DWG drawings in QGIS,
still readable

CAD layers, colours, line types, line widths, hatch patterns and text come across. Everything runs on your machine — drawings are never uploaded anywhere.

What Pro adds Install the free edition

There are two editions

The free edition makes a drawing visible in QGIS, one drawing at a time. Pro turns a whole folder of them into data you can query and analyse. The part that reads the drawing is the same code in both — nothing is held back to make the free edition worse.

Feature	Free	Pro
Import, colours, line types, hatches, text	yes	yes
How many drawings per run	one, by hand	a whole folder
Block attributes (ATTRIB) as queryable fields	—	yes
Mapping profiles — merge many CAD layers into one feature class	—	yes
Batch conversion with a per-file CSV report	—	yes
Runs from the Processing toolbox and models	—	yes
Converter bundled — works the moment you install it	you obtain it	bundled

Free — the drawing, visible in QGIS

Plugins → EchoCad → Import DWG opens a window. Pick the drawing, check the coordinate system, import. That is one drawing done.

• One QGIS layer per CAD layer, split into point, line and polygon, so you can style each one instead of fighting a single mixed layer
• Entity colour, line type (solid / dashed / dash-dot) and line width kept, so the distinctions the drawing already made are still visible in QGIS
• Text placed at its original size, rotation and colour — title block, notes and dimension text stay where they belong
• Hatch patterns rebuilt from the drawing’s own definitions. Angle, spacing and dash pattern are read out of the drawing, not flattened to a solid blob
• CJK text does not turn to mojibake. The encoding is decided from the actual bytes, not from what the header claims, so drawings with a wrong declaration still read
• The coordinate system comes from your project, so a drawing lands on top of the data you are already working with. Change it in the window whenever you want
• Optional GeoPackage output. Without it the layers are in memory and go away when you close QGIS
• Failures say why — unsupported format (R13 and older), empty drawing and timeout are told apart

The free edition needs the converter (LibreDWG dwg2dxf) obtained and pointed at once. It is GPL-3, so it cannot ship inside the free edition. How to get it is in the documentation.

Pro — the drawing, as data

Not geometry conversion — moving the drawing’s meaning into a GIS schema. That is the part QGIS’s own importer has not done for two years.

1. Block attributes (ATTRIB) as queryable fields

Most of the information in a drawing is not in the lines. It is in the block attributes: manhole numbers, pipe diameters, asset codes, parcel numbers. Neither the free edition nor QGIS’s own importer brings these across. The drawing opens; the attributes are gone.

Pro builds one block-reference point layer per CAD layer and spreads every attribute tag found there into a field. The original tag name is kept as the QGIS field alias, so a normalised field name loses nothing.

2. Mapping profiles — CAD layers onto your schema

A hundred drawings arrive with a hundred layer namings. A-WALL-EXST, A-WALL-NEW and A-WALL-2F are all the same building wall, but QGIS receives three layers.

A profile is a list of glob-pattern rules. The first match wins, so order is priority. A layer that matches nothing keeps its original name and is listed as unmatched, so you know at once whether something was left out. One JSON file, so a team can share it and keep it in git.

{
  "version": 1,
  "name": "example",
  "rules": [
    { "match": "A-WALL-*", "layer_name": "building_wall", "geometry": "polygon" },
    { "match": "*-TEXT",   "layer_name": "annotation",    "geometry": "point"   }
  ],
  "default": { "layer_name": "{cad_layer}", "geometry": "auto" }
}

3. Batch folder conversion with a per-file report

Drawings arrive by the folder, not one at a time. The free edition does one per run: open the window, pick the file, pick the coordinate system, import, repeat. Fine for one drawing, unusable for eighty.

• Point it at a folder and every DWG inside is converted. Subfolders optional
• One file failing does not stop the rest. It does not halt half way
• Per-file results go into a CSV report
• The mapping profile and coordinate system apply to the whole run

Below is a real report from one run over a folder of nine drawings. One of them was an R13 file. The run did not stop there, and what failed and why is on the record.

Features dropped for broken coordinates are counted too. Drop them silently and nobody can explain the missing count later.

4. Runs from the Processing toolbox

Pro registers as a Processing algorithm, so it goes into a model or a script, chains with other steps, and re-runs unchanged on next month’s delivery. The free edition registers no algorithms at all — everything there goes through the import window, by hand.

5. Converter bundled

Pro carries the Windows and macOS converters. Install it and it works. On macOS the execute permission and the quarantine flag are handled for you, so there is no reason to open a terminal. The setup step the free edition goes through once does not exist in Pro.

Pro installs as a separate plugin (echocad_pro), so it never collides with the free edition and updates never overwrite each other. More screens and examples are on the features page.

Price

You can check it on your own drawings before paying. The trial is the full Pro build; with no key in it, every feature runs on the first five distinct drawings. What you are paying for is block attributes, mapping profiles and batch conversion, so those three are what you should see on real drawings first. The pricing page has the download.

Buy Pro Documentation

What you need

• QGIS 3.34 LTR or newer — checked on 3.44 and 4.x too
• Windows or macOS
• DWG R14 or newer. R13 and older are refused up front with a message

The interface follows your QGIS language. Ten are included: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese and Chinese.