SAGA

SAGA is a comprehensive software application that enables you to evaluate geographical information and customize the visualization in several ways, as well as resort to some handy methods and algorithms. Given its wide range of advanced settings, it is solely geared toward experienced users.

The installation procedure does not take a long time to finish, and it doesn't require special input. As far as the interface goes, SAGA opts for a classical-looking interface based on a single window split into multiple panels. It is not visually appealing, yet easy to navigate.

You can open SAGE projects or tool libraries, grids, ESRI Shape files, tables (TXT, CSV, DBF format) along with point clouds. It is possible to navigate libraries with tools for the climate, garden, grid, imagery, import and export, projection, reports, shapes, simulation, spatial and geostatistics, TIN, table, terrain analysis, tool chains, and visualization, in order to configure each and every settings to achieve the desired effects.

Thanks to an Explorer-based folder structure, you can also navigate disk directories for the file system, ODBC and PostgreSQL sources. After executing commands, you can view log details and information about errors (if any).

No errors popped up in our tests, and the program did not hang or crash. It has a good response time and minimal impact on computer performance, thanks to the fact that it needs a low quantity of CPU and memory to work properly. Those who want to bypass the installer and run the app directly from a pen drive may resort to its portable counterpart, called SAGA Portable. To sum it up, SAGA features a rich set of options and commands for analyzing geographical data.