RoomPlan vs Matterport vs Polycam: which one belongs in your contractor's toolkit?

If you're a contractor in 2026 trying to figure out which 3D scanning tool to put in your truck, you've probably stumbled into the same alphabet soup I did: RoomPlan, Matterport, Polycam, Canvas, NavVis, Leica, Trimble. The marketing makes them all sound interchangeable. They aren't. I've used most of them on real job sites and the differences are big enough that picking wrong wastes hours per project.

Here's how each one actually performs in the field.

RoomPlan (Apple, iOS 16+)

What it is: A free API Apple ships with iOS that turns a 30-second walkthrough into a parametric 3D model — walls, doors, windows, furniture, all as labeled objects, not just a mesh.

What it's great at:

Where it breaks:

Verdict: This is the daily driver for renovation scopes. If you walk a kitchen, a bathroom, or a bedroom-sized space, RoomPlan gives you everything you need to send a phase-by-phase scope of work in under 10 minutes total. We built our scope generator around it because the parametric output is exactly what a scoping tool wants to ingest.

Matterport (Pro2, Axis, or LiDAR-Pro phone)

What it is: A 3D walkthrough platform — capture, hosting, embed-on-your-website, virtual tour. The Pro2 camera is a $4,000 tripod-mounted unit; the phone app uses LiDAR.

What it's great at:

Where it breaks:

Verdict: Matterport is a great marketing layer once a job is done — embed the finished space in your portfolio, send the tour to the next prospect. It is the wrong tool for scoping. Use it after the work, not before.

Polycam

What it is: A photogrammetry + LiDAR app for iOS and Android (Android is photogrammetry only). Captures meshes, point clouds, and rough room layouts.

What it's great at:

Where it breaks:

Verdict: Polycam is the right tool for capturing a specific feature you need to replicate (a built-in cabinet, an existing trim profile, a stair stringer). It is the wrong tool for whole-room scoping if you have an iPhone with LiDAR — RoomPlan is free, faster, and produces output a scope generator can actually use.

What about Canvas, NavVis, Leica, Trimble?

These are higher-end scanning platforms ($5K-$50K hardware) used in commercial construction, BIM workflows, and large-scale renovation by firms with full-time scan operators. If you're running a 5-50 person design-build shop, you're not their customer — yet. We may add NavVis-tier ingest support in BlueWave Projects later, but it's not the right starting point.

The contractor's stack we actually use

For our own jobs (renovations, additions, custom homes in Honolulu) the workflow is:

Each tool does one job well. Don't try to make one of them do all three.

Where BlueWave Projects fits

We ingest RoomPlan parametric output directly. Drop the scan into your BlueWave tenant, the [scope generator](/scope) reads it, asks two clarifying questions, and writes a phase-by-phase scope of work in 60 seconds. The model lives in your project room — clients see it on a public timeline link, your crew sees it in the blueprint editor.

If you're still scoping renovations by hand because the tools you tried felt wrong, [book a demo](/booking) and try the RoomPlan → scope flow on your next walk-through. The whole loop, from boots on site to scope in the client's inbox, is under 20 minutes.

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