Agisoft Metashape

Desktop photogrammetry that turns photographs into point clouds, meshes, orthomosaics and DEMs

As of 1 September 2026, Agisoft Metashape starts at $179/one-time. A node-locked photogrammetry package with a published price and no subscription requirement, which makes it one of the few reality capture tools you can still own outright. Softwr lists it under Maps. Agisoft Metashape is made by Agisoft LLC, available on Windows, macOS, Linux.

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Overview

What Agisoft Metashape does

Agisoft Metashape performs structure-from-motion photogrammetry: give it overlapping photographs from a drone, a handheld camera or a rig, and it produces a sparse and dense point cloud, a textured mesh, a digital elevation model and an orthomosaic. The Professional edition adds georeferencing with ground control points, coordinate system handling, multispectral processing, ground point classification and Python scripting. The fact that changes shortlists is the licensing. Metashape Professional is sold as a node-locked perpetual licence at a published $3,499, with Standard at $179 for non-georeferenced work. Almost every competitor in drone mapping has moved to annual subscription or per-hectare cloud credits. For a survey firm processing a large volume of imagery, or a research group with capital budget and no recurring budget, buying Metashape once and processing unlimited data locally is dramatically cheaper over three years than cloud processing charged by area. Buyers are surveyors, archaeologists, mining and quarry operators, cultural heritage teams, VFX studios and universities. The trade-off is that you provide everything else. There is no cloud, no collaboration layer, no drone flight planning and limited support; you supply the workstation, the GPU, the ground control and the expertise. Metashape rewards people who understand photogrammetry and punishes those hoping the software will hide it.

What people use it for

A survey or engineering firm processing high volumes of drone imagery that wants unlimited local processing instead of per-hectare cloud credits
A quarry or mine measuring stockpile volumes monthly, where the same flight is reprocessed repeatedly and cloud pricing by area is punitive
An archaeology or heritage team documenting sites on a capital grant with no recurring software budget to renew a subscription
A VFX or games studio scanning props and environments, where Standard at $179 covers the whole requirement because georeferencing is irrelevant

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Agisoft Metashape.

Processing is entirely local, so throughput is a function of your workstation, and a large project on modest hardware can take days where a cloud service would return results overnight.
The vendor is a Russian company, and since 2022 payment is restricted to wire transfer, ACH and SEPA direct debit with no card payment, which some corporate and government procurement departments simply cannot process.
There is no collaboration layer: no shared projects, no web viewer, no permissions. Sharing results means sending files, which is a real limitation on multi-office teams.
Support is thin compared with commercial drone platforms, and the software assumes photogrammetric competence; users who do not understand overlap, ground control and residuals produce confidently wrong models.
A node-locked licence is tied to a machine, and moving it or covering a second workstation means either a reseller-quoted floating licence or buying twice, which erodes the cost advantage for teams rather than individuals.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Agisoft Metashape

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Agisoft Metashapevs
Pix4D
Pix4D: If you want cloud processing, flight planning and vendor support rather than a local perpetual licence
Agisoft Metashapevs
Q
QGIS
QGIS: Free, and adequate if you only need to view and analyse the outputs rather than generate them
Agisoft Metashapevs
DroneDeploy
DroneDeploy: If the requirement is an end-to-end drone workflow rather than a photogrammetry engine

Pricing

What Agisoft Metashape costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Standard

$179 /one-time

Photogrammetric alignment, dense cloud, mesh and texture
No georeferencing or coordinate systems
No ground control points
Non-commercial and small commercial 3D work

Professional

$3,499 /one-time

Everything in Standard
Georeferencing, coordinate systems and ground control points
Orthomosaic, DEM and point cloud classification
Multispectral and thermal processing
Python and Java scripting
Network and cluster processing

Floating licence

On request

Shared across machines rather than node-locked
Sold through authorised resellers only
Quoted rather than listed

Capabilities

Features

Structure-from-motion alignment
Reconstruct camera positions and sparse geometry from overlapping photographs
Dense point cloud generation
Produce dense coloured point clouds with configurable quality and depth filtering
Mesh and texture
Build textured 3D models suitable for measurement, visualisation or export to VFX pipelines
Orthomosaic and DEM
Generate georeferenced orthophotos and digital elevation or surface models
Ground control points
Georeference and assess accuracy using surveyed markers, with a residual report
Point cloud classification
Separate ground from vegetation and structures for terrain modelling
Multispectral processing
Handle multispectral and thermal imagery for vegetation indices
Python and Java scripting
Automate batch processing and integrate into an existing production pipeline
Network processing
Distribute a project across multiple machines with a floating licence

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

How much does Metashape cost?

Professional is $3,499 and Standard is $179, both node-locked. Floating licences are quoted through resellers.

Is it a subscription?

No. These are perpetual node-locked licences. Major version upgrades are charged separately.

What is the difference between Standard and Professional?

Standard has no georeferencing, coordinate systems, ground control points, orthomosaic export or scripting. Anything survey or mapping related requires Professional.

Does it process in the cloud?

No. All processing is local on your own hardware, which is the main reason it is cheap at volume and slow on weak machines.

Are there educational licences?

Yes, Agisoft offers reduced academic pricing on a separate page.

Keep looking

Where to go from Agisoft Metashape

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Agisoft Metashape, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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