QGIS PCRaster Tools Plugin Reaches 100,000 Downloads

16/07/2026

This morning, the PCRaster Tools plugin for QGIS officially passed 100,000 downloads. For a project that began as a modest prototype, this milestone marks a major achievement! It shows how deeply practitioners value robust, transparent, and reproducible workflows, and how PCRaster Tools has become a trusted foundation for those workflows.

From Prototype to Plugin

The development of the PCRaster Tools plugin began in 2020–2021, when the first prototype was shared through the QGIS Resource Sharing plugin. At that stage, it consisted of simple scripts and only worked inside a Conda environment, a proof of concept rather than a full integration.

The turning point came with the collaboration between Nyall Dawson (North Road) and the PCRaster team. Together, the plugin evolved into a fully integrated QGIS Processing Provider:

24 September 2021: official launch.
Rapid adoption, surpassing 45,000 downloads by 2022
Featured in QGIS for Hydrological Applications – 2nd Edition, by Kurt Menke and Hans van der Kwast, published at Locate Press.
Easy Windows installation thanks to OSGeo4W packaging by Jürgen Fischer.
Cross‑platform support via Conda for macOS, Linux and Windows.
Today: 100,000+ downloads, used worldwide in hydrology, geography, ecology, and environmental modelling.

Built on the PCRaster Python framework, the plugin exposes PCRaster's optimized environmental modelling functions directly inside QGIS, making advanced modelling accessible through a familiar GUI.

Why PCRaster Tools while there are other tools?

Although SAGA, GRASS and WhiteboxTools remain essential parts of the open‑source GIS ecosystem, their integration with QGIS has become more challenging:

SAGA versions change rapidly, often breaking compatibility with QGIS Processing. Recently, there is no community driven SAGA Processing Provider plugin available.
GRASS integration is stable but at the moment you need a work around to make the Processing Provider work in the latest point release of QGIS on Windows.
WhiteboxTools is robust, but not completely open source. Also the Processing Provider plugin changed recently, leading to a new user experience.

For teaching, scripting, and long‑term modelling projects, these issues can make workflows fragile.

PCRaster offers a stable, predictable, and highly modular alternative:

Atomic tools: small, precise building blocks that do one thing extremely well
Modular workflows: easy to combine tools into custom hydrological models
Consistent behaviour across platforms
Optimized algorithms for hydrology and environmental modelling
Full modelling framework integrated into QGIS, offering deterministic and stochastic modelling opportunities as well as data-assimilation algorithms.
Transparent, reproducible workflows ideal for research and education

Because PCRaster tools are atomic, users can design workflows with fine control over each step, from sink filling to flow direction, catchment delineation, stream extraction, and dynamic modelling.

A Community Effort

This milestone would not have been possible without the people behind the technology. A big thank you to:

Nyall Dawson (North Road) for transforming the early prototype into a professional, stable, and beautifully integrated QGIS plugin as well as its maintenance.
The PCRaster Team at Utrecht University for decades of research, development, and stewardship of PCRaster. Always helping out when there is a question from the community.
The QGIS Community for providing support.
Everyone who downloaded the plugin! 100,000 times, in classrooms, research labs, government agencies, NGOs, and consultancies around the world.