Kuula vs Moorea 2026: a panorama or a delivery

We are Moorea, this page is signed, and it argues for our tool: read it knowing that. It compares two things that look alike from a distance and do not do the same job.

Kuula is a panorama editor: its unit is the post, a sphere you upload and share. Moorea is a platform for producing and delivering aerial virtual tours: our unit is the place, a golf course or a campsite that a client will put on their website and keep for years.

Let us say straight away what Kuula does better, because the rest of the page depends on it.

• Uploading a sphere and getting a link takes a minute, with nothing to learn first.
• Its free tier is more generous than ours in raw volume: 300 posts and 100 uploads a month, recorded August 2026.
• Its nadir and zenith patches with masters are exactly the tool a photographer needs to erase a tripod.
• Its public feed helps people discover authors, and we have no public gallery at all.

Nothing that follows disputes any of it. What follows is about what is missing once the sphere has to become a deliverable.

The table

Criterion	Kuula	Moorea
The unit of work	the post: one panorama, alone or linked to others	the tour of a place: scenes linked on a map
Template by industry	none, every tour starts from a blank page	industry templates: golf, campsites, wineries, marinas, construction
Client sign-off before publishing	outside the tool, by email and screenshots	the Atelier: notes placed inside the 360, guests without accounts
Audience analytics	Business tier, $36 a month billed annually	included everywhere, free plan too
Password on a tour	Business tier	from €19 excl. VAT, with four visibility levels
Client domain and white label	custom domain on the Business tier	full white label at €19 excl. VAT, carried by the workspace
The tour's map	imported floor plan, Google Maps pins	satellite map by default, placed from the file's own GPS data, or an imported plan
Free tier	300 posts, 100 uploads a month, Kuula logo	3 tours, 5 panoramas each, no expiry
Views, bandwidth, expiry	not billed	unlimited, never billed, and the tour never expires
Where the data sits	US platform, no European hosting commitment on its pages	API and database in Frankfurt, media in European jurisdiction

Kuula publishes a panorama, Moorea delivers a place

A golf course is not a collection of spheres: it is eighteen holes played in order. A campsite is not a collection of spheres either: it is zones, accommodation, services, and a visitor asking “where is the pool relative to my lodge”.

Those two tours do not have the same structure, and neither of them looks like a gallery.

On Kuula, every tour starts from a blank page: it is on you to decide what links to what, which content to attach, in which order. That is flexible, and it is work redone on every delivery.

The map follows the same logic. Geolocated scenes place themselves on a satellite map from the GPS position and heading read out of the file, and the player’s minimap builds on that.

When the map is not the right backdrop, the interactive map takes any image you like while keeping the original coordinates: remove the plan and the satellite map comes back, nothing is lost.

The tour is signed off before it is delivered

Between “the tour is ready” and “the tour is live”, there is always somebody saying “that viewpoint is too high”, “the booking link is missing here”, “the restaurant photo is from last year”.

With no tool, that conversation happens by email, with screenshots and photo numbers, and nobody knows which angle is being discussed.

Kuula has no equivalent, and that is not an oversight: a panorama editor has no reason to organise the sign-off of a client deliverable. It is a production-platform function.

The workspace in the client’s name, not yours

Kuula Business does custom domains with SSL and multiple logos: on that point it is far from empty-handed. The difference is what carries the brand.

At Moorea, the accent colour, the logo, the favicon and the share card belong to the workspace, with its members, its roles and its domain.

A drone pilot therefore opens one workspace per client instead of stacking everybody’s tours under their own brand. Each client gets a link that talks only about them: their domain in the address bar, their name and favicon in the tab, their cover image when the link is shared.

A white label that refuses the unreadable

A detail that says how seriously it is implemented: an accent colour whose contrast falls below 3:1 against the player’s dark surfaces is refused on save. A white label that lets you produce an unreadable button is not a white label.

The two grids do not cut in the same place

This is where a price comparison becomes misleading, because the tiers do not lock the same things.

On Kuula, the three capabilities a client deliverable needs sit on one tier: password, detailed analytics and custom domain are all grouped in Business, at $36 a month billed annually, recorded August 2026.

The Pro tier, at $20, gives you the editor, unlimited uploads, your logo and unlisted tours, with no analytics at all.

