EchoCad

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.

An architectural floor plan imported by EchoCad and shown in QGIS, with walls, doors and grid lines in their original colours and line types.
An architectural plan brought across as it is. Wall, door and grid-line colours and line types survive, as do the title block, north arrow and location inset. 23 CAD layers became 23 QGIS layers, 3,517 features.

What Pro adds Get the free edition

What the free edition does

A CAD base map of roads, streams and boundaries imported into QGIS, with line colours and weights distinguishing the classes.
Not only building drawings. A base map of roads, streams and administrative boundaries comes across the same way — 7 layers, 18,961 features.

What Pro adds

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.

FeatureFreePro
Import, colours, line types, hatches, textyesyes
Block attributes (ATTRIB) as queryable fields—yes
Mapping profiles — merge many CAD layers into one feature class—yes
Batch folder conversion with a per-file report—yes
Converter bundled — works the moment you install ityou obtain itbundled

What each one solves is on the features page. Mapping profiles are a single JSON file, so a team can share and version them. Pro installs as a separate plugin (echocad_pro) and never collides with the free edition.

Price

$499
perpetual licence · one office, up to 10 people

The first year of updates is included. After that, updates renew at $149 a year. It is not a subscription — the version you have keeps working whether or not you renew.

Pricing and purchase Documentation

What you need

The free edition needs the converter (LibreDWG dwg2dxf) obtained separately — it is GPL-3, so it cannot ship inside the free edition. Pro has it bundled. How to get it is in the documentation.

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