Guide
Matterport vs Moorea 2026: the whole site
Matterport wins measured interiors, and that is said in one paragraph. The rest compares what actually decides: the viewpoint, and the counter that drives the invoice.
We are Moorea, and this page argues for our platform against Matterport. So you are reading an interested party: better to say so, and to make up for it with figures you can go and check. Every competitor price quoted here carries the date it was recorded, and our own numbers come from our public pricing.
What Matterport does better, no argument
Matterport does not just display 360 photos, it reconstructs the space. Its camera measures depth, the software turns that into a 3D mesh, and from that mesh come the dollhouse view, the floor plans and the measurements taken inside the image.
It is mature, coherent, and since February 2025 it belongs to CoStar, which bought it for 1.6 billion dollars. None of that exists at Moorea and nothing replaces it: if your deliverable is a floor area or a reliable floor plan, the rest of this page is not about you.
For every other case, reconstructed 3D is not what decides. What decides is what you have to show, and what you will pay to keep it online for years.
The table
| Criterion | Matterport | Moorea |
|---|---|---|
| Home ground | partitioned interiors, room by room | the wide site, seen from the sky, and interiors on top |
| Capture | Matterport camera or smartphone, on a tripod | 360 photos from a drone, up to 512 Mpx per viewpoint |
| Deliverable | 3D mesh, dollhouse, floor plan, measurements | 360 panoramas linked on a satellite map or on a plan you supply |
| What drives the invoice | the number of active spaces: €2.60 to €3.32 per space per month | the tier you pick, never the number of projects |
| Public pricing | €13 for 5 spaces, €52 for 20, €148 for 50 (cheapest tier at each volume) | €0, €9, €19 and €39 excl. VAT a month, whatever the number of tours |
| Free plan | 1 space | 3 active tours, 5 panoramas each |
| Views and bandwidth | not billed | not billed and uncapped |
| How long a tour lives | a space is counted for as long as it is online | no expiry at all |
| Where the data sits | US company, CoStar group since February 2025 | API and database in Frankfurt, media in European jurisdiction |
What a ground-level scan cannot show
Matterport’s strength is also its boundary: it needs walls, doors and capture points close together. An 18-hole golf course has none of that. Neither does a campsite, a winery or a marina.
On sites like those, two things give way at the same time.
- The density of capture points. Covering sixty hectares from a tripod would take hundreds of stations, and the capture cost would explode before anything went online.
- Legibility. From the ground you never see the whole: not where the greens sit relative to each other, not how far the pitch is from the beach, not the shape of the lake.
That is precisely what your client wants to know, and it is what fifteen metres of altitude deliver in a single image.
A place that makes sense from the sky gets shown from the sky: the drone is not a flourish, it is the only viewpoint that takes in the subject. We wrote the full argument on our aerial virtual tour page.
So what about interiors?
They display, and it matters to say so because the confusion is common. The Moorea engine reads 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.
JPEG, PNG, TIFF and AVIF are accepted, up to 32,000 pixels wide. The mixed tour is therefore the normal case, not the exception: the aerial viewpoints tell the story of the site, and a few ground-level panoramas show reception, the restaurant or a sample room.
And when the satellite map is not the right backdrop, the interactive map takes any image you like, floor plans included, with the points positioned by hand. What the engine does not manufacture is geometry: we display the interior, we do not scan it.
The counter that drives the invoice
This is where the gap is widest, and it does not close over time: it grows. Matterport bills per active space.
Its public euro pricing, recorded on 17 August 2026, runs from €13 a month for 5 spaces to €52 for 20 on Starter, then €148 for 50 and €277 for 100 on Professional, and €332 for 100 on Business. Per unit that works out at €2.60 to €3.32 per space per month, almost perfectly linear.
So the tiers are packaging: the counter that drives the invoice is the number of tours you have online. The free plan follows the same rule, with one space and one only.
That logic is defensible, and it deserves to be acknowledged: revenue follows the value being hosted. It also has a mechanical consequence nobody anticipates in year one. Your past work does not go away, it accumulates, and every tour you leave online for a former client becomes a permanent line of cost.
