 5.0, and Zenmuse L3 LiDAR processing has been free since 5.1.

The catch is the hardware: Windows only, NVIDIA only. The trial lasts a month and stops at 500 photos.

Runs on: Windows with an NVIDIA GPU, 32 GB of RAM minimum
Price: on the US DJI Store, Standard $1,850 a year or $5,280 permanent, Flagship $3,700 a year or $10,580 permanent
Gaussian splat: Flagship, exported as PLY or 3D Tiles
LiDAR: yes, from DJI LiDAR

DroneDeploy is a cloud platform for jobsites: a flight app, processing, and maps the whole team opens in a browser. It makes orthomosaics, elevation and terrain models, contours, point clouds and 3D models, with cut and fill and automatic GCP tagging on Aerial Pro. Procore, the construction software company, completed its purchase of DroneDeploy on September 9, 2026.

LiDAR is upload and view: preprocessed LAS files, with no terrain model or volumes computed from them. Gaussian splats are a beta for Aerial Pro, enabled on request, with no export during the beta.

Runs on: browser, plus a flight app for iOS and Android
Price: individual Flight & Analysis plan $4,188 billed annually, up to 3,000 images per map; team plans on quote. 14-day trial
Gaussian splat: beta on Aerial Pro, view only
LiDAR: preprocessed LAS, view only

WebODM is free and open source, with installers for Windows, macOS and Linux. It produces orthophotos, elevation models, point clouds and textured models, with ground control points and, since October 2026, check points. Since April 2026 it is an independent project with its own engine, ODX. The OpenDroneMap project carries on separately with ODM and sells its own Windows installer.

If you would rather not run it yourself, WebODM Lightning is the hosted version, with classification, terrain models, contours and volumes among its outputs. Both display Gaussian splats, but the splat is trained in a separate program and uploaded.

Runs on: Windows, macOS, Linux, 8 GB of RAM at least and 16 GB recommended; Lightning in the cloud
Price: free. Lightning from $24 a month billed yearly, or pay per map with 150 free credits
Gaussian splat: displays splats trained in another program
LiDAR: not mentioned in its documentation

Esri sells drone processing inside its ArcGIS Reality family. Drone2Map is the Windows desktop app, Site Scan for ArcGIS the cloud platform with fleet management, and ArcGIS Reality Studio and Reality for ArcGIS Pro sit above them. Results land straight in ArcGIS.

Drone2Map 2026.1 merged its two licence levels into a single Reality Mapping licence, so every user gets the former Advanced features: point clouds, meshes and Gaussian splats as 3D Tiles. Site Scan has made splats in the cloud since May 2026, for Custom Subscription accounts and not for customers on EU hosting.

Runs on: Drone2Map on Windows 11, 32 GB of RAM for up to 2,500 images; Site Scan in the cloud
Price: not published, contact sales
Gaussian splat: yes, as 3D Tiles
LiDAR: Drone2Map displays LAS files; Reality Studio can add lidar to the reconstruction

Formerly ContextCapture, iTwin Capture Modeler builds reality meshes, Gaussian splats, point clouds and orthophotos for infrastructure and digital twins. It processes LiDAR as well as photos, and the WorkSuite bundle covers terrain models, contours and volumes.

The pricing model changed. Modeler Flex is a free app to prepare projects, and you pay when you process, either on a licensed iTwin Capture Engine or in Bentley's cloud services.

Runs on: Windows 11, an NVIDIA RTX 3070 at least for the Engine; cloud services
Price: Modeler Flex free; Engine from €4,095 and WorkSuite from €5,115 a year, as shown to a European visitor; cloud on quote
Gaussian splat: yes
LiDAR: yes, LAS, LAZ and other formats

3Dsurvey covers the whole survey job in one window: point clouds, true orthophotos, ground classification, terrain models, volumes, contours, profiles and cross sections, with a CAD engine built in. AprilTag ground targets are detected automatically, and the Scan module merges LiDAR and SLAM clouds with photogrammetry.

It has said openly that it will not add Gaussian splats until they reach measurement-grade accuracy. Version 4.2, out on October 22, 2026, claims processing up to 5 to 10 times faster on large datasets.

Runs on: Windows 11 or Ubuntu 24.04, with an NVIDIA GPU
Price: $225 a month billed yearly ($2,700), $270 month to month, or a perpetual licence. 14-day trial
Gaussian splat: no, by choice
LiDAR: yes, with the Scan module ($120 a month)

These are built for a textured model you can turn around and look at from every side, for heritage, VFX, games or reverse engineering. Some also produce orthophotos and terrain models, RealityScan for one, but their strength is the model.

RealityScan is the new name of RealityCapture, Epic Games' photogrammetry software, since June 2025. It builds photo-real models and point clouds from small objects to large environments, and exports orthophotos, DSMs and DTMs too. Version 2.0 added aerial LiDAR, and 2.1 reads classified LAS and LAZ.

