Agisoft Metashape vs Meshroom

Agisoft Metashape processes digital images into 3D spatial data for GIS, cultural heritage documentation, visual effects, and indirect measurement. It works with aerial, close-range, and satellite imagery, including automatic camera calibration and multi-camera projects. Professional Edition can create and edit terrain and surface models, georeferenced orthomosaics, and EPSG-based outputs. Its surveying functions include aerial LiDAR point attributes, laser scan registration, ground control points, targets, and scale bars. It also handles RGB, NIR, thermal, multispectral, and satellite imagery, and can calculate user-defined indices such as NDVI. Professional Edition adds Python scripting, Java bindings, distributed calculations on a local network, and a cloud processing interface. Standard and Professional installers are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. A 30-day full-function trial is available; demo mode blocks saving and exporting. Standard Edition costs $179, paid once, and Professional Edition costs $3,499, paid once. Regular licenses are not time-limited and include 12 months of email technical support and free updates through version 2.x.x.

Meshroom is a free, node-based visual programming toolbox for creating and running data-processing pipelines. Its AliceVision plugin combines photogrammetry, camera tracking, HDR panorama, lidar meshing, raw image conversion and color calibration workflows. Users connect operations visually to set dependencies, data flow and execution order. Pipelines can run locally or on distributed systems, including local and remote computation in one project. The meshroom_batch command-line interface and JSON pipeline definitions support automated, reproducible execution. Meshroom reuses cached intermediate results and invalidates affected downstream nodes when attributes change. Built-in viewers display logs, images, 3D data and node outputs. Dynamically loaded plugins can run in separate virtual environments, while Meshroom Hub offers domain-specific plugins for computer vision, AI and other tasks. Prebuilt desktop releases are available for Linux and Windows; macOS requires manual packaging. The software is linked to the Mozilla Public License 2.0. Its listed plan costs nothing.