EPANET
Gov-PublicVerified
The public-domain standard for water distribution modelling — hydraulics and water quality in pressurised networks.
OpenFlows WaterGEMS
ActiveBentley's flagship distribution suite — design, optimisation and criticality on EPANET-compatible hydraulics.
by Bentley Systems
- Pricing
- Commercial
- License
- Proprietary
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- AutoCAD, MicroStation, ArcGIS
- Platform
- Windows
About OpenFlows WaterGEMS
WaterGEMS is Bentley's water distribution workhorse: EPANET-compatible hydraulics and water quality extended with Darwin genetic-algorithm calibration and design optimisation, criticality and outage analysis, pipe renewal planning (with companion tools), SCADA connection, and integration into AutoCAD, MicroStation and ArcGIS.
Large utilities buy it for the surrounding workflow — model management, skeletonisation, optimisation — rather than the solver itself. Models import and export EPANET INP cleanly, which keeps migration risk low in both directions.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Alternatives to OpenFlows WaterGEMS
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with OpenFlows WaterGEMS.
EPANET-MATLAB Toolkit
Open Source
Full MATLAB control of the EPANET engine — the standard bridge for control and optimisation research.
InfoWater Pro
Commercial
Autodesk's ArcGIS Pro-native distribution modelling — for utilities whose network data lives in Esri.
WNTR
Open SourceVerified
Sandia/EPA's Python toolkit for water network resilience — EPANET simulation plus disaster scenarios and metrics.
QGISRed
Open Source
A QGIS plugin that turns the free GIS into a water-network modelling environment for EPANET.
epanet-js
Freemium
EPANET in the browser — build, import and run distribution models on a map with zero installation.