The licence is generous: free for students, educators, hobbyists and most non-games companies under $1 million in yearly revenue, and $1,250 per seat per year above that.

Runs on: Windows with an NVIDIA GPU, or AMD since version 2.2; an experimental Linux build for the command line
Price: free under $1 million in yearly revenue; otherwise $1,250 per user per year. 30-day trial
Gaussian splat: not offered; it exports to COLMAP for splat trainers
LiDAR: yes

3DF Zephyr, from 3Dflow in Verona, comes in three editions. Free handles up to 50 photos. Lite (€199, perpetual) is the low-cost edition for 3D models. The full edition adds the survey side: control points, orthophotos, terrain models, DXF contours and volumes, plus laser scans registered with the photos.

Version 9.0, released in July 2026, added Gaussian splatting to the full edition and to Lite.

Runs on: Windows 10 and 11; a CUDA card speeds it up, the CPU alone works
Price: Free; Lite €199; full edition €4,200 perpetual or €250 a month, excluding VAT
Gaussian splat: yes, since 9.0
LiDAR: laser scans in the full edition

Meshroom is the desktop app of AliceVision, an open source framework under the MPL-2.0 licence. It turns photos into a textured mesh through a node graph you can open and change at every step, and it is aimed at film, VFX, games, science and cultural heritage.

It is not a mapping tool: no orthophoto, no terrain model, and no documented ground control workflow. Gaussian splats exist only as an experimental plugin that needs a developer setup.

Runs on: Windows or Linux, with an NVIDIA GPU
Price: free
Gaussian splat: experimental plugin
LiDAR: E57 import since version 2025.1

• Propeller is a cloud platform for earthworks, mining and aggregates, sold with its AeroPoints smart ground control targets ($1,000 each). It processes DJI Zenmuse L1 and L2 LiDAR. The platform price is not published.
• SimActive Correlator3D is a Windows suite for large aerial blocks with no image limit, from €295 a month. It has made Gaussian splats since version 11, in April 2026.
• COLMAP is the free research engine behind many pipelines: camera alignment and dense point clouds, no orthophoto. Many Gaussian splat trainers start from its output.
• Polycam and KIRI Engine are phone and web apps for objects and rooms, both with free tiers and Gaussian splats. Polycam also takes drone photos for splats, from 20 to 200 images.

A Gaussian splat turns the same photos into a different kind of 3D. Instead of a surface, it stores millions of small coloured, semi-transparent blobs that the viewer blends into an image. It looks like the photos, including the things a mesh handles badly: glass, foliage, fences, railings, thin wires.

What it does not give you is geometry. You cannot take a contour, a volume or a CAD line off a splat. So the split is simple: photogrammetry for anything you measure, the splat for showing a site to a client, checking it by eye, or walking someone through a place they have never visited.

A splat also depends more on how you flew. From vertical photos only, it looks best from above. Oblique photos are what make it convincing when you orbit a building or drop to street level.

Among the drone tools above, PIX4Dcloud and PIX4Dmatic Pro, DJI Terra Flagship, Drone2Map and Site Scan, iTwin Capture, Correlator3D, 3DF Zephyr and Lidarvisor make splats. DroneDeploy has them as a beta without export, and WebODM displays splats trained in another program. Check the coordinates the splat comes out in: Pix4D documents its PIX4Dcloud splats as georeferenced, while most vendors do not say. In Lidarvisor the splat sits in your project's coordinate system, on the point cloud and the mesh of the same run, and downloads as a PLY.

Dedicated splat tools work from drone photos too. Postshot trains on your own Windows PC with an NVIDIA card, from €17 a month billed yearly for commercial use, and the free SuperSplat editor edits and publishes a splat in the browser.

Photogrammetry measures what the camera sees. Over bare ground, roads and roofs, that is plenty, and the colour comes for free. Under trees it sees the top of the canopy, because no photo sees the ground beneath the leaves, so a terrain model there is a guess.

LiDAR pulses pass through the gaps between leaves, and some of them come back from the ground. That is why firms that map wooded or overgrown sites often fly both, and why Lidarvisor takes photos and LiDAR in the same project.

Free is real in this field. Each option comes with a condition.

• WebODM: free and open source drone mapping on Windows, macOS and Linux, with orthophotos, elevation models, point clouds and textured models. It runs on your own machine.
• Meshroom: free, open source 3D models on Windows and Linux. It needs an NVIDIA graphics card and makes no orthophoto or terrain model.
• COLMAP: free camera alignment and dense point clouds under a BSD licence, for researchers and developers.
• RealityScan: free for students, educators, hobbyists and most companies under $1 million in yearly revenue, on Windows.
• 3DF Zephyr Free: up to 50 photos on Windows. Enough to learn on, not for a survey.
• Lidarvisor Free: 50 hectares once, about 200 photos per run, with the same processing as the paid plans. You view and share the results in 3D; downloading them needs a paid plan, from $19 a month billed yearly.