Trevor English
If you’re a Civil 3D user, you might’ve heard the news that Autodesk has been making updates to the drainage capabilities inside of Civil 3D. Whether you’re a Civil 3D user, an InfoDrainage user, or someone who has never used either tool, you’re likely curious about which tool you should use for your drainage and site design needs.
In this post, we’ll give you a background of how we’re approaching drainage design here at Autodesk, what the new drainage capabilities, powered by InfoDrainage in Civil 3D are, how it’s similar and different from InfoDrainage, and ultimately what you can expect for the future of drainage design solutions from the Autodesk portfolio. We even have a handy comparison chart for you.
The history of drainage design at Autodesk
Ever since Autodesk acquired Innovyze, we’ve been investing heavily in integrating the powerful suite of water planning, design, and operations solutions into our AEC portfolio. InfoDrainage has emerged as one of the most powerful drainage design applications, supporting workflows for everything from culvert analysis to sustainable drainage systems. One of the biggest strides we’ve made in this area is building a tight integration between InfoDrainage and Civil 3D, a user-centric workflow that allows you to easily go from civil design to hydraulic analysis and back again to civil design. InfoDrainage is, and will continue to be, Autodesk’s drainage design modeling solution for all your drainage modeling needs.
However, we know that sometimes there is a need to run a quick site analysis without leaving Civil 3D. For these more rudimentary scenarios, Civil 3D has long offered Storm and Sanitary Analysis (SSA). Now, Autodesk is offering drainage design capabilities powered by InfoDrainage Civil 3D users. Let’s explore what these capabilities are today, and the track that they’re on for the future.
What are Civil 3D’s drainage analysis capabilities?
The drainage design and analysis capabilities power by InfoDrainage for Civil 3D, available in a tech preview starting in the 2026 version, connect the Civil 3D drainage design environment to specific InfoDrainage analysis services that are hosted in the cloud. These enhancements contain a few new Civil 3D drainage design capabilities, including pond, channel, and underground storage design workflows.
The drainage design capaibilities in Civil 3D allow engineers to analyze a selection of drainage systems from Civil 3D by running them on our cloud platform via InfoDrainage analysis services, using several rainfall and runoff methods. Aside from these new features, the new capabilities aim to provide similar functionality to SSA, an extension that you’re likely already familiar with.
The future of InfoDrainage
Since we’re launching a new drainage toolkit inside of Civil 3D, we’ve had questions about the future of InfoDrainage. Rest assured: The future of InfoDrainage is incredibly bright, as is drainage design in general at Autodesk.
InfoDrainage remains the most powerful and flexible drainage design solution at an affordable (and recently lowered) price. Nothing is changing about our roadmap, our development, and our plans to further integrate InfoDrainage with Civil 3D and other solutions in the Autodesk AEC ecosystem.
As the drainage analysis capabilities in Civil 3d continue to advance, add features, and improve functionality, these statements will all remain true.
InfoDrainage remains (and will continue to be) the ideal solution for full and comprehensive hydraulic modeling. A few examples of where we think InfoDrainage especially stands out:
- Compliance: It’s becoming essential for regulatory compliance, thanks to the near-automatic advanced, flexible drainage reporting that InfoDrainage can deliver.
- When building highways: If you’re working on a USDOT highway project, the integrated FHWA culvert analysis tool in InfoDrainage allows you to rapidly run hydraulic simulations in a familiar environment.
- When sustainability is a priority: If you’re designing sustainable drainage systems (SuDS/LIDs/WSUDs/BMPs), InfoDrainage maintains industry-leading support for modeling the hydraulic behavior of these designs.
- When complexity is a given: Our customer VHB, a top design consulting firm, chooses InfoDrainage for its ability to model complex interconnected systems, SWMM support, and its ability to quickly model dozens of options.
Which drainage solution should I use? InfoDrainage or Drainage Analysis?
If you’re consistently working on drainage design projects, designing SuDS, running drainage reports, and designing stormwater and sanitary sewer systems, then you likely need InfoDrainage. However, if you’re already working in Civil 3D and need to run a check on a preliminary plan or understand overall drainage on your site, then you might find some of the new drainage capabilities powered by InfoDrainage will fill gaps in your processes.
However, as always, it’s a little more complicated than that. Most users will find that the enhanced capabilities in InfoDrainage like deluge analysis, flexible reporting, culvert analysis, support for SuDS, and a plethora of other workflows, are well worth the upgrade.
Which one is for you? See for yourself.
In the end, our customers will continue to have lots of options – and you can try both of them out to see which fits your needs:
- Civil 3D drainage capabilities: You’ll need Civil 3D 2026 (or newer, as time goes by). You’ll find the technical preview option for Civil 3D 2026 in your Autodesk Account, which can be conveniently packaged with the Civil 3D 2026 installer.
- InfoDrainage: If you haven’t already tried out this AI/ML-powered option and want to take advantage of the full power of InfoDrainage, you can do that via a via a free 30-day trial (no credit card required).