RealityScan
Epic Games photogrammetry suite, formerly RealityCapture, free below USD 1M revenue and built for merging photos with laser and SLAM scans.
Polycam
Phone-based 3D scanning using LiDAR, photogrammetry and Gaussian splats, with CAD-ready floor plans on the paid tiers.
3D Scanning and Photogrammetry Freemium
Overview
Polycam turns a phone into a 3D scanner. On Apple hardware with a LiDAR sensor it meshes rooms on-device in real time; on everything else, including all Android phones, it uploads photographs and reconstructs them in the cloud. It also produces Gaussian splats, which capture reflections and foliage that defeat conventional photogrammetry but are not editable meshes. The company started in 2020 alongside Apple's first LiDAR phones as a prosumer scanning toy and has since pushed hard into architecture and construction, where the selling point is checking a floor plan while still standing in the building. Two things shape whether it fits: the free tier exports only GLTF, and there is no ground control point or RTK support, so it is accurate enough to quote a kitchen remodel and not accurate enough to be a survey.
Key features
On-device LiDAR meshing with live preview
On an iPhone Pro or iPad Pro the mesh builds on screen as you walk, so gaps are visible while you can still fill them. Processing stays on the device, which makes it fast and means the data never leaves the phone. Range is roughly five metres, so it is a tool for rooms and objects, not for landscapes.
Cloud photogrammetry for everything else
Any phone can shoot overlapping photos or a video orbit and send them up for structure-from-motion reconstruction. The result has much sharper texture and finer geometry than LiDAR, which is why object scans for 3D printing and VFX go this route, but it needs surface texture to work and fails on shiny, transparent or plain-coloured objects.
Floor plans that export as layered DXF
Apple's RoomPlan lets it identify walls, doors, windows and cabinetry while scanning, and the resulting plan exports as DXF with elements on separate named layers rather than a flat pile of vectors. That is the difference between a drafter importing a file and a drafter rebuilding it. Business tier and above.
Gaussian splats for scenes meshes cannot hold
Reflections, glass, foliage and hair reconstruct convincingly as splats where photogrammetry produces holes and noise. The catch is that the output is a volumetric PLY, not geometry: it cannot be rigged, boolean-edited or printed without specialised and still experimental tooling.
An unusually open developer side
For a closed-source consumer app it maintains a real GitHub presence. Its polyform tool exports optimised ARKit camera poses into formats that NeRF research frameworks read directly, which spares researchers hours of desktop pose estimation and has quietly made the app a common data-ingest step in computer vision work.
Pros and cons
What users consistently praise
- Genuinely fast: a room meshes on-device while you walk it, with live feedback showing which areas still need coverage
- One walkthrough produces a textured mesh, a point cloud and a layered CAD floor plan, which few competitors manage together
- DXF export puts architectural elements on separate named layers, so it imports into AutoCAD or Revit as usable drafting rather than raw vectors
- LiDAR and floor plan processing happen on the device, so that data never goes to a server
- Handles textureless surfaces such as blank walls where photo-only scanning fails outright
- Gaussian splat capture covers reflective and fine-detail scenes that conventional photogrammetry cannot reconstruct
What users consistently criticise
- The free tier exports GLTF only, which is the most common complaint from new users and is easy to miss before you have already done the work
- LiDAR features need an iPhone Pro or iPad Pro; the Android app is photogrammetry only and lacks the floor plan and instant measurement workflow entirely
- No GCP or RTK support at all, so nothing it produces is survey grade
- Tracking drift makes multi-room and long corridor scans unreliable, forcing manual alignment afterwards
- The individual Pro tier was retired and measurement, floor plan and point cloud export moved into the far more expensive Business plan, which existing users experienced as losing features they were paying for
- Photogrammetry and splats require uploading to Polycam's cloud, which rules the app out where data cannot leave the organisation
Recurring themes across third-party user reviews (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius).
Videos
Pricing
Is Polycam free?
Polycam is free to start. There is a free tier you can use indefinitely, and paid plans begin at USD 150/year (Basic).