Tier at which analytics unlock

Kuula

$36/mo

Business tier, billed annually - the $20 Pro tier gives none

Moorea

€0

included on all four plans, free plan too

Analytics are not a comfort option

This is not a Kuula quirk, it is the market norm: as of 17 August 2026, Klapty opens its analytics at €29.90 and Panoraven at €29. We decided the other way.

Knowing how many people saw the tour, which scenes they opened and which call to action they clicked is not a comfort option: it is what justifies the next commission. A free account is entitled to it like anyone else.

The measurements are deliberately modest and documented as such: no real time, no heatmaps, and unique visitors counted by day, which the interface says out loud.

What our own tiers lock

On our side, the four visibility levels - private, unlisted, password-protected, public - arrive at the Place tier, €9 excl. VAT. Pilot, at €19 excl. VAT, adds full white label, the custom domain, the industry templates and badge removal. Studio, at €39 excl. VAT, adds unlimited tours and Moorea Network.

The market benchmark is useful here: full white label costs €99.90 a month on Klapty, or €250 to €699 as a one-off add-on on 3DVista, again as of 17 August 2026.

Our free tier is narrower than Kuula’s by volume, as said above: 3 active tours, 5 panoramas each. It has two properties the market almost never offers.

It carries the analytics, and it does not expire - where Matterport and Klapty cap their free plan at a single tour, where visite360.immo closes the account after six months, and where Panoraven bars its free plan to companies and associations (recorded 17 August 2026).

From the drone file to the screen

Neither Kuula nor we stitch your 26 RAW frames: you arrive with a 2:1 equirectangular. What happens next is not the same job, because we only have one kind of source to handle well.

Moorea accepts files up to 32,000 pixels wide and 500 MB, in JPEG, PNG, TIFF and AVIF; beyond that the source is downscaled automatically, never rejected.

The zenith hole a drone leaves is detected and filled with a gradient, the logo is reprojected at the nadir, and six image adjustments are previewed in real time then recomputed on output, so that the editor’s screen does not lie about the final render.

A workspace profile then applies the same settings to every scene in a tour.

The zenith hole a drone leaves

Kuula

By hand

nadir and zenith patches with masters, to prepare yourself, image by image

Moorea

Detected

zenith cap spotted and filled with a gradient on import, logo reprojected at the nadir

What the visitor sees

The panorama is then cut into multi-resolution tiles that let you zoom to 512 megapixels per viewpoint, encoded in AVIF: a calibration on real golf panoramas, measured on 9 August 2026, gives 40.9 dB PSNR against 39.4 dB for WebP, for 7 % more weight.

The engine that displays all of it weighs 19.5 KiB gzipped, measured 17 August 2026, with no external dependency, and the embed on the client’s website fits in an iframe of around 142 kilobytes gzipped, with no cookies and no session.

Yes, Moorea displays interiors too

It is the most frequent confusion about us, so let us clear it: our engine displays any 2:1 equirectangular panorama, wherever it comes from.

An indoor panorama shot from a tripod imports and renders exactly like an aerial view, in the same tour, with the same navigation. Aerial is our speciality, not a border.

The mixed tour is in fact the normal case: the aerial viewpoints tell the story of the site, and a few ground-level panoramas show reception or a sample room.

When Kuula is enough

Three specific situations where we have nothing better to offer.

You publish standalone spheres on unrelated subjects. An interior on Monday, a shop on Tuesday, an aerial view on Thursday, each with its own link: that is a publishing stream, not the tour of a place. Kuula is built for that rhythm.

The tour will never carry a client’s name and nobody will sign it off. Two or three panoramas a year, published under your own brand, no password and no review to organise: Kuula’s free plan covers it, and so does ours. No reason to pay a subscription, to them or to us.

You want to be discovered. Kuula’s public feed circulates your posts among a community of photographers. We offer nothing of the sort, and we do not plan to.

Outside those three cases, the gap shows mostly in what does not appear on its grid.

The moment a sphere becomes a deliverable

Those three cases have one thing in common: the sphere is the finished product.

The moment it becomes the raw material of a deliverable - a place someone has to grasp at a glance, a client’s brand to carry, a sign-off to organise, numbers to report the following year - the scope changes, and that is the scope Moorea exists for.

The product page sets out what the platform makes, and the feature list says what the subscription covers.

Moorea’s free plan needs no card: three tours of five panoramas are enough to see the difference on a place you already know.