Following its reports earlier this year for top-rated CAD and BIM programs among AEC professionals, Chicago-based business software review platform G2 Crowd has released a ranking of the leading civil-engineering design platforms. The results, published today in the company’s Grid for Civil Engineering Design, found that products in the category met their users’ needs about 84 percent of the time and that practitioners were also as likely to recommend the product.
G2 Crowd selected the eight products—Autodesk’s AutoCAD Map 3D, AutoCAD Civil 3D, and InfraWorks360, Bentley’s MicroStation, InRoads and Geopak programs, Transoft Solutions’ AutoTurn, and CarlsonCivil—included in the report because each had received 10 or more practitioner reviews on its website. G2 Crowd classifies the software in this category as programs that include functions specific to civil engineering such as railway modeling, road and highway design, and mapping tools.
An accompanying matrix (shown above) compares products based on customer satisfaction and market presence. For example, products categorized as “Leaders” offer high customer satisfaction and have a sizable market presence, while “High Performers” meet user requirements but operate on a smaller scale. The satisfaction metric is garnered from user reviews while market presence is generated from factors such as vendor size and market share.
The report also ranks products according to their highest- and lowest-rated features, such as drawing and editing tools, file inter-operability, customization, and hardware support, as well as the overall user experience. For example, AutoCAD Civil 3D rated above-average on its drawing tools but below average on file size, while Geopak’s drawing tools met the average mark and its rendering tools fell below that for each’s category.
The full Spring 2015 report can be access for $599 here.
