Ben Claremont Video Review: Matterport versus Competitors15686
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| Video: Matterport versus Its Competitors | Video courtesy of Ben Claremont YouTube Channel | September 29, 2021 Hi All, Transcript below ... Your thoughts? Best, Dan --  Save 15 percent with this WGAN affiliate link for Virtual Tour Pro course by Ben Claremont and WGAN Coupon Code: WGANVTP  Free! 12-Months WGAN-TV Training U (in Matterport) Membership when you send a copy of your Matterport Pro2 3D Camera purchase receipt using one of the WGAN Affiliate Link above.  Free! WGAN-TV Training U (in Matterport) 1-Year Membership when you use this WGAN affiliate link to buy any My Case Builder case for $150 or more. WGAN.INFO/MyCaseBuilder Transcript (video above) What is better, Matterport or its competitors. In this video, I'll compare Matterport with the five platforms that are most similar to it. Because there are countless virtual tour softwares out there and a lot of them would say they're an alternative to Matterport, but in reality, they're better suited to other things such as retail, hospitality, e-commerce, and so on. So I did have to be picky in this video and choose the platforms that had the most Matterport like experience. If you're considering Matterport or considering swapping from Matterport to another platform, then this is probably the most detailed comparison you'll find online. Okay, so what makes a platform Matterport like? Well, the first thing is it needs to be 3D focused. Most virtual tour platforms offer a conventional 360 experience inside the virtual tour where you move around from 360 photo to 360 photo, whereas with Matterport it focuses on 3D and combining that with 360. It's not only capturing a 360 photo, but it's also capturing depth and the distance from the camera to the wall, from the wall to the objects in the room and from capturing that 3D. You can also achieve some pretty cool things like having a floor plan that's created automatically, like having measurements within that floor plan that are roughly 98 percent accurate, and the biggest one or the most widely known one is the dollhouse. Now whether you think the doll house is a gimmick or not, the cool factor is undeniable. The dollhouse presents the 3D space in a way that allows you to interact with it from every single angle so you can truly see the size and scale of the location you've shot, which is such a handy feature especially for real estate. I would say the dollhouse is the quintessential Matterport feature. Another essential feature of Matterport is having the tour is built for you. You barely need to do any editing later on. All the photos are connected together and the 3D depth map is generated automatically. It needs to be available internationally so not focusing on just one single region. The final two Matterport like features are its real estate focused and it's got a quick and easy workflow. All the 100 plus virtual tour platforms out there, this narrows down the field quite considerably. I would argue to six software, including Matterport. While all the others have their own strengths, and I cover many of them on my channel already. If you're not focusing on real estate and you don't care about 3D tours, I would suggest checking those ones out, but if you are interested in 3D, let's get to the candidate. Firstly, I want to give honorable mentions to a few softwares that almost made the list. The first one Everpano, which is related to Krpano, which is a really advanced virtual tour software. In fact, I would say it's too advanced. Also, it doesn't have the ability to build the tours for you. Vpix 360 is another good one. However, they've recently shifted their focus away from the B2C market and are working solely with B2B, meaning it won't be a consumer friendly software anymore. Next runner-up is Zillow 3D because they are a US only company right now. Also they're pretty early on in their virtual tour creation software development. While they're not a direct Matterport competitor now they may be in the future. Tourbuzz is a great Matterport alternative. However, they're only currently focusing on the North American market. The final three runners-up are Cupix, iGUIDE, and InsideMaps, all of which are great real estate focus platforms, but don't offer a doll house and a few of the other quintessential Matterport features. Many people do consider these softwares to be genuine Matterport alternatives, which I do as well. However, I don't see them quite on the level of the softwares I will be comparing in this video. To learn more about these and other 3D focused real estate virtual tour platforms, I'd suggest joining the We Get Around Network Forum. It's free to join and has a ton of great info or link to follow. The five platforms that are the most similar to Matterport that I'll be comparing in this video with Matterport are: Metareal, and I've already made a video on my channel. You've probably seen that, however, at the time I made it was the only Matterport alternative that I was really aware of. I later discovered that it wasn't the only one nor the best. Then we have Asteroom, EyeSpy360, Immoviewer, and new come up Pivo Tours. This one's a brand new platform that could potentially revolutionize Matterport shooting. But let's just wait until the end before we make any claims like that. Now this video is not sponsored by any of these companies. It