CloudComparevs
Global Mapper
Global Mapper: If you want lidar classification and terrain products with a vendor to call and a perpetual licence
CloudCompare
Open source point cloud comparison and processing maintained largely by one person in their spare time
As of 1 September 2026, CloudCompare is free to use. The standard free tool for comparing, registering and analysing point clouds and meshes. Softwr lists it under CAD. CloudCompare is made by CloudCompare open source project, administered by Daniel Girardeau-Montaut, available on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Overview
What CloudCompare does
CloudCompare processes 3D point clouds and triangular meshes. It began as a doctoral project at EDF, the French electricity utility, to detect change between laser scans of industrial plant, and cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-mesh distance computation remains what it is best at. Around that it has grown registration, segmentation, subsampling, normal and curvature computation, sensor management, statistical outlier removal and a plugin architecture covering Poisson surface reconstruction, canupo classification, RANSAC shape detection and more. It reads the common survey and lidar formats including LAS, LAZ, E57 and PLY. The governance fact matters more than any feature. CloudCompare is GPL and the project is administered by its creator, Daniel Girardeau-Montaut, in his own time while employed as a principal engineer at a medical device company. Contributions come from a scattered community and from research groups that need a particular plugin. There is no company selling support, no service level and no roadmap commitment. For an academic or a survey technician that is fine, and the price is unbeatable. For an organisation putting a monitoring programme on the deformation results, the entire maintenance of the tool rests on one person's available evenings, and that should be written into the risk register rather than discovered later. Users are survey and scanning technicians, structural monitoring engineers, heritage documentation teams, geomorphologists and researchers. The trade-off is a steep, unhelpful interface and processing that is single machine and memory bound, so very large aerial lidar collections need tiling or a different tool.
What people use it 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
The honest half
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 CloudCompare.
- The project is administered by its creator in his spare time while he holds a full-time job elsewhere, so an organisation building a monitoring programme on it depends on one person with no obligation to continue
- There is no commercial support contract from anyone, so a defect that blocks a deliverable is resolved by a GitHub issue and community goodwill rather than by an agreement
- Processing is single machine and memory bound, so very large aerial lidar collections must be tiled manually and large jobs are limited by the workstation rather than scaled out
- The interface is unforgiving and organised around the underlying data structures rather than around tasks, so competent surveyors routinely take weeks to become productive
- Plugins vary widely in maintenance, and several useful ones originated in research projects that have since ended, so a workflow built around a specific plugin can break at the next release
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of CloudCompare
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.
- CloudComparevsQQGIS
QGIS: If your point cloud work is secondary to general geospatial analysis and mapping
- CloudComparevsPix4D
Pix4D: If you need to generate the point cloud from imagery rather than analyse one you already have
Pricing
What CloudCompare costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
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
Capabilities
Features
Cloud to cloud distance
Change detection between two scans of the same object, the original purpose of the tool
Cloud to mesh distance
Point cloud compared against a reference surface for deviation analysis
Registration
Manual point pair alignment followed by iterative closest point fine registration
Segmentation and cleaning
Interactive segmentation, statistical outlier removal and subsampling
Plugin architecture
Poisson reconstruction, RANSAC shape detection, canupo classification and others
Format support
LAS, LAZ, E57, PLY, PTX, OBJ and more read and written
Command line mode
Batch processing scripted for repeatable pipelines
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.
Who maintains CloudCompare?
Daniel Girardeau-Montaut, its creator, administers it in his own time alongside a full-time engineering job, with contributions from a community of users and research groups.
Can I buy support?
No. There is no vendor and no commercial support offering. Some geospatial consultancies know it well and can be hired, but they are not contracted to support the software itself.
Is it suitable for commercial deliverables?
It is widely used for them. The licence permits it and the algorithms are well regarded. The risk is operational, not legal: no support and no roadmap commitment.
Can it handle a full aerial lidar survey?
Not in one piece. It is memory bound on a single machine, so large collections need tiling or a dedicated lidar pipeline such as PDAL.
Keep looking
Where to go from CloudCompare
- CloudCompare alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- CloudCompare pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- CloudCompare badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All CAD softwareThe full category
- Best CAD softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for CloudCompare, 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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