Flood Modeller
Freemium
Jacobs' 1D/2D river and floodplain suite — a UK practice staple with a genuinely useful free tier.
TUFLOW
ActiveBenchmark-setting commercial 1D/2D flood engine with GPU acceleration — dominant in AU/UK flood studies.
by BMT
- Pricing
- Commercial
- License
- Proprietary
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- QGIS, SMS
- Platform
- Windows, Linux (HPC)
About TUFLOW
TUFLOW, from BMT, is the flood-modelling engine that consistently tops the UK Environment Agency 2D benchmarking exercises. Its HPC solver runs the full shallow-water equations on GPU with sub-grid sampling, quadtree meshes and best-in-class stability, coupled to ESTRY 1D networks for pipes and channels. TUFLOW dominates flood-risk practice in Australia and holds a large share of UK studies.
It is commercial and licensed per core/GPU, with model building typically done in QGIS (the free TUFLOW plugin) or SMS. For large urban and catchment-wide flood models where run time and stability matter, it is the engine to beat.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Appears in collections
- Alternatives to HEC-RAS
Free and commercial hydraulic engines worth knowing when HEC-RAS is not the answer.
Alternatives to TUFLOW
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with TUFLOW.
HEC-RAS
FreeVerified
The world's most used hydraulic model: free 1D/2D river analysis, sediment, water quality and flood mapping.
RIVIA
Open Source
A modern Python interface for HEC-RAS project parsing, simulation automation, and result visualization.
BASEMENT
Free
ETH Zurich's free 2D hydraulics and morphodynamics simulator — rivers, sediment and hazard mapping.
Crayfish
Open Source
QGIS plugin for exploring mesh model results — animate TUFLOW, Telemac and HEC-RAS 2D outputs in the GIS.
MIKE+
Commercial
DHI's unified platform for rivers, urban drainage and distribution networks — successor to MIKE 11/MIKE URBAN.