Agisoft Metashape

Agisoft Metashape is a desktop photogrammetry package from Agisoft LLC, a St. Petersburg company founded in 2006. It was previously called PhotoScan. It processes overlapping photos from drones, aircraft or handheld cameras into dense point clouds, textured 3D models, digital elevation models and orthomosaics. It also measures distances, areas and volumes. The Professional edition adds georeferencing with ground control, multispectral and thermal imagery support, aerial LiDAR point attributes, LiDAR-adapted ground classification, automatic multi-class point cloud classification, and laser scan registration. Larger jobs can use network processing across several local machines or cloud processing, and a Python and Java API lets teams automate pipelines. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Pricing is a one-time perpetual node-locked license rather than a subscription: Standard costs $179 and Professional costs $3,499. Floating licenses are sold through resellers, and educational discounts exist. Standard licenses can be upgraded to Professional. The online store currently takes only wire transfer, ACH or SEPA. It suits drone service providers, survey and engineering firms, and researchers who want an affordable, scriptable processing engine without recurring fees. The main limitation is that it is a processing workstation tool, not an asset or inspection management platform. It has no work orders, inspection workflows or collaborative asset records. Users also report long processing times on large datasets, hard troubleshooting, and occasional missed automatic GCP target detection.