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | USD 0 | Capture works, export barely does: geometry comes out as GLTF only, media carries a watermark, and captures are capped at 150 images or three minutes of video. Treat it as a viewer and sharing tool rather than a way to get files. |
| Basic | USD 150/year or USD 30/month | Unlocks the six common mesh formats including OBJ, FBX, STL and USDZ, removes watermarks, raises limits to 300 images, and allows private sharing. This is the tier that makes the app useful for 3D printing or a DCC pipeline. |
| Business | USD 300/year per user, listed as 25 percent off USD 400 | Where the professional output lives: floor plans as DXF, PDF, SVG and CSV, point clouds as LAS, PLY, XYZ and PTS, AI spatial reports, measurements and shared team libraries. |
| Enterprise | USD 1,200/year per seat, three seats minimum | Adds the content management API, SSO, SOC-II compliance, regional storage and custom branding. API access is gated here rather than sold separately. |
Best for
Contractors and remodellers quoting jobs
Scan a kitchen, check the dimensions before leaving, and export a DXF plan plus a square footage report the same day. Catching a wrong measurement on site instead of back at the office is the whole return on investment here.
Small architecture and interior design practices
As-built documentation without the licence cost of a full survey suite. For a firm of a handful of people, the Business tier does the routine measuring work that would otherwise justify much more expensive software.
VFX artists and game developers
A scanner in your pocket for props, textures, foliage and surfaces, exporting straight into Blender, Maya or a game engine on the 150 dollar tier. Splat capture also handles subjects that photogrammetry has always mangled.
Who should look elsewhere
Land surveyors and civil engineers
There is no ground control point support, no RTK, and no way to tie a scan to a real coordinate system. Stated accuracy is around half an inch indoors, which is fine for estimating and useless for boundaries, structural monitoring or earthwork volumes. This is the single hardest limit in the product.
Anyone hoping the free tier is enough
The free tier exports GLTF and nothing else, which catches out a lot of people who scan something successfully and then discover they cannot get an STL or OBJ out of it. If you want files rather than a shareable link, the subscription is not optional.
Large multi-room or outdoor capture
Tracking drift accumulates over distance, so long corridors and multi-room walkthroughs often fail to close the loop and come out misaligned. Sunlight also interferes with the infrared sensor. The practical workaround is scanning room by room and stitching later, which undoes much of the speed advantage.
Real estate virtual tour marketing
The walkthrough viewer is documentation, not a marketing product. There is no lead capture, no meaningful white labelling and no listing-portal publishing, which is what the dedicated tour platforms are actually selling.
Frequently asked questions
Can I export an STL for 3D printing on the free plan?
No. The free tier exports GLTF and nothing else, and GLTF is a web delivery format rather than something a slicer wants. STL, OBJ, FBX, DAE and USDZ all sit behind the Basic plan at 150 dollars a year. This surprises a lot of people because capture itself works fully on the free tier, so the limitation only becomes apparent after the scan is done.
Do I need an iPhone Pro?
Only for the LiDAR features. Any iPhone or Android phone can use photogrammetry mode, where photos are uploaded and reconstructed in the cloud. But real-time on-device meshing, instant measurements and the RoomPlan floor plan workflow all need Apple's LiDAR sensor, which means an iPhone 12 Pro or later or an iPad Pro from 2020 onwards. The Android app is a different product in practice.
How accurate is it really?
Polycam states around half an inch on typical interior LiDAR scans. That is enough to estimate flooring, price a remodel or draft a schematic layout. It is not enough for anything legal or structural, because the app has no ground control point or RTK support and cannot tie its local coordinates to a real world coordinate system. For boundaries, deflection monitoring or earthwork volumes you need survey equipment and survey software.
Does my scan data go to Polycam's servers?
It depends on the mode, and the difference matters if you have compliance obligations. LiDAR space scans and floor plan generation run on the device, so the data stays local unless you choose to share it. Photogrammetry and Gaussian splats are cloud-processed, so the raw imagery is uploaded. Enterprise adds SOC-II, SSO and regional storage, but environments that forbid cloud processing outright will not be satisfied by that.
Why do my multi-room scans come out misaligned?
Tracking error accumulates as you walk, and over a long route the end of the scan no longer lines up with the start. This shows up as duplicated or offset walls. It is a limitation of phone-based SLAM rather than a bug you can configure away. The usual workaround is to scan each room as its own capture and align them in desktop software afterwards.
How does it compare with Scaniverse or RealityScan?
Scaniverse is free and scans objects and rooms well, but it has no CAD output, no floor plans and no measurement tooling, so it is a visual tool rather than a drafting one. RealityScan is free and feeds Unreal Engine directly, with slower processing and a clunkier interface by most accounts. Polycam costs money and earns it specifically through the floor plan and CAD export path. If you only want a mesh, the free options are hard to beat.
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Agisoft Metashape
Photogrammetry software that turns photos and LiDAR into measurable point clouds, meshes and orthomosaics. Perpetual licence, no subscription.