Guide
3DVista vs Moorea 2026: licence or hosted
A perpetual licence against a platform that hosts. This guide costs what the licence does not buy: distribution, the domain, the audience, and the tour that still has to work in three years.
3DVista is desktop software you buy once. Moorea is a platform that hosts, serves and updates your tours. Both display 360 panoramas, but they do not solve the same problem: one gives you a folder of files, the other gives you an address that works.
We are Moorea and this page argues for our tool, which you will know as you read it. The 3DVista prices quoted come from its public grid, recorded 17 August 2026; those grids move, so check them before deciding. Ours exclude VAT.
What 3DVista does better, and we will not argue about
You buy it once. No monthly direct debit, no tier to watch, nothing that disappears the day you stop paying.
It is a deep authoring tool, made for people who want to set everything by hand. And the exported tour is a folder on your disk: you archive it, you copy it to a stick, you run it without a network.
No platform, ours included, gives you that freedom. The rest of this page starts from that fact and asks the question that comes straight after: once the folder is exported, who serves it, at what address, and for how many years?
The table
| Criterion | 3DVista | Moorea |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | desktop software, installed on your machine | online platform, editor in the browser |
| Model | perpetual licence, €499 excl. VAT once (recorded August 2026) | subscription, public grid from €0 to €39 excl. VAT a month |
| Hosting the tour | your problem | included, on all four plans |
| Domain and certificate | your problem | client domain on the Studio tier, certificate issued and renewed on its own |
| White label | one-off add-on of €250 to €699 excl. VAT (recorded August 2026) | included at €19 excl. VAT a month, domain included |
| Views and bandwidth | whatever your host's contract says | unlimited, never billed |
| How long the tour lives | as long as you pay your hosting | no expiry at all |
| Audience analytics | check with them: the export lives on your server | included on every plan, free one included |
| Player updates | what you exported stays as it is | the engine served is the current one, with no re-export |
| Where the data sits | wherever you host it | API and database in Frankfurt, media in European jurisdiction |
The licence buys the software, not the distribution
What the export leaves on your plate
The licence does not buy the fact that a tour answers at the address printed on your leaflet. What stays your problem after the export:
- hosting able to serve thousands of tile files;
- a domain name, and the certificate that goes with it;
- monitoring all of that, and the backups.
Nothing insurmountable if you already run a server and know the drill. A real workload otherwise. 3DVista also sells a hosting option: its price does not appear in our surveys, so check it with them before doing your sums.
What the platform takes back
Moorea takes exactly that job: storage, serving the tiles, the domain name with its certificate, and the four visibility levels of a tour, from private to public.
The embed on your website goes through an iframe of around 142 kilobytes gzipped, measured on every build.
The API and the database are in Frankfurt. That is an infrastructure fact, not a flag to wave.
Total cost over three years
The assumption
Take the case that really separates the two models: a drone pilot or an agency keeping thirty tours online for their clients, white-labelled.
Assumptions: 3DVista prices recorded August 2026, and for hosting a French-market anchor, where having a tour hosted is invoiced at €24 to €100 excl. VAT a year. It is a national survey rather than a European average, and it is quoted as such.
Thirty tours online, white-labelled, over three years
3DVista
€2,909 to €9,749
€499 licence and €250 Branded Viewer add-on, then three years of storage, domain and monitoring for thirty tours, on you
Moorea
€570
Pilot at €190 excl. VAT a year: hosting, client domain and white label included
If you pool those thirty tours on a server you already pay for, the hosting line falls to zero in cash terms. Never in time: you are the one monitoring, renewing and restoring.
The other direction, which matters just as much
On a single tour, sitting on infrastructure you already administer, 3DVista is cheaper: €499 excl. VAT once against €570 excl. VAT over three years on the Pilot tier. The licence is amortised in year one and never pays again.
The tipping point comes from volume and duration. Every tour you add weighs a little more on your side, and adds nothing to the invoice on Moorea’s Studio tier, which is unlimited in number of tours.
What the free plan lets you judge
The free plan does not play in this category, but it does serve as a serious trial: three active tours, five panoramas each, no expiry.
Across the panel surveyed on 17 August 2026, the market’s free plan caps at one tour (Matterport, Klapty), expires after six months (visite360.immo) or shuts companies out (Panoraven).