is however, a brand new video I'm adding to my paid Virtual Tour Pro course and also given for free to my loyal YouTube subscribers. Once you've watched this video and chosen the right virtual tour platform for you and you want to start earning money in virtual tours, I'd strongly suggest enrolling in the course because it teaches the entire business plan for not only getting started as a virtual tour photographer from scratch, but also building and scaling a profitable business out of it. I linked that down below. Now I'm going to break this comparison up into two parts. Part 1 will be a Features comparison. Part 2 will be a Pricing comparison. These tour factors hold all the weight when choosing a long-term software option for your virtual tour business, which is why it's a really important one. I'm going to do my best to cover these two things in as much detail as I possibly can and if there's anything I missed, there probably will be, let me know down below. Let's start with features, and I'm going to rate these six softwares on 17 key factors that cover shooting, editing, and how professional the end result looks when using these platforms. I'm not going to mention the basics, like does it have hotspot? Because all softwares have the basics. Instead, I want to focus on the most unique features of these platforms. I'm going into give each software one point for every feature it has. We're going to start with shooting virtual tours and the first useful feature is having a Mobile App. Can you access the software through their own app on your phone? Whether you're on iPhone or Android, there's no question, it's handy when you can upload the photos directly from your phone as you're shooting. Starting with Matterport, yes, it does have a mobile app. It used to be iOS only, but they did recently released an Android app. It has mixed reviews in the Play Store, but nonetheless, it has an app for both platforms. Metareal doesn't and it relies on you uploading photos manually through your Internet browser. Asteroom does, it's got a good app for iPhone and Android. EyeSpy360 has no app, unfortunately. Immoviewer has an app but it's only for iPhone, nothing for Android. I think they used to have something but it's now been taken down so I'm only going to give them half a point. Finally, Pivo Tours does have a mobile app. Next category is can you use a smart phone? This is the most basic way to shoot a virtual tour, but nonetheless, an important one for anyone that wants a super fast turnaround on their tours. With Matterport, you absolutely can. Metareal, you can't since it doesn't have its own app. Asteroom, you can. EyeSpy360, you can't, again, because it doesn't have a mobile app. Immoviewer doesn't seem to have that feature in their app and it seems like the app was last updated over a year ago. In fact, it also seems like their entire website isn't updated very often. I don't know really how active Immoviewer is. But regardless, I'm going to keep grading it because technically they are still open for business. Finally, Pivo Tours does allow you to shoot to the smartphone. In fact, this is the only way to shoot with pivot tour. It's also worth noting that of the three platforms that do allow you to use a phone, both Pivo Tours and Asteroom require you to use their hardware, which is basically a smart phone 360 rotator, which is designed for really good stitching. Whereas with Matterport, they let you do it handheld and somehow the stitching looks okay from the tours I've seen. So with Asteroom and Pivo Tours, it's going to be an extra $100 cost roughly in order to get your own smartphone rotator and those are compulsory. You can't shoot handheld. Next, can you use a 360 camera? We're moving up without production quality because someone that doesn't want to shoot on a phone, but you also don't want to shoot on a high-end camera, then a 360 camera is going to be a great alternative. With Matterport, yes, you can shoot with a range of cameras from Insta 360 and RCA. With Metareal, since it's an online SaaS software, you upload any photos you like shot on any device. Same with Asteroom, likewise with EyeSpy360 and Immoviewer. You can upload your photos manually, which means you can use any 360 camera. Pivo Tours, however, since it is a smartphone setup right now they don't have an option to use a 360 camera. The next feature is having the ability to easily download and upload photos manually. So if you're someone that cares about your image quality and you like downloading photos, editing them in Photoshop, Lightroom or Affinity Photo, and then uploading them to your virtual tour platform, this will be an important feature for you. Unfortunately with Matterport, they have never had the ability to do this. When you shoot with Matterport, it gets uploaded straight to the Matterport server and you can't upload photos manually. It does try its best to get the best image quality possible, whether you're using a phone, a 360 camera, or the Matterport Pro2 camera, however, still it's not going to be on the level of a professionally edited image. With all the other platforms, however, you can manually upload images after downloading color correcting, and then re-uploading. The next essential feature, which was actually one of the qualifiers for making this list is, does this software offer the ability to build it for you? I'm happy to say all six softwares have this feature. With