Carlson Software

Carlson Software makes desktop CAD for surveyors and civil engineers. The core modules are Survey for field data reduction and drafting, Civil for road and site design, Hydrology for stormwater, GIS for mapping, and Takeoff for earthwork quantities, with SurvCE and SurvPC on the data collector side. The Civil Suite bundles Survey, Civil, Hydrology and GIS and lists at $4,450. The commercially decisive fact is the licensing model. Carlson sells perpetual licences with annual maintenance at roughly ten per cent of the purchase price, and maintenance is optional: skip a year and the software keeps running, you simply do not get updates. Against a competitor charging comparable money every year, the five-year total cost difference is large, and this is the main reason surveying firms move to Carlson from Civil 3D. It also runs either on the IntelliCAD engine included in the price or on top of full AutoCAD if a firm already has it, so a practice can drop its AutoCAD subscription entirely. Buyers are small and mid-sized surveying and civil engineering practices, particularly in North America. The trade-off is ecosystem: Carlson field software supports a wide range of instruments including Leica, Topcon and Trimble hardware, which is a genuine advantage, but the office CAD is a smaller world than Autodesk's, with fewer trained staff on the market, thinner third-party add-ons and less certainty that a client will accept a native file format without translation.

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  Carlson Softwarevs

  

  Carlson Mining

  Carlson Mining: The Carlson product line aimed at mine planning and surveying rather than land development

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  Carlson Softwarevs

  

  Bentley MicroStation

  Bentley MicroStation: If your clients or public sector work mandate a Bentley file environment

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  Carlson Softwarevs

  

  Trimble

  Trimble: If you are standardised on Trimble instruments and want a single-vendor field to office chain