It is free and open-source software, developed originally by a small team at the Department of Physical Geography, University of Göttingen, Germany, and is now being maintained and extended by an international developer community.

SAGA GIS is intended to give scientists an effective but easily learnable platform for implementing geoscientific methods.

SAGA has a fast-growing set of geoscientific methods, bundled in exchangeable module libraries.

The standard modules are: SAGA GIS is an effective tool with user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) that requires only about 10 MB disk space.

No installation is needed, since SAGA GIS can be run directly from a USB thumb drive if desired.