Matterport, it's free. With the others, it's paid and that is part of their overall pricing model. I'll discuss pricing models in a whole lot of depth later on in this video but for now it's good news all around. They all have the ability to build the tours for you so you don't have to yourself. Category number 6 is quick processing. Once you get these platforms to build it for you, how long does it take them to put the tour together and send you a link? Based off of what these platforms described themselves as the turnaround time, as well as me reaching out to a few of them, I found the results were very different. With Matterport, they say the average turnaround time is less than eight hours and I've found that to be accurate. In fact, this small tours sometimes they even take an hour or two. That's definitely a good feature of Matterport. With Metareal, they say 2-3 working days. That is a really long time. In fact, you basically couldn't shoot with Metareal unless you had a lot of time to spare. I have seen a few people complaining about the turnaround time for build it for you so unfortunately, they don't get a point. With Asteroom, they say most in 24 hours and I'm going to say 24 hours, even though it's more than 12 hours, I'm going to give it an honorable half a point because it's long but not that long. With EyeSpy360, they also say within 24 hours Monday to Friday so half a point, same with Immoviewer, they say 24 hours. With Pivo Tours, I contacted them and they told me a 20 photo virtual tour would take 7-10 minutes to process. That is infinitely faster than all of these platforms. They also said for a 200 photo tour, it would take around an hour and a half, I will need to shoot some more tools with Pivo Tours to verify this. But for now I think it's safe to give Pivo Tours to a big shining tick. The next feature is having a floor plan. Do these softwares use their in-built 3D technology to generate floor plans that are somewhat accurate? Well, with Matterport, firstly, they always have had a floor plan view, which essentially turns the dollhouse into a bird's eye view where you can see a clear outline and top view perspective of the location. This is really cool. It is different however, to a conventional floor plan, which would normally be black and white. However, you can actually get these made within Matterport, so it's a separate service. It costs 14.99 per floor plan and they make that based off of your existing scans. The answer would be yes, with Matterport, they offer two different types of floor plans. Metareal do make a floor plan with every tour they make for you and it's a really good one. It's very accurate, I think around 98 percent. Asteroom do also have a great inbuilt floor plan. This is something you will need to pay a little bit extra for. It's not that much, but that floor plan looks legit and I'd say it's the best floor plan of any of these platforms. EyeSpy360, again, yes, they do have a floor plan feature. This one's a bit basic, but it's still really good. Immoviewer do offer a floor plan here it is. It looks a bit more basic and even though I do like it within this virtual tour, it just feels a bit amateur. Any floor plans better than no floor plan, but this one is a bit more on the basic side. Finally, with newcomer Pivo Tour, yes, they do offer a floor plan. Again, it's fairly basic and it's also got a nice-looking radar which moves around perfectly in sync with the 360 photo movement. The next feature is do they have a dollhouse and with Matterport, I think you know the answer. They absolutely do. It's one of their defining features and it's an amazing one. There's no question Matterport popularized the dollhouse and every time you shoot a tour, assuming you shot and edited it correctly, it will look something like this. Overall, it's really fantastic. Sometimes it is a bit rough around the edges, so straight lines and walls aren't always straight. But for the most part, this is a really good dollhouse. With Metareal it does have a dollhouse, but something you probably notice is that the walls here at dead straight. The reason is they build this 3D model from scratch room by room and they mark out exactly where the walls are, where the corners are and it creates a 3D object, that it then places elements of the 360 photo around, making them perfectly straight whereas with Matterport, often there is no manual realignment of walls unless you do it yourself. Sometimes areas that weren't properly covered end up being those gray areas that don't have perfectly straight walls or lines. Now if you turn this into a more complex shape, who knows if it would still be as clean cut. But overall, I think the Metareal dollhouse is one of the best on this list. Asteroom do have a dollhouse as well. This is obviously a fantastic property, which is why it looks so good as a dollhouse. You can see that they use a similar technique for achieving such perfectly straight lines and walls. That's because you're getting someone to build it for you and they are actually spending the time to define all the corners of the rooms. It almost looks like a diorama you submit for a school project. It's really clean cut, really nice and I rate Asteroom extremely highly for their dollhouse as well. EyeSpy360 also have a dollhouse. It pretty good. In fact, I'd say it's just as good as the others. Sometimes unnoticed things get projected against the wall in the