Matterport vs krpano vs 3DVista: The Real Cost of a Virtual Tour Platform

Spend an hour researching virtual tours and three names will surface again and again: Matterport, krpano and 3DVista. They are routinely compared as if they were three brands of the same product. They are not. One is a subscription platform, one is a professional software engine, and one is a desktop application — three different answers to the question of who owns your tour and who pays to keep it online. This guide explains what each one actually is, where each is strong, and how to run the only comparison that matters: total cost over the years the tour will work for you.

Three Products, Three Business Models

Matterport sells an ecosystem: capture hardware, cloud processing and hosting, bound together by a subscription. krpano sells a licence: a rendering engine that professionals build tours with and host wherever they choose. 3DVista sells software: a one-time desktop application for people who want to assemble tours themselves. Feature lists shift every year; the business models do not. And it is the model — not the feature list — that decides what the tour costs in year five.

Matterport: The Subscription Platform

Matterport made 3D capture mainstream, and in residential real estate it is close to a default. The pipeline is genuinely convenient: scan the space with a supported camera, upload to the cloud, and receive a polished tour with the signature dollhouse view and an automatic floor plan. Agents love it for good reason — dozens of listings a month can be scanned by staff after minimal training, and every result looks the same.

The price of that convenience is the model. Tours live on Matterport's cloud, plans are priced by the number of active spaces, and hosting cannot be separated from the platform. While the subscription runs, everything works; when it stops, public access to the tours stops with it. In the terms that matter to an owner: you are renting publication, not buying an asset. For a portfolio of listings that expire within months anyway, that trade can be perfectly rational. For a hotel lobby that will look the same for a decade, it rarely is.

krpano: The Professional's Engine

krpano is not a service and barely a product in the consumer sense: it is a rendering engine with a one-time licence, the tool a studio reaches for when the result has to be exactly right. It displays panoramas up to gigapixel resolution, allows any interface a designer can imagine, and produces static files you can host on any server on earth. No per-tour fee, no platform, no meter.

What it does not do is hold your hand. krpano expects finished, stitched panoramas and rewards people who can work close to code. It is the wrong purchase for a venue owner — and the right foundation for a production studio. It is also part of our own history: tours we built on it years ago are still online today, and nobody has paid a monthly fee for them since.

3DVista: One-Time Software for the Determined

3DVista sits between the two. Its Virtual Tour Pro is a desktop application sold as a one-time licence: you shoot the panoramas yourself, stitch and connect them in the software, place hotspots and publish the result as files you host yourself (optional hosting exists, but it is exactly that — optional). For an in-house marketing team with time, a suitable camera and patience for the learning curve, it is a sensible middle ground.

The honest caveat: the licence is the cheapest part of the project. HDR shooting, colour work and scene logic are crafts, and the hours they take are the real cost of do-it-yourself. The software owns nothing of yours — but it also does none of the work.

The Five-Year Question

Ignore list prices for a moment and compare shapes. A subscription platform costs little at the start and accumulates forever: entry fee times sixty months, multiplied by however many venues you keep active. A licence or a produced tour costs its full amount immediately and then stops costing anything at all. The lines cross surprisingly early, and everything after the crossing is pure difference.

Four questions expose the model behind any offer: Who owns the image files? What happens to the tour if you stop paying in year three? What does venue number two cost? And is hosting included — for how long? We keep a side-by-side version of this comparison on our pricing page, right next to the calculator — with our own numbers public.

Which One Fits You?

• A high-volume estate agency scanning dozens of short-lived listings each month: a platform's speed and consistency genuinely pay off, and the subscription hurts least where tours retire quickly anyway.
• A production studio or developer building branded, long-lived tours: krpano — plus the skills to drive it.
• An in-house team with time and a camera, producing tours occasionally: 3DVista's one-time licence beats renting, as long as the hours stay affordable. And if you shoot but would rather not build, our tour production service turns your panoramas into finished, hosted tours.
• A venue owner who wants the result, not the software: none of the above. Hire a producer on a one-time model and judge the output, not the toolchain.

Our Answer: Producer, Not Platform

We have photographed venues since 2004 — more than 50 projects in three countries — and the model has never changed: you pay once, the tour stays online, lifetime hosting is included, and the files are yours. The engines we build on carry one-time or open licences and run on our own servers, so no third party's pricing decision can ever switch your lobby off. Shoots are HDR at up to 16K, Google Street View publication is part of the package, and our list prices start at €299 in Europe and €149 in Türkiye.

If you are weighing the three names above, look at finished tours in our gallery first and decide what your venue deserves; the 360° virtual tour service page explains what a production includes. And if a subscription quote is already on your desk, do the sixty-month multiplication before signing — then message us on WhatsApp for the one-time figure to put beside it.