Deed plotting software, compared

The established workflow looks like this: read the deed, decipher the legal description, type each bearing and distance into a form, and eyeball whether the figure closes. Good desktop tools have refined that loop for decades. Net Deed Plotter and Metes and Bounds can even parse calls out of text you paste in, which saves typing when the description is already digital and cleanly worded.

Easting starts one step earlier. You hand it the recorded document, scan and all. It reads the description, extracts every call with the verbatim sentence it came from, recomputes the traverse, checks closure, and compares the computed area against what the deed states. Only then does it draw, in your browser or in QGIS, on a real basemap. When a description will not verify, you get the misclosure, the suspect courses, and the source text instead of a polygon that looks authoritative and is not.

Already holding the description as text, from a title commitment or an email? Paste it and the same checks run. The one difference is honesty about provenance: the certificate says the source was provided text rather than a recorded document, because geometry verified against what somebody typed is not the same claim as geometry verified against the instrument itself.

Where the desktop tools still win

Honesty cuts both ways. Traverse PC is full survey COGO software with least-squares adjustment and field-data import; if you are a licensed surveyor processing your own field work, Easting is not a replacement. Net Deed Plotter's $200 perpetual license beats a subscription for someone plotting deeds every working day for years. Metes and Bounds has a genuinely free tier, and DeedMapper's prebuilt historic map sets serve genealogists tracing patents Easting has no special support for. The newer AI readers deserve credit too: Deed Reader Pro transcribes cursive handwriting, which Easting does not attempt, and DeedPlotter AI's web app is quick for one-off plots. Where every tool in the table stops short is the verdict. Some calculate closure, one or two report it, but none of them compare the computed area against what the deed itself states, and none will refuse to draw and tell you the description itself is bad.

What verification actually catches

Descriptions are wrong more often than people expect, and a hand-typed plot inherits every error silently. The engine checks closure and stated area as two independent signals; a figure that closes beautifully while disagreeing with its own acreage is telling you something, and on our qualification corpus the verdicts overruled even our own hand-annotated reference geometry (GroundTruth has the receipts). Old units come through at the correct survey definitions: chains at 66 feet, Texas varas at 33 1/3 inches, meters at the exact survey-foot ratio. A unit the engine does not recognize fails loudly by name instead of being silently treated as feet.

Try it on a real deed

Three documents are free, with no card, and failed extractions are never billed. If you only plot a few deeds a year, the $30 pack of ten never-expiring credits costs less than an hour of the manual method. Run a deed in your browser at app.easting.ai with nothing to install, or add the Easting plugin from the QGIS plugin manager if your work lives in a QGIS project. The step-by-step guide covers both. Starting from a scanned county document rather than typed calls? That workflow has its own page.