wrong directions and look at the shape of that bathtubs. There seems to be quite a few skewed elements in the EyeSpy360 dollhouse. Overall, it's a pass but if you're someone that strive for perfection, you're probably not going to get perfect projections within the EyeSpy360 dollhouse on those walls and especially in any rooms that only have one photo taken in them. Actually now when I look back at Asteroom I'm noticing the same thing as well. Next is Immoviewer, and this is their dollhouse. That's all right. It looks like half dollhouse, half a floor plan. I'm going to be honest and say this doesn't look anywhere near as good as the others. Finally, there's new come up Pivo Tour. Does it have a dollhouse? It sure does. Here it is. It's good. It's not great. They're new company, they're just starting to work on their technology, so it's something, but I'd really only rate at half as good as Matterport or most of the other platforms other than Immoviewer. Next is 3D transitions, meaning when you move from one shot to the next, there's a parallax effect. You can see things moving to the left and right. This is a really cool 3D effect that brings us space to live like no other transition can. Here I'm doing it in Matterport and it works extremely well. With Metareal, it also features the same 3D transition technology. With Asteroom, it doesn't have this feature. While there are a few presets transitions you can choose, it's not utilizing that 3D geometry of the space to create the cool 3D transition effect. It's more of a fade and a little bit of a zoom. With EyeSpy360, it's a zoom and then a cut and that's not really the same thing at all. With Immoviewer, it's a zoom and a fade, so the answers no. Finally, with Pivo Tour, it's a 3D transition. If you look closely, so look at this beam here. When I move this way, we didn't have that slow moving parallax effect that we had in the other softwares. However, they do mask this really well in having a zoom effect that does somewhat feel a 3D transition, but it's just a more clever use of the zoom and fade. I'm going to be generous and give Pivo Tour half a point for this. The next feature is having a fly through effect or animations. What does this mean? Well, in Matterport, you'll notice down the bottom left-hand corner, if you hit "Play", you can set up an automatically playing walkthrough of the space. Without the viewer having to do anything, I literally just hit the Play button and it's automatically taking me on a 3D tour of this space. Utilizing the already built 3D mesh of the space to move around this location with a high level of life-like movement, there's no doubt this is a big value add to have something like this. Because it turns a virtual tour experience almost into a video like experience where we don't need to interact with the virtual tour. There are simpler versions of this where it's just a straight pen and then it cuts to the next photo. Yes, you can also set these up as well so you can choose the angles that you want, the shots you want. Again, really valuable feature for a software like this where the focus is real estate. Matterport obviously does have it. Metareal doesn't. Asteroom doesn't have a fly through or animations. It does have the ability to download a teaser video, which is a short 20-second video. That is a similar concept. However, you have to download it from the Settings menu. You can't start it automatically within the tour. Well, Matterport does have this. I'm still going to give Asteroom half a because it's something. EyeSpy360 also don't have this feature, but again, they've got something similar and what it is is a guided tour, where you can pre-record message. Hello and welcome to long Pond house. You could record a video narration and tell people what to do. You could say, go ahead, click that button there, and the video of the top-left plays while the viewer is navigating the tour. Again, it's not exactly the same thing, but it is a cool video feature so I'm going to give it half a point. I can't see an option in Immoviewer to do this other than just turning order rotate on and off Pivo Tour also doesn't have an autoplay feature. The next feature on this list is a super handy one, and that is the measurement feature. Where you simply just click a button. I'm going to measure from here to here, and that is 1.79 meters and I believe it's 98 percent accurate, because again, it's going off of the same technology that produces the floor plan for all of these platforms, where through the 3D geometry it captures the depth of the space. Here, I'm using it in Matterport, but to the other platforms have it. The answer is yes with Metareal, again, I believe this is roughly 98 percent accurate. Asteroom doesn't have a measurement tool, but it does have an option to display measurements to the viewer. If you enable it in the editor and enter your tripod height. Now when you're in the tour, you see them measurements roughly laid out across the virtual tour. While this isn't quite as good because it doesn't allow you the flexibility of measuring specific parts of the room. It's the next best thing so I'm going to give it half a point same with EyeSpy360, there doesn't seem to be a measurement tool nor with Immoviewer. Finally, Pivo Tour also doesn't have a measurement feature. Next, does the software allow you to add a custom nadir? If you wanted to add a logo down the bottom, can you do