--- title: Carlson Survey Reviews meta_title: 'Carlson Survey Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 11 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Carlson Survey works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 3.9 review_count: 11 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-12' parent_category: name: CAD url: https://www.g2.com/categories/cad --- # Carlson Survey Reviews **Vendor:** Carlson Software **Category:** [Civil Engineering Design Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/civil-engineering-design) **Average Rating:** 3.9/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 11 ## About Carlson Survey Carlson Survey is a Windows software application for the Surveyor’s office to manage the complete job cycle from field data collection to drafting a final plan with several CAD options. With minimum effort and time, Carlson Survey allows users to design and produce a 2D drawing, an enhanced 3D surface model and construction layout data sets, for increasing their efficiency and profitability. • Compatibility: AutoCAD©, AutoCAD Map©, Land Desktop©, Civil3D© & IntelliCAD© • Automated Plan Drafting from Field Data • Generation of Surface Models, Roadways, Lots and Plans • Full COGO Features • Simple or Advanced Configurations ## Carlson Survey Reviews ### 1. Awesome software for the Survey Professional **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jack M. | Registered Professional Land Surveyor, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2021 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** All of the endless tools that I can use to make my job easier and my final product look great! So may tools that if you can't find it...you're not looking close enough! **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** Not much! I can't think of any right now!! **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a Professional Surveyor, I use Carlson to Draw up my Deeds, and living in Texas means using Varas. Carlson gives me the option to input my measuring template, and whether I am using feet or Varas, it has me covered. ### 2. Benefits of Carlson Survey **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michel N. | Owner/Surveyor **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** It is the closet thing we have found to TDS **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** That not all cogo funtions like line-brg etc will not automatically use the assigned scale factor. Must use a separate calculator to scale distance with. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use spc in all of my work therefor all of my projects and past projects are relative ### 3. Excellent Package Land Surveying Operations. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joyce W. | Graphic Designer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2020 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** The tool its easy to use and its available either as Standard Module or being part of the Civil Suite and offers many functional features. I like the data storage flexibility of Carlson Survey and the fact that it can also operate within AutoCAD and even within IntelliCAD. Carlson Survey its an Engineering tool for easy surveying operations for different project and it allows data exporting and even data uploading and downloading as well as easy tracking file history. **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** No anything to dislike on Carlson Survey, easy and very helpful tool for the Engineering projects. **Recommendations to others considering Carlson Survey:** Flexible and functional Land Surveying platform. easy to set and it offers different capabilities to the Engineers for easy and productive Land Surveying projects. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** Effective Land Surveying, annotation and management of Engineering project documents and some more tool usage. ### 4. Automatically results with a smart survey builder **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sandro G. | Adv., Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 25, 2019 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** The automatically report of the rating and the survey results. Need to impact the first time all the possible answers and results but then you will get a smart function, works in a smooth way and mostly automatically. **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** The data protection reports are standard so it's necessary to fix it with the regular data protection by country - for example with the italian regulations. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** Getting in touch with clients to hear the satisfaction by single product and sale. The smart conversation and the builder of the survey front end is build properly and it's build also for a smartphone usage. ### 5. Exerllent tool for surveying work. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anjali G. | Civil Engineer, Construction, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 24, 2019 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** Nice tool for accurate 2d drafting, and very wonderful in surveying projects. Getting started to this product is quite simple, and user can customize this tool for performance improvement. It has plenty functional features, and the support is great as well as the price plan of this tool is good. It also has the ability of exporting its files to different products. **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** No issue found so far, the platform performance comparing with alternative tool is good. **Recommendations to others considering Carlson Survey:** Perfect solution for surveying projects and also management of work flow on various projects which comes with friendly price plan. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** Drafting of accurate professional documents the the clients and saving of much time in our projects. ### 6. Great for surveyors **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michelle M. | Owner, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2019 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** Very user friendly to surveyors. Must have for land surveyors. Support is amazing. I usually get a response within minutes from actual person who really knows the software. **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** Can be difficult to learn in depth commands. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has sped up the work flow process. ### 7. Carlson is great! