How to Choose GIS Software for Surveying, Engineering and Mining

Write down the five questions you answer most often. If they are about features and attributes — which parcels lie in a zone, which pipes are due for inspection — a general-purpose GIS with a strong attribute database and cartography is the right centre of gravity. If they are about the terrain — volumes, slopes, drainage, visibility, sections, change between surveys — the elevation model is the centre, and the software has to be judged on how well it handles one.

Many teams need both, and that is normal: a general GIS for mapping and records, and a terrain tool for the ground, exchanging GeoTIFF, Shapefile, GeoPackage and DXF.

A drone DEM or a lidar DTM of a real site runs from hundreds of megabytes to many gigabytes. Some software loads the whole raster into memory; some builds overviews and reads only what the view needs. Test with your largest file: how long the first open takes, how long the second takes, and whether pan, zoom and measurement stay responsive across the whole extent.

LAS and LAZ are the standard formats for lidar and photogrammetry point clouds. Some tools display the points; some classify them into ground, vegetation and buildings; some turn them into surfaces. For terrain work the key output is a surface — a bare-earth DEM from ground-classified points, or a surface model from all of them — so check which of those the software produces, and at what resolution.

Survey data lives in projected grids, national systems and local vertical datums. Check that the software reads each dataset's coordinate system and shows it for confirmation, distinguishes assigning a system from transforming to one, and handles heights explicitly: ellipsoidal from GNSS, orthometric from the geoid. A tool that silently mixes the two puts a design tens of metres out vertically.

Engineering deliverables end in CAD. Look for DXF import that keeps layers and 3D geometry and drapes the drawing on the terrain, DXF export with layers, TIN surfaces as LandXML, and conversion between CAD and GIS formats — DXF to Shapefile and back — with the coordinate system written where the format allows.

Slope and hillshade are table stakes. Check the depth that matters to you: contours with index lines and labels; hydrology with flow direction, flow accumulation, stream networks and watersheds; viewshed; cut and fill against several reference surfaces; cross-sections; and change detection with a level of detection instead of raw differences.

If your work is repetitive batch processing, scripting matters — check whether the software has it. If you publish maps, check the layout tools: legends, grids, scale bars and fixed-scale sheets. No single package is strongest at everything; the right choice covers your five questions and exchanges cleanly with whatever covers the rest.

Licences come as perpetual, subscription, per-module or free and open source. Add the extensions you will need for terrain, lidar or hydrology, the training time, and whether the people you send results to need a licence to open them. Academic and beta programmes can lower the cost of evaluating properly.

STREAM is terrain-focused GIS for Windows. It streams very large DEMs, orthophotos and LAS/LAZ point clouds, reads each layer's coordinate system by EPSG code, converts vertical references with a geoid grid, and runs slope, aspect, hillshade, contours, hydrology, viewshed, sun and shadow, cut and fill, cross-sections and change detection on the elevation model — offline. It imports and exports DXF with layers and writes Shapefile, KMZ, GeoTIFF, CSV and LandXML. It is free during the public beta, and academic use is always free.

It does not try to replace a general-purpose GIS: there is no attribute database, no scripting and no web mapping, so it works alongside the GIS you already use rather than instead of it.