Twenty tours kept online for three years
Matterport
€1,872
20 active spaces on Starter, the cheapest tier at that volume: €52 a month for 36 months
Moorea
€684
Pilot plan at €19 excl. VAT a month, 15 active tours included
A tier of capabilities, not a catalogue
At Moorea, what you pay for is a tier, not a catalogue: the grid runs from €0 to €39 excl. VAT a month, and the top tier has no limit on the number of tours.
A drone pilot who keeps thirty tours online for their clients pays €39 excl. VAT a month; at three hundred tours, they still pay €39 excl. VAT. The breakdown of what a tour actually costs is in our cost guide.
Credit where it is due
On this specific point, Matterport is not the market’s bad pupil: it bills neither views nor bandwidth, and its counter stays the number of spaces.
Other platforms bill for the watching itself, on view overage or by the monthly gigabyte, and some delete inactive tours after a few months. The full survey is in our alternatives comparison.
We do neither: a QR code printed on a welcome sign has to still work in three years.
What the free plan actually lets you do
A free plan exists so you can judge for yourself, not so you can run a thirty-second demo. The design difference shows in a single number.
Active tours on the free plan
Matterport
1
one space, and one only, on the Free plan
Moorea
3
3 active tours, 5 panoramas each, no expiry
Our free plan is for trying, not for delivering. Five panoramas are enough to build a real tour and show it, not to deliver a 9-hole golf course, which needs about twenty. The choice is deliberate, and three tours is still three times what Matterport’s free plan gives you.
It does not expire after six months, as happens elsewhere, and it is not closed to businesses, as also happens elsewhere: both cases appear in our survey of 17 August 2026.
Delivering under your client’s brand
A tour delivered to a golf club or a campsite ends up on the golf club’s or the campsite’s website. It should arrive under their name, not ours.
The accent colour is checked on save, incidentally, against a minimum contrast of 3:1 with the player’s dark surfaces. Below that, saving is refused: a well-applied brand should not make a button unreadable.
The trade’s template, and client review inside the tour
Two things Matterport does not set out to do, because they mean knowing the trade of the place rather than the geometry of the building.
Industry templates first. A golf course is not walked like a campsite: one reads hole by hole in playing order, the other by zones, from the lake to the pitches. The template installs that trade-specific navigation instead of leaving you to rebuild a tour plan on every commission.
Then the Atelier, which fixes the most painful moment of any production: client sign-off. The note is anchored to the viewpoint and the angle, so “that mast ruins the shot” reads exactly where the mast is visible, with no email exchange full of screenshots.
Your guests have no account to create. And the Atelier is a layer: you open it to work, you close it to deliver, and the published tour keeps no trace of it.
What you distribute, and where it lives
A tour always ends up in a page: yours, a booking listing, a follow-up email. Our embed is an iframe of around 142 kilobytes gzipped, measured on every build, with no cookies and no persistent identifiers.
The rendering engine weighs 19.5 KiB gzipped and has no external dependency: it is hand-written TypeScript on WebGL2, not a general-purpose 3D library.
On the hosting side, the API and the database are in Frankfurt. That is an infrastructure fact, useful if your legal department asks the question.
Four visibility levels exist - private, unlisted, password-protected and public - and access control sits in front of the cache: a revocation takes effect immediately.
When Matterport is the right answer
A comparison that wins on every line is worth nothing. Here are the three situations where we will send you to Matterport without arguing.
The deliverable is the measurement. Fit-out, costing, insurance, facility management: as soon as a dimension has to be taken or a reliable floor plan produced, a depth sensor has no equivalent in a 360 photo, however sharp.
The property is visited room by room, and the plan is the argument. A flat, a house, an office floor: the dollhouse makes the layout obvious in a second, and buyers are used to it.
Your tool chain is already built around Matterport. Partners, processes, client habits: the friction of switching will cost more than the gain.
Outside those three cases, the question goes back to the viewpoint and the counter.
And the mixed case is more common than people think: a hotel with a golf course has good reason to run both, Matterport for the rooms, Moorea for the course and the grounds. The two tours live side by side on the same page.
See for yourself
Moorea’s free plan holds three tours and does not expire: enough to build a real subject, show it to a client, and decide afterwards.
The product page shows the player at work, and the pricing grid fits in three columns, with no overage line.
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.