What this is
LidarKit converts, views, inspects and analyses LiDAR and geospatial files entirely inside your web browser. It decompresses LAZ to LAS and compresses LAS to LAZ, turns E57 laser scans into LAS or LAZ, renders point clouds in 3D, streams COPC octrees straight from a URL, opens E57 scan projects and PLY clouds, meshes and splats, reads a LAS or LAZ file's header, CRS and records, labels ground, vegetation and buildings (experimental), grids a cloud into a DSM or DTM or an orthophoto, compares two DEMs or two point clouds, and hillshades DEMs and drapes orthophotos over them. Nothing is uploaded, and only downloading some analysis results asks you to sign in.
Why it exists
Converting a point cloud is a five-second job that the existing options make disproportionately annoying. Command-line toolkits are excellent but assume an install and a terminal. Desktop GIS is a heavy dependency for one file. And the web converters that fill the gap almost all work by uploading your data to somebody's server — which is a non-starter for client survey data, infrastructure scans, or anything under an NDA, and painfully slow for a multi-gigabyte file even when it is allowed.
So this one does the work on your own machine instead. A WebAssembly build of laz-perf runs in a Web Worker; the page is static files with no backend behind it. The upshot is that the tool is simultaneously private and fast, because it skips the upload entirely rather than trying to secure it.
Correctness
The claim this project cares most about is that conversion is lossless, and it is tested rather than asserted. An automated round-trip test converts LAS to LAZ and back and checks the output is byte-for-byte identical to the input — public header, all VLRs and EVLRs, and every point record — across LAS 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4.
That last detail is not decoration. The straightforward way to build a browser LAZ converter hands the file to laz-perf's own writer, which rewrites the header and silently drops every user VLR — and with them the coordinate reference system. This converter assembles the LAZ container itself specifically to avoid producing files that load fine and have quietly lost their CRS. How it works covers the rest.
How it is funded
The tools are free. Opening, viewing, inspecting and converting files never needs an account; downloading the results of some analysis tools, such as the classifiers and the comparison tools, asks you to sign in with a free Google account first. Nothing is charged for either.
There are no ads on the site yet. The plan for covering the running costs is advertising rather than charging for the tools and banners from companies that sponsor LidarKit directly. A sponsor's banner is an image hosted on this site with a plain link, labelled as a sponsorship, with no ad script or tracking behind it.
Whatever advertising runs here, an advertiser cannot see your data: your files never leave your device, so there is nothing there for anyone to collect. The privacy policy sets out what an ad network would and would not receive, and how to opt out of personalised advertising.
Built on
Compression and decompression come from laz-perf by Hobu, Inc., used under the Apache-2.0 licence and compiled to WebAssembly with Emscripten. The LAS specification is published by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Raster reading is a purpose-written TIFF/GeoTIFF decoder. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of those organisations.
Contact
LidarKit is built and maintained by one independent developer. Bug reports, a file that will not convert, a format you need, or anything about this site: lidarconverter.contact@gmail.com. Real messages get a real reply.
If you are reporting a file that fails, the most useful thing you can send is the LAS version and point data record format shown in the converter's file details panel — not the file itself, which you should not email to a stranger and which we would rather not receive.