FreeSurfer Download and Install

You can read and compare the version 7 and 6 release notes here.

Latest Version 7 Release (Apr 2020)

Freesurfer 7 release downloads and setup: here.

Previous Version 6 Release (Jan 2017)

Freesurfer 6 release downloads and setup: here.

Important Note: When processing a group of subjects for your study, it is essential to process all your subjects with the same version of FreeSurfer, on the same OS platform and vendor, and for safety, even the same version of the OS. While we continue to work to ensure that results match across platforms, there are none-the-less system-level libraries that are OS dependent. An exception to this rule is that you may view and edit files across any platform or version, and run some post-processing tools (outside the recon-all stream) if you check with us first (for instance you may run the longitudinal processing with newer versions).

Ubuntu 18.04 VM disk image (.vdi) with 6.0.0 Release and Development 7.0.0 beta 1 Release: A VirtualBox Ubuntu image to run on Windows, the Mac and/or other Linux OS flavors VM_setup. Can be used to run the freesurfer tutorial commands.

Development Version: Daily builds of FreeSurfer can be downloaded from here.

Older Releases: Previous releases of FreeSurfer can be downloaded from here.

Freeview: For instructions on how to update Freeview - FreeSurfer's mri viewing application - go to the following page: Updating Freeview

License

A license key must be obtained to make the FreeSurfer tools operational. Obtaining a license is free and comes in the form of a license.txt file. Once you obtain the license.txt key file, copy it to your FreeSurfer installation directory. This is also the location defined by the FREESURFER_HOME environment variable.

Follow this link to obtain a license key.

Additional Resources

Try our tutorials

Sign up for a FreeSurfer course

Join the FreeSurfer mailing list, ask a question, or view the archives

openneuro_badge.svg A free and open platform that can be used to run FreeSurfer. For more information, click here.