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David H. | Land Surveyor, Civil Engineering, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2019 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** The customization of workspaces is great and easy! **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** Nothing that I can think of. Carlson seems to do great. **Recommendations to others considering Carlson Survey:** Works great! Has everything you need to get the job done! **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** N/A ### 8. Good alternative software to big and powerful Autodesk. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Terrance R. | IT Administrator, Civil Engineering, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2018 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** What I like best about this software is the fact that a person can get their work done in an industry satisfactory manner without breaking the budget. Also, they have good support and licensing practices. **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** The one thing I dislike is the fact that the end product of my work is in a different format (manufacturer proprietary) than what Autodesk uses, .dwg. This makes extra work to get it into an acceptable file for some clients. **Recommendations to others considering Carlson Survey:** Use a trial version of the software first to be sure it will meet your needs. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** This software allows us to complete our drafting and survey work for our clients while keeping costs down. Carlson is a solid piece of software that should have a larger share of the market when compared to the giant Autodesk who does not care about their customers as they should. ### 9. A great product but didn't fit my needs **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam S. | LWD Engineer, Oil & Energy, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2017 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** Lots of features and surveyor specific. Easy to get up and running. **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** Basic features I was looking for are buried deep in the program and I was not happy with that. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was looking for a basic 2d drafting software, Carlson can do that, but it is more tailored to large data projects including BIM. ### 10. Constant problems with upgrades. **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Construction | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 05, 2016 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** The price of the Carlson software is extremely attractive compared to other software bundles. **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** The functionality and ease of operation has declined with every "Upgrade" and software update we have installed. Basic functions such a drawing a polyline with arcs and hatching an area that includes splines locks up our computers and wastes our time. Tech support never tries to solve the issue beyond recommending that we install their latest product, which we have done only to find that it not only did not resolve the issue but included new bugs as well. We are constantly having to find ways to bypass basic drafting functions that no longer work. **Recommendations to others considering Carlson Survey:** I personally would not use this product if I could afford to purchase something better. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** Drafting of surveys relating to topography, title surveys and residential construction are what we utilize the Carlson Survey program for. Besides a much lower cost for the software we have not really seen any other benefit. In fact the amount of time we are having to spend trying to find ways to work around it's ever growing list of problems is starting to eat into our profit margin. ### 11. Great survey software **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nhuy N. | RPLS, Civil Engineering, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2015 **What do you like best about Carlson Survey?** Carlson Survey knows a surveyor's needs for Field to Finish, Deed description and legal description writer, COGO and they make it all very easy to use. It has the full menu for those who used to C&G software before, but also has its own menu to control, and support survey points. The GIS menu intergrate ARCGIS shape files to and geo-image into AutoCAD. Carlson also has an option to export lineworks to Google Earth. The support is also top rate. They reply to email ticket within 24 hours, and any problem after that they reply really fast. **What do you dislike about Carlson Survey?** The Centerline and Lot Layout of Carlson Survey relies heavy on Polyline, not points. These can be hard to manage if you change point coordinates, everything doesn’t update to the points. Luckily there is still the CG menus, which handles that through separate point group file. **What problems is Carlson Survey solving and how is that benefiting you?** The program has all you need to solve survey problems outside and inside office, and more. If you know CG or AutoCAD Land Survey then it is very easy to learn. ## Carlson Survey Discussions - [What is Carlson SurvCE?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-carlson-survce) - [What is SurvCE software?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-survce-software) - [How do you use Carlson Software?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-do-you-use-carlson-software) - [What is Carlson autoCAD?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-carlson-autocad) - [View Carlson Survey pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/carlson-survey/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-12+20%3A55%3A44+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=8f9eae5a-b21e-40b3-bf6a-539f7d682c57&secure%5Btoken%5D=abd18ed73255ba162c0cf0c6d292660f37e1f8d75ba771d1a38f5a5ff3ac2a14&format=llm_user) ## Carlson Survey Features **Plan** - Documentation - Sequence - Annotate - Collaborate **Design** - 3D Modeling - 3D Rendering - Drawing - Editing **Construction** - Fabrication - Reinforcement - Clash Detection - Grading - Earthwork **Engineering** - Hydraulic engineering - Hydrologic engineering - Transportation engineering - Structural engineering ## Top Carlson Survey Alternatives - [MicroStation](https://www.g2.com/products/microstation/reviews) - 4.0/5.0 (407 reviews) - [Civil 3D](https://www.g2.com/products/civil-3d/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (290 reviews) - [ZWCAD](https://www.g2.com/products/zwcad/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (349 reviews)