Today, one of the biggest differentiations between UrbanFootprint and UrbanSim is that I'd call UrbanFootprint a "sketch analysis tool" whereas UrbanSim is, to the best of my understanding, an agent-based simulation tool. For a user, the key differentiator is that in UrbanFootprint you build scenarios with the actual future land use that you envision and we run analyses to provide insight on the relative impacts of those scenarios. So you might build out a few scenarios like “Business as Usual”, “Urban Infill”, and “Transit Oriented Development” and assess the cost/benefit of those different plans. In this use case you are literally “painting” land use onto a map (with the aid of lots of nice faceted filtering, geospatial joins, etc.). In the absolute simplest terms, I like to think of it as “you tell us what and where you want to build and we’ll tell you how that pencils out.”
Additionally, we aim to provide numerous high value datasets and analysis modules “out of the box” to lower the bar to entry for many planning tasks. For example, we provide users a normalized nationwide parcel-level land use “canvas” to create projects with. This means you can be up and running with parcel data for most cities in the United States in a few clicks!
And for the record, there is absolutely nothing on the technical side that precludes us from doing agent-based simulation -- we just haven’t focused on that yet. I’d personally like to build a feature which allows you to use simulation to produce scenarios as a starting point and then tweak them to your liking.
For MapCraft, I'm not up to speed on what it is now capable of. I am familiar with their cofounder’s previous work while at UC Berkeley. This is a good reminder for me to circle back on what MapCraft is up to - thanks! Also, if you’re a customer of theirs I’d love to hear how you think UrbanFootprint compares.
I'll have to leave questions about PECAS for someone else on my team as I don't personally have any knowledge/expertise on that one.