that? Well, short answer is you can with all of them other than Matterport and Pivo Tour. For me, this has always been one of the biggest flaws of Matterport is literally the floor. But yeah, basically not matter which camera you use, it blurs out the tripod automatically. I do know that they're trying to speed up the workplace or you don't have to deal with the bottom of the shot and edit out the tripod manually. But that said, I really think they should give you an option to cover it up or end tripod out yourself so you can allow viewers to look down and see the actual floor there. But instead they force you to go with that blurred nadir. Matterport does not get a point, neither does Pivo Tours that also does the same thing and right now they're adding their own logo on top of it, which isn't that distinctive. Next, do these platforms allow virtual staging? What virtual stating is? Is basically taking an empty house. Let's say there's a house that you want to display online, but you want to stage it with furniture to make it look like a livable space. While you can technically achieved virtual staging without the need to use a virtual tour software, where it's done with a third party provider and then you just upload the photos with stage furniture. I'm going to have a full point to the softwares that allow you to do it within their software or have third parties that easily integrate within their software and those are Matterport, Asteroom, and EyeSpy360, the other three get half a point because they do allow manual uploads of photos that have already been staged. The next feature, which again is a really important one and that is how fast do the tours load. Not only when you load the tool for the first time, but then when you move between shots, how quickly does it process and buffer the images so you can get maximum image quality and a seamless experience for your viewer. With Matterport as you can see, it's almost instant. The image quality is really good. The whole time you don't need to sit around waiting for it to load. This makes navigating Matterport tours a fast and seamless experience. With Metareal however, this is something I missed when I made my initial Metareal review. While it does have a lot of fantastic Matterport like features, one feature it is severely lacking, is fast loading. When you go from shot to shot, the image starts as blurry and then takes a few seconds to load the full quality. Unfortunately, when you're moving around a virtual tour and you don't have a few seconds per shot to stop and wait for the quality to catch up. Hopefully they see this video and do whatever they can to fix it. But right now I consider this one of the few flaws that Metareal has. Now back to Asteroom. For the most part, I've experienced fast loading speeds with Asteroom. Maybe a few milliseconds slower than Matterport but still fast overall, so I am going to give Asteroom a point for this. Now, EyeSpy360. That's slow. You can see the initial load is okay quality, but to get the proper full resolution, it is taking between two and four seconds per photo. Unfortunately, I can't give EyeSpy360 a point here. With Immoviewer, this is slow. You'll notice that there are big blocks everywhere as you look around your photos, and this is just a really ugly virtual to experience. I'm sorry to say it but clearly, Immoviewer just haven't spent the same amount of time as the other platforms to keep their software up-to-date and highly responsive. So at this point, I'm finding very little upsides to using Immoviewer. Finally, there's Pivo Tour. That was quick. Between each photo, I don't have to wait any longer than around a second to a second and a half for a full quality to load. Next is an optional one but it is a valuable feature regardless, and that is Google Street View upload. Can you upload to street view within these virtual tour platforms? With Matterport, you can, with Metareal, you can, with Asteroom, EyeSpy360, Immoviewer, and Pivo Tour, you can't. The next category is MLS integration. Which of these softwares integrate directly with MLS platforms like realtor.com and Zillow? Two that do are Matterport and Asteroom. The rest unfortunately don't and will require longer work arounds. Metareal, EyeSpy360, and Immoviewer do provide unbranded links which means you can upload them to these platforms, however, it's a longer work around. I'll give them half a point and Pivo Tour gets nothing because it's still too new to have this feature. The final category number 17 out of 17, and this one is added half as a joke half serious, and it is, Is it Matterport? There's obviously only one of these platforms that is Matterport. The reason I chose to add this is because Matterport really is considered the gold standard when it comes to 3D 360 tours, and using an alternative to Matterport requires extra education for your client and it also has slightly less credibility because it's not the most well-known name in 3D scanning. It's not a make or break thing and again, I'm half joking by adding this point, but at the same time, I just think it's a credibility point. You're either using Matterport or you're not. When you're not, you really have to go the extra mile to make sure the end result are as good as what people know Matterport tools as can be. Now, for the final results. Drum roll, please. Here they are. Wow, that is a pretty big difference between these six platforms. Matterport