Arc Hydro
Free
Esri's free hydrology framework for ArcGIS Pro — terrain preprocessing and the data model behind many agency workflows.
WhiteboxTools
DHS VerifiedActive500+ fast geospatial analysis tools with the best DEM hydrology toolkit in open source.
by Whitebox Geospatial Inc.
- Pricing
- Open Source
- License
- MIT
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Rust, Python, QGIS
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
Install
pip install whiteboxAbout WhiteboxTools
WhiteboxTools, from John Lindsay's Geomorphometry and Hydrogeomatics lab at the University of Guelph, packs over five hundred geoprocessing tools into a single fast Rust binary — and its hydrological terrain analysis is the deepest available anywhere: depression breaching (its least-cost breaching is the reference implementation), flow pointers and accumulation in many flavours, stream extraction, wetness indices and lidar processing.
It runs standalone, from Python, or inside QGIS/ArcGIS via frontends, with no dependencies to install. For DEM conditioning and delineation pipelines, WhiteboxTools is usually the sharpest free tool in the drawer.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Appears in collections
- QGIS Tools for Catchment Delineation
The free GIS stack for going from raw DEM to watershed boundary and stream network.
Alternatives to WhiteboxTools
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with WhiteboxTools.
GRASS GIS
Open Source
Four decades of geospatial engineering — r.watershed and the most battle-tested hydrology modules in GIS.
HydroSHEDS
Free
The global hydrography reference — basins, river networks, lakes and hydro-environmental attributes, free.
SAGA GIS
Open Source
The geomorphometry powerhouse — hundreds of terrain and hydrology modules behind a free desktop GIS.
TauDEM
Open Source
Utah State's parallel terrain-analysis suite — D-infinity flow modelling and objective stream-network extraction.
pysheds
Open Source
Watershed delineation in pure Python — DEM conditioning to catchment boundary in a dozen lines.