Five panoramas do not make a professional deliverable - a 9-hole golf course needs more than four times that - but they are plenty to judge the render on your own images.
Two methodological precautions
Always check whether a price is shown with or without VAT. The apparent 20 % gap comes from that more often than from any real difference.
Then check the update policy on a perpetual licence, which is not the same thing as a lifetime licence covering every future version.
The capture line, which weighs far more than the software in either case, is broken down in our cost guide.
White label: a separate purchase there, a tier here
The add-on, at 3DVista
It is paid as one-off add-ons: Branded Viewer €250, Branded App €499, Branded Pack €699 excl. VAT (recorded 17 August 2026).
They dress the viewer. They supply neither the address, nor the certificate, nor the serving of the files, all of which stay yours.
Full white label, what the price buys
3DVista
€250 to €699
one-off Branded Viewer, Branded App and Branded Pack add-ons: they dress the viewer, without the domain, the certificate or the file serving
Moorea
€19 excl. VAT / mo
Studio tier: logo, accent colour, badge removed and the client's domain via CNAME, certificate issued and renewed automatically
The tier, at Moorea
At Moorea, €19 excl. VAT a month carries the lot: your logo, your accent colour checked on save at a contrast of at least 3:1 against the player’s dark surfaces, our badge removed, and the client’s domain wired via CNAME, with a certificate issued and renewed automatically.
Across the panel surveyed on 17 August 2026, full white label is elsewhere a top-tier privilege: €99.90 a month on Klapty.
The engine follows the web, without you re-exporting
An exported tour is frozen at the version of its export day. The web is not: browsers, image formats, mobile behaviours. The day something breaks, it is on you to reopen the project, re-export and redeploy, on every tour already delivered.
At Moorea, the engine is served by the platform. It weighs 19.5 KiB gzipped, measured 17 August 2026, with no external dependency, and an improvement benefits tours already published without anyone reopening anything.
The corollary has to be said too: on this precise point you depend on us, where an exported folder depends on nobody.
What the tour teaches you
A hosted tour can tell you what people do with it. A folder dropped on a server will only tell you if you wire an analytics tool into it yourself.
Aerial, the industry template, the client sign-off
The viewpoint that takes in the whole site
Moorea is built for the aerial virtual tour: GPS metadata read so each scene places itself on the satellite map, the zenith cap filled above the drone, the logo reprojected at the nadir, up to 32,000 pixels wide per viewpoint.
It is the only viewpoint that takes in a golf course, a campsite or a marina in one look.
Interiors, which nothing closes off
That closes nothing off indoors, and the confusion is common: the engine displays any 2:1 equirectangular panorama, wherever it comes from.
A panorama shot from a tripod inside a building imports and navigates like an aerial view, in the same tour. When the satellite map is not right, the interactive map takes any image you like, floor plans included.
The structure laid down in advance
For places that come back, the industry template lays down the tour’s structure and navigation from the start - golf, campsite, winery, marina, construction site or new-build development - instead of making you build it screen by screen.
No tool in the panel surveyed on 17 August 2026 offers an equivalent.
When 3DVista is enough
Three situations where we will send you to them without hesitating.
The deliverable has to run offline or be handed over as files. A trade-show kiosk, a computer with no network, a contract requiring the sources: a tool that exports is structurally the right tool, and we offer no deliverable export.
The interactive storytelling goes beyond what a template covers. If the interactions are your added value and you want to write them one by one, an authoring tool will always go further than an online editor.
Go and read their exact list of what the current version allows: our surveys cover positioning and pricing, not a feature inventory.
A single tour, on infrastructure you already administer. €499 once, one more folder on a server that is already running and an administrator to hand: the sum does itself. It only flips with the tenth tour and the third year.
The only test that settles it
Nothing forces you to choose once and for all, incidentally: building the scripted projects under a licence and running the week-in, week-out deliveries on a platform is a split that defends itself perfectly well.
To judge the second option there is only one way: upload your panoramas, publish, send the link to a client and watch what they do with it.
The product page sets out what Moorea makes, and the pricing grid is public.
If you make a living from your flights, the guide to selling tours describes what changes when the tour is no longer yours to host.
Développeur et télépilote de drone. Construit Moorea au sein d’Elvn Studio.
A place worth showing from above?
The free plan is enough to publish a first tour and show it around.