got 15 out of 17, Metareal 10, Asteroom 12.5, EyeSpy360 8.5, Immoviewer 8, and Pivo Tour 9 out of 17. Meaning the top three overall for features are Matterport, followed by Asteroom, followed by Metareal. There's no question, the undisputed winner for features is Matterport. It has almost everything you could want features-wise from a 3D virtual tour software. Maybe there's some things I missed and maybe there are other features that might be more important to you personally than the things I covered here. If that is the case, then use your best judgment based on the things I did compare in this video, and add whatever you want to your own personal list. Next let's compare pricing, and this is going to be a really big decision because when you're shooting virtual tours professionally and you own a business, this is going to be an ongoing cost, and these 3D and Matterport like platforms are a lot higher in cost than most of the traditional virtual tool platforms. So it's really essential to consider what the long-term pricing look like. When you're shooting a lot of tools for real estate, cost can outweigh features in the long run, which is why you need to make a sustainable choice that gives you enough features but also doesn't break the bank. Now, each of these softwares have their own unique and yes, confusing pricing models, and there's also such a wide variety of needs from the photographer based on how many tools you shoot and how long you want to keep them online. I followed the pricing models with all of them and did the calculations based on an average tour, or what I think an average tour would be, which would be a 20 photo 3D virtual tour with a dollhouse that is built for you. I took that average tour and calculated the monthly and yearly subscription phase on a 5, 20, and 50 tour subscription. The results were interesting. Starting with Matterport for five tours, it's obviously $9.99 a month, times that by 12 months and it's $119.88. For 20 tours, you'd have to choose their professional plan at $69 a month, which is obviously $69 for the first month for 20 tours, and for one year, it would be $828. If you have 50 tours online, you'll have to choose the business package which is $309 a month, then times that by 12 and it's $3,708. This comparison is completely in USD, by the way. At first, when I looked at this and then went to the more conventional virtual tour platforms, I thought, wow, what a rip-off, that's so much. But as much as I hate to admit it, it's actually not as bad as you might think. Moving on next to Metareal, and this is something I pushed heavily in my Metareal video, is that the prices are much lower overall than Matterport, on the surface. Looking at their pricing table, it says 0, 9.95, $39 Canadian per month. Those numbers seem good at first. The free version comes with one gigabyte of storage, which means the monthly cost for five tours would be zero because you could fit five tours within one gigabyte. However, I mentioned at the start that these platforms have to build the tour for you. It's not an option to build it yourself. Even though you can with Metareal, most people don't want to take the time to learn the 3D modeling themselves. On their free plan, it's $4 per pano, times that by 20 photos in our example tour, and that's going to be $80. $80 times five tours is $400. That's $400 for one single month, it's also $400 for a full year. That right there is the downside of paying per tour. Let's move on to 20 tours, and I think you could get away with five gigabytes of storage for that, in which case, you'd choose the 995 a month plan. While the initial fee is going to be $9.95, don't forget, we have to get them to build it for us, which in this second package is now $3 a pano. So 3 times 20 times 20 is $1,200 plus $9.95 which is their monthly subscription fee. That's how much it costs for 20 tours for one single month. Those are Canadian dollars, by the way, so we'll have to do the conversion. Right now, that would be about $962 US. Then for yearly, you would have still obviously paid that 1,200 upfront, and then it's 9.95 for their subscription times 12 months equals $1,319 Canadian. Moving onto 50 tours with Metareal, and this is where we'll have to go for the premium package since it has 50 gigabytes of storage. With this package, to get them to build it for you, it's $2 a photo. So 2 times 20 times 50 equals $2,000 Canadian plus $39 for the monthly subscription fee. For yearly, it's 2,000 times 39 times 12 equals $2,468 Canadian, which is $1,963.19 US right now. That's interesting. That's actually cheaper than Matterport, it's almost half. Yeah, I think Metareal does beat Matterport quite considerably if you're shooting a lot of tours and getting them to build it for you. Next is Asteroom, and this is another pricing model yet again. With Asteroom, it's free to host your tours, however, you will have to pay for the 3D dollhouse. They charge $10 US per tour up to 10 panoramas and $1 US per additional panorama. For our 20 photo example tour, that's going to end up as $20 US. 20 times 5 tours is 100. While hosting is free, it also has an expiry date of six months, and you have to pay now the $12 US dollars for another 180 days. To get to a full year, we're going to have to buy hosting on those five tours which means an additional $60. If you want a floor plan with that as well, it's going to be an extra $15. For 20 tours, we're going to take our original $20 that we got from the 20 photo tour with a dollhouse, and times that by 20 which is $400. To extend the hosting to a full year, it's going to be $12 times 20 photos which is 240. 