Compare our free, cloud-based CCTV planner with IP Video System Design Tool — JVSG's paid desktop application. See which solution fits your workflow better.
| Feature | CCTVplanner | IP Video System Design Tool |
|---|---|---|
| Data Residency | EU (AWS eu-west, Ireland) | Desktop app |
| Pricing | Free tier + paid from €4.17/mo | 319-1,599 EUR one-time, or 360-720 EUR/yr subscription |
| Platform | Web browser (any device) | Windows desktop only |
| Updates | Automatic, always latest | Manual download required |
| Camera Database | 65,530 models, 110 manufacturers | Extensive database |
| Camera Placement | Drag & drop on map/plan | Drag & drop on plan |
| Field of View | FOV with DORI zones | FOV with DORI zones |
| 3D Visualization | Full 3D scene in the browser, per-camera POV walkthrough, 3D PDF | 3D viewport, Windows install only |
| Floor Plan Upload | Yes (image upload) | Yes (CAD/image import) |
| Satellite Maps | Built-in Google Maps | Manual image import |
| Collaboration | Cloud sharing & team access | File-based sharing only |
| PDF Export | Professional PDF reports | PDF export available |
| Mobile Access | Full mobile support | Desktop only |
No installer to run, no major version to buy, no colleague working from last year's camera database because their update failed. Refresh the tab and you and the rest of the crew are on the same build.
Windows, Mac, tablet or phone — the same project opens on all of them, and it lives in the cloud rather than on the laptop that goes in the van. Every integrator working off a desktop tool has at least one story about which copy turned out to be the current one.
Share the project with a colleague or the customer as a link. Nobody is emailing a 40 MB file around, and nobody is commenting on a revision that was superseded two days ago.
No licence key, no installation wizard, no admin password, no antivirus exception. On a locked-down corporate laptop that is the difference between drawing today and waiting on an IT ticket.
Everything below is in the product today, on the free tier, and none of it needs an install. Open it in a browser and check it against IP Video System Design Tool on a job you already know.
No install and no workstation. Walk the site from any camera point of view, with DORI silhouettes standing at the Detect, Observe, Recognize and Identify distances so the customer sees what the camera sees. Sun and shadow study for the time of day that matters, and one-click 3D PDF export for the people who will never open a design tool.
Every cone is computed from the sensor, resolution and focal length at the mounting height (1 to 20 m) and tilt you set, then clipped by buildings, fences and real ground elevation on satellite imagery. On a flat indoor floor a 2D tool agrees with us. On a sloped yard or a sunken loading dock it does not, and that gap is exactly where the blind spots are.
Racking, containers, concrete blocks, scaffolding, solar panels, trees, and the machinery a live construction site actually parks in the shot: excavators, cranes, concrete mixers, bulldozers, vans and pickups. Each one carries real dimensions and a vertical range, and the field of view clips against it with the shadow drawn on the plan.
Stack ground floor, mezzanine, plant room and roof as separate levels. Draw walls, close rooms and read the floor area back in square metres. Cabling routes between levels, the topology graph carries across them, and each floor exports as its own DXF sheet and PDF page.
Predictive coverage for access points using ITU-R P.2040 wall transmission and a P.1238 margin, drawn as a heatmap over the same plan the cameras sit on. Point-to-point links are checked for line of sight against the buildings and terrain, so the wireless leg of the design fails on screen rather than on site.
51 specified cable types with PoE budget from loop resistance, DC voltage drop, fibre loss budget with splice and connector allowances, coax attenuation per format, speaker line loading and conduit fill. Route length is measured on the drawn route and carries straight into the bill of materials, the cable schedule and the customer offer.
The plan is validated while you draw it: DORI shortfall, blind spots, perimeter gaps, PoE budget and class escalation, cable length and category headroom, conduit bundling, fibre loss, thermal lens and pairing, EMC and environmental class, lightning protection zones, ONVIF profile mixing, NDAA compliance, bandwidth headroom and switch port capacity.
CAD-grade DXF (AutoCAD R2018 / AC1021) on named layers with BLOCK, INSERT, SPLINE, ELLIPSE, HATCH and DIMENSION preserved, inside an ISO 5457 sheet frame with an ISO 7200 title block. Multi-page PDF with bill of materials, cable schedule, equipment list, elevation views, coverage analysis, acceptance test protocol, maintenance schedule and the GDPR Article 35 DPIA worksheet.
For the work most installers actually do, yes: camera placement on satellite maps and floor plans, FOV with DORI zones, storage and bandwidth figures, a multi-page PDF, and a browser 3D site view with a per-camera point-of-view walkthrough and 3D PDF export, the feature desktop tools were bought for. It installs as a PWA and keeps working on a site with no signal, so the offline case a desktop tool was chosen for is covered too.
Not as a project file — the format is proprietary, as it is across most of this category. The path that works is the one we use: get the floor plan out as DXF, PDF or PNG, bring it in, calibrate the scale once, then re-place the cameras from our catalog. It is a redraw rather than a migration, and it is an evening rather than a project.
The free tier is 1 project and 6 cameras, permanent, no card and no expiry — enough to design a real small site, render the PDF and check the coverage maths against your own datasheets. Paid plans start at EUR 4.17 a month when you outgrow it.
The reasons we hear are always the same four: the licence cost, the Windows-only requirement, the project living on one machine, and the week a new hire spends before they are productive. What people stay for is the engineering that arrived after they switched: coverage solved in 3D on real terrain, 67 automatic design checks, the cabling engine and CAD-grade DXF.
Take your next real site through it — no install, no card — and judge the coverage maths against the drawings you already trust.
Also explore: CCTV Design Tool · Camera Placement Tool · CCTV Layout Software · CCTVplanner vs JVSG · Hikvision vs Dahua · Dome vs Bullet · JVSG alternative 2026 · JVSG migration steps · JVSG pricing in 2026
