Saga GIS left QGIS. Here’s how to bring it back!
QGIS is great. We say it a lot in this blog, but sometimes I like to call a friend for help, when I can’t find the right tool in the toolbox. That friend is called SAGA GIS.
Short information break: SAGA GIS is an Open Source project originating from German scientists that created the software roughly 20 years ago. The name stands for System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses. SAGA offers a lot of different GIS tools and is widely used, also outside the scientific community. There are a lot of tools SAGA provides and you can get an overview from looking at the SAGA menu in QGIS.
QGIS has for a long time been supporting using SAGA tools within QGIS. This is actually how I’ve come into contact with SAGA and it has all been quite easy. I just use the tools directly from the Processing toolbox (Ctrl + Alt + T if you were not familiar with it yet).
However, as of QGIS 3.30 version SAGA is no longer automatically integrated as a core plugin into QGIS, so you can’t find the tools directly in your Processing toolbox.
Why? One of the reasons SAGA was dropped from QGIS was that at least in the past SAGA’s APIs would change between every version – even minor patch releases. Keeping up with the updates in QGIS became messy.
Luckily, there’s a solution. It’s a plugin called Processing Saga NextGen Provider. This plugin allows you to get back SAGA tools in QGIS. The plugin supports only a single fixed version of SAGA and has some other developments compared to the old version.
Let’s go through the steps to make it work in your QGIS.
First, go to your plugins (Plugins -> Manage and install Plugins…) and search for “Processing Saga NextGen Provider”. Choose it from the plugin list and press the “Install Plugin” button.
Easy. Well, actually, you’re not done yet. This is the trickier part but I’m sure you can do this.
Next up we need to install something called SAGA binaries. These are pre-compiled executable files for the software. If you have SAGA installed already on your computer, you could try to connect to that installation. I don’t, so I’m going to download the binaries separately. You can find the binaries here.
I noticed from the plugin repository that the latest support is SAGA version 9.2.0 (even though my plugin window in QGIS says 9.1). I’m going to take a risk and download the 9.2.0 version. On the download page I choose the file “saga-9.2.0_x64.zip”. Make sure you are downloading the correct file (not the setup file!). After the download, extract the Zip to a folder where you can find them easily.
Go back to QGIS and open up Settings -> Options -> Processing. Under Providers, you should see SAGANG and under that SAGA folder. This is where you should insert the path to your SAGA binaries. In my case the path would be C:/Users/emil/Documents/saga-9.2.0_x64/saga-9.2.0_x64
Note! At least on Windows extracting the Zip file generates two folders of the same name inside each other. Choose the latter to make sure the SAGA plugin works. In my case, I double-clicked the saga-9.2.0_x64 folder to open it and then chose the another saga-9.2.0_x64 folder that was inside.
After pressing OK you should see a SAGA Next Gen menu in your Processing toolbox. Underneath you’ll find the SAGA tools at your service! Yay! The friendship between QGIS and SAGA is restored!
If you run into problems, there are a few things to consider:
- Check the SAGA folder path: are the executable files inside this folder?
- Check that the Zip file has been extracted and that your SAGA folder path is not pointing to the Zip.
- Check the SAGA version you downloaded. If 9.2.0 is not working, perhaps another version will.
- Restart QGIS. This solves most of my problems.
- If you have problems with the plugin, you can add an issue to Github or contact us on info@gispo.fi We’re happy to help on problems related to Open Source GIS – such as QGIS plugins like SAGA NextGen Provider. Feel free to be in touch!