400 plus 240 is 640. If you did want to add a floor plan, which is an additional $15, that's going to end up as $300 more. Meaning, the total for 20 tours for one year is going to be $940 US. Finally, for 50 tours with Asteroom, the cost of the dollhouse, $20 times 50 is 1,000. If you want a floor plan made, it's going to cost you $750 for 50 tours. Now, for one year, we're going to have to extend that hosting, so 12 times 50 equals 600. 1,750 plus 600 equals 2,350 for a full year of hosting on Asteroom with a dollhouse and a floor plan. Next is EyeSpy360, and we've got another pricing model yet again. With EyeSpy360, it's $15 per virtual tour with a 3D model and a floor plan, but that is only up to 15 photos. It's going to cost an additional $1 per 360 photo thereafter. Meaning, a 20 photo tour is going to cost $20. But then, you need to combine that with a monthly subscription of $19.99. For 5 tours, it's going to cost $20 times 5 equals 100 plus the 19.99 monthly subscription fee which is a $119.99. For yearly, we're going to take that $100 it took to build those five tours, and times the 19.99 subscription fee by 12 months which in total, is $339.88. For 20 tours, it's 20 times 20 again which is 400, plus the 19.99 subscription fee which is 419.99, then times the subscription feed by 12 and it's $639.88. For 50 tours with EyeSpy360, it's going to be $20 times 50 equals $1,000. For one month, that's going to cost you $1,019.99. For one year, it's going to be $1,239.88. Already looking back on the four platforms I've compared so far, that's the cheapest, quite considerably. Next is Immoviewer. For five tours, I'm going to follow their $69 a month plan and get the 34.95 floor plan with dollhouse upsell. 34.95 times 5 equals $174.75. Then with a $69 subscription fee, it's $243.75. For five tours for one month, Matterport was $9.99. Then if we go yearly, it's the cheapest subscription overall, which is $499 a year. Then we have to pay $45 for a Dollhouse so 45 times 5 is $224, meaning the total is $724 for five tours for one year. Now, for 50 tours, and keep in mind with all of these packages I'm trying to get the lowest price possible based on packages that they offer. I determined that with Immoviewer, if you have 50 tours and you only want to host them for one month, it's best to go with their basic monthly subscription which in total for one month would be $1816.50. For one month, Matterport was 309. Now for yearly with Immoviewer, it's best to choose the $799 a year package which lowers the price elsewhere. 799 plus 50 tours times $34.95 for a floor plan in a Dollhouse, is $2546.50. Then there was one and that is, Pivo Tour. Even though Pivo Tour was lacking a bit with features, pricing is it's number one selling point. I can't believe I'm about to say this but Pivo Tour right now, at the time of launching, is $99 to access their software and you get unlimited tours for unlimited time. UNKNOWN_1: What? Ben Claremont: Yes. You heard correctly. It doesn't matter how many tours you have or how long you want to keep them online, it's $99 across the board. For one tour for one month or 1,000 tours for 1,000 months, it's $99, onetime payment. They did tell me that they do intend on charging a small fee for Dollhouses shot using the LiDAR feature of iPhones and may add some costs down the road once their service improves but right now, at the time of releasing this video, those costs do not exist. That sounds too good to be true, and who knows, it could be too good to be true. They're still a new company so there's no way of knowing if this will be a good long-term play for them or for their customers. But for $99 that's so low compared to all the others even if you were to take a gamble on it, if you didn't need all of the features of Matterport and the others. That means Pivo Tour absolutely annihilates the competition when it comes to price. If keeping costs down is a really important thing to you, I would strongly suggest Pivo Tour for that reason. My thoughts overall, when it comes to pricing is that if you're someone that shoots less tours, I'm talking under 25 online at a time, it does seem like Matterport is the best option. Aside from Pivo Tour obviously being the extremely low budget alternative, but Matterport is Matterport. Like I said before, if you could pay a little bit more to get Matterport, I just think you should. It comes with all of those features. It actually looks a lot cheaper than most of these platforms when it comes to under 25 tours. Technically, EyeSpy360 is a bit cheaper if you have 20 tours online at a time, but it's only really a $200 difference and I think it's worth paying an extra $200 for Matterport. Which is why I'd say, if you're on a really low budget and you are considering Pivo Tour, think about it. If you only shoot five tours at a time and you could get away with a Matterport start-up package which is $9.99 a month, it's worth it. For Matterport, you get all the features I talked about in the features section and it's roughly the same price over the course of one year. I think in general with all the other platforms, aside from Pivo Tour and Matterport, their build-it for you feature doesn't work well with someone that is