Correlator3D

SimActive photogrammetry with a published price list and a perpetual licence still on sale

As of 1 September 2026, Correlator3D starts at $295/month. End-to-end photogrammetry for drone, aerial and satellite imagery from Montreal-based SimActive. Softwr lists it under Maps. Correlator3D is made by SimActive, available on Windows.

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Overview

What Correlator3D does

Correlator3D processes imagery into aerial triangulation results, digital surface and terrain models, point clouds, orthomosaics, 3D meshes and vectorised features. It runs on GPU-accelerated Windows workstations and is built for production throughput on large blocks rather than for occasional small drone jobs, which is why it turns up in mapping bureaux and national mapping work as much as in drone service companies. The fact that changes a shortlist is the licensing. Where most of this market has moved to subscription only, SimActive still sells a permanent licence at $5,900 with a year of support and updates, and a permanent floating licence at $6,400. A firm running the software for five years pays roughly $14,750 on the annual subscription against $5,900 plus optional maintenance on the perpetual. Licence tiers are also set by sensor class: the standard licence covers imagery up to 61 megapixels, while medium format, large format and satellite sensors require separately quoted licences. Buyers are aerial survey firms, mapping agencies, drone service providers processing large blocks, and defence and forestry users. The trade-off is scope: Correlator3D is a processing engine, not a data management or collaboration platform. There is no cloud workspace, no client sharing portal and no field app, so everything around the processing step has to be assembled from other tools.

What people use it for

An aerial survey company processing large photographic blocks where per-project cloud credits would be more expensive than owning a licence
A national or regional mapping agency that needs software it can run offline on classified or restricted imagery
A drone service provider producing bare-earth terrain models for volumetrics and corridor mapping at high throughput
An organisation that wants a perpetual licence because a multi-year subscription cannot be justified against its capital budgeting rules

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 Correlator3D.

The standard licence caps at 61 megapixel sensors, so an operator moving to a medium or large format camera has to buy a different and separately quoted licence rather than paying an upgrade fee.
It is Windows desktop only with no cloud processing option, so throughput is bounded by the workstation and GPU you buy, and there is no way to burst capacity for one large job.
There is no collaboration layer, client portal or field application, so deliverable sharing, review and version control all have to be handled by other software.
The interface and workflow are built for photogrammetry specialists; an occasional drone operator will find the learning curve steeper than a consumer-oriented mapping package.
The perpetual licence includes only one year of support and updates, and staying current afterwards means paying maintenance, so the headline $5,900 is not the whole long-term cost.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Correlator3D

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.

Correlator3Dvs
Pix4D
Pix4D: Broader product family and cloud options if you want more than a processing engine
Correlator3Dvs
Bentley iTwin Capture Modeler
Bentley iTwin Capture Modeler: If the meshes feed a Bentley infrastructure design and digital twin workflow
Correlator3Dvs
Q
QGIS
QGIS: Free downstream analysis and cartography for the products Correlator3D generates

Pricing

What Correlator3D costs

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

Monthly subscription

$295 /mo

Unlimited images
Sensors up to 61 megapixels
All modules and tools

Yearly subscription

$2,950 /yr

Unlimited images
Sensors up to 61 megapixels
All modules and tools

Permanent licence

$5,900 /one-time

Perpetual licence
Unlimited images up to 61 megapixels
All modules and tools
One year of support and updates included

Permanent floating licence

$6,400 /one-time

Perpetual floating licence shared across machines
Unlimited images up to 61 megapixels
One year of support and updates included

Medium, large format and satellite

On request

Unlimited image resolution
Quoted individually by sensor class
One year of support included

Capabilities

Features

Aerial triangulation
Solves block geometry for drone, aerial and satellite imagery
DSM and DTM generation
Produces surface and bare-earth terrain models with ground filtering
Orthomosaic production
Generates mosaicked orthophotos over large areas
Point cloud and 3D mesh output
Exports dense clouds and textured meshes in standard formats
Feature extraction
Vectorises 3D features such as buildings from the reconstruction
GPU acceleration
Uses graphics hardware for throughput on large image blocks
Satellite imagery support
Separate licence class for satellite sensor processing
Batch and unattended processing
Runs production jobs without operator supervision

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.

Can I still buy a perpetual licence?

Yes. $5,900 for a permanent licence and $6,400 for a permanent floating licence, each including a year of support and updates.

What limits the standard licence?

Sensor resolution, up to 61 megapixels. Medium format, large format and satellite imagery need separately priced licences.

Is there a cloud version?

No. Processing runs on your own Windows workstation. SimActive offers a data processing service as an alternative to buying the software.

Does it handle satellite imagery?

Yes, under a separate satellite licence class quoted on request.

Keep looking

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Correlator3D, 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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