CAD · pricing
CloudCompare pricing
CloudCompare publishes a single tier. Below is what it costs, what it covers, and how that compares with the cad tools listed alongside it.
As of 1 September 2026, CloudCompare pricing is free. Figures are the vendor's list prices as recorded on this page's last check; the vendor's site is the final word.
- Entry price
- Free
- Model
- Open source, no licence fee
- Tiers
- 1
- Free tier
- Yes
CloudCompare plans, side by side
Every published tier in ascending order of price, with the number of features each one lists. An absence here means the record does not itemise it, not that the tier lacks it.
| Plan | Price | Features listed | Step up from the tier below |
|---|---|---|---|
| CloudCompare | Free | 5 | Entry tier |
Where CloudCompare stops being free
CloudCompare, Free
- GNU General Public Licence
- No licence fee and no usage limits
- No commercial support contract exists
- Support is a community forum and GitHub issues
- Source available for internal modification and plugin development
No paid tier on record
CloudCompare lists a free tier and no priced tier above it in the record we hold.
What the product covers
The full CloudCompare feature record, grouped as the catalogue groups it. This is the product as a whole; the record does not map every feature onto a specific tier.
Other
- Cloud to cloud distance
- Cloud to mesh distance
- Registration
- Segmentation and cleaning
- Plugin architecture
- Format support
- Command line mode
People bring CloudCompare in for a monitoring engineer comparing quarterly laser scans of a retaining wall to quantify movement without buying a proprietary deformation package, a heritage team registering dozens of terrestrial scans of a building into a single cloud before meshing, a geomorphologist measuring erosion between two drone-derived surfaces of a river bank, a survey technician cleaning and subsampling a scan before delivering it to a client whose software cannot handle the full density. If that is not the job you are buying for, the alternatives to CloudCompare are worth a look before you commit to a tier.
How that compares in CAD
Too few cad tools in this directory publish a starting price to quote a meaningful median, so the table below is a like-for-like list rather than a ranking.
| Tool | Entry price | Model | Rated | Head to head |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CloudCompare (this page) | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | |
| Carlson Software | $4450/one-time | One-time purchase | - | vs CloudCompare |
| RealityScan | Free, then $1250/year | Free below a revenue threshold, then per seat per year | - | vs CloudCompare |
| Bentley iTwin Capture Modeler | On request | quote | - | vs CloudCompare |
| MicroSurvey CAD | $2945/one-time | One-time purchase | - | vs CloudCompare |
| Nomad Sculpt | On request | One-time purchase | - | vs CloudCompare |
| nTop | On request | quote | - | vs CloudCompare |
Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry, they are not reviews hosted on Softwr. How each figure is used is set out on the CloudCompare badges page.
Before you pay for CloudCompare
Three things this page cannot tell you, and all three change the bill. The record carries a price and a billing period but not the unit - per-seat and flat-rate pricing are indistinguishable in this data, so a five-person team may be looking at five times the figure above. It carries no annual rate, so any discount for paying yearly is not something this page can quote. And it carries no trial length.
What it can tell you is the shape of the ladder: a single tier at Free. Because there is a free tier, the cheapest way to answer the rest is to use it before paying anything.
CloudCompare runs on windows, macos, linux, and is published by CloudCompare open source project, administered by Daniel Girardeau-Montaut of France. The full record is on the CloudCompare review, and the rest of the category is under best cad tools.
CloudCompare pricing questions
- How much does CloudCompare cost?
- CloudCompare publishes a single tier, CloudCompare, at Free.
- Does CloudCompare have a free plan?
- Yes. The CloudCompare tier costs nothing and covers gnu general public licence, no licence fee and no usage limits, no commercial support contract exists.
- Which cad tools can I use without paying?
- 2 of the 8 cad tools listed alongside CloudCompare have a free tier: RealityScan, SolveSpace.
- What am I actually paying for with CloudCompare?
- The record lists 7 features across 1 area: other. In practice it is brought in for a monitoring engineer comparing quarterly laser scans of a retaining wall to quantify movement without buying a proprietary deformation package, a heritage team registering dozens of terrestrial scans of a building into a single cloud before meshing, a geomorphologist measuring erosion between two drone-derived surfaces of a river bank.
- Does CloudCompare charge per user?
- The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 1 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.
- Are these CloudCompare prices current?
- They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.
- What should I compare CloudCompare against before paying?
- The closest cad tools in this directory are Carlson Software, RealityScan, Bentley iTwin Capture Modeler, MicroSurvey CAD. Each has a side-by-side comparison with CloudCompare covering price, platforms and features.