shooting only a few tours. Because the lower cost of a subscription fee like $9.99 a month or even $69 a month for Matterport, is still going to be lower than paying $2270 per tour to have them make it for you. Again, if you really want to work around this, you can build these tours from scratch in platforms like Metareal. While those are options, I just think you're shooting a lot of volume that workflow can become a bit on manageable. Now let's talk about if you are someone that shoots a lot of tourists. Fifty plus, you've got 50 tours online at a time and you're shooting every week, if not every second day, I still think paying more for Matterport overall is worth it because it's Matterport. But if you're more budget conscious, then all of these platforms are cheaper than Matterport, if you plan on keeping your tours online for awhile. If you're shooting that level of volume though, you're probably making more than enough money to cover the cost of Matterport or whichever of these platforms you choose. That's another factor to keep in mind because that's just a bit more of a demand overall and awareness, in general, of Matterport and I think it would be easier to sell tours that are made with Matterport and therefore make more money than having to sell clients on a Matterport alternative. Which yes, technically is nearly as good but again, it's not Matterport. I also want to point out the fact that Matterport charges it's subscription fee for having active spaces and this means, having tours online. Whether you're shooting with a giant Matterport camera, or your phone, or a 360 camera, the cost will remain the same if you upload, then take down tours over and over. Whereas with the other platforms you will always have to pay that build it for you cost. Generally with real estate, a listing goes up, it sells, then the tour it's taken down. Which is why shooting for real estate differs from other long-term virtual tour platforms where you might be making a tour of a small business or a big business, and they want there tour be on their website permanently that's when you really need to make sure your long-term hosting fee doesn't become exorbitant. But with real estate, tours go up and they come down shortly thereafter. Which is why I think these pricing models are actually workable. Relying too much on the whole build-it for you pricing model, will really only pay off if you're shooting a lot of volume, so 50 tours plus, and it should still a quite to less in Matterport business plan. It's a costs versus features thing and I just think Matterport offers both of them to a really high level above its competitors, especially for anyone who has 25 tours online at a time or less. For more, I'd say it's up to you whether you want to pay more for the Matterport experience or pay less for the alternative experience. I do think Pivo Tour is really interesting though, and I'll be sure to make a follow-up video about that and test it over long period of time to see whether it really is the definitive low budget Matterport alternative. I can't say it is yet, but it has all the potential in the world to be so subscribe for that video, coming soon. Now that we've compared features and pricing, which one wins, Matterport or its competitors? Well, I'm going be honest. When I set out to make this video, I had a mission in the back of my head that I was going to prove that there are better alternatives to Matterport that you don't need to pay these exorbitant amounts when other platforms do exactly the same and then I actually took the time to look at them and research them in depth. I realized Matterport was much better for features and doing this price projections is cheaper in most situations. I just don't have it in me to say that Matterport isn't the best, because it is. There's no question that Matterport is a big company, it's the most well-known virtual tour platform out there and they really are expanding and taking on new things, adding new tech to their service. That is really creating a bright future for 3D capture and virtual tours and 360 creation in general. They're not perfect. They do have their fair share of flaws. They make some decisions sometimes that aren't always in a user's best interests but for the most part, if you are a smart business owner and you use Matterport to your advantage, there's no reason why you should be taken advantage of by Matterport. Matterport wins. That said, all of the platforms I explored in this video do get an honorable mention. They are all fantastic platforms, I've used them all, I like them all. I hope they stay around for a long time and I hope they improve and give Matterport even more of a run for its money. Really quick, I want to address those few softwares that I didn't include in this video. If I were to rank them overall based on price and features, I'd say they end up about average with both. None of them would be in the top one or two of either category but that said they are still fantastic platforms. I do recommend them for their specific use cases. If you're into shooting real estate and you're looking for something that isn't Matterport, but has other real estate friendly features, I would certainly suggest checking them out. I will also link them down below. As well as one more contender to watch out for in the future and that is Giraffe360. Yes, it's a silly name, but it may become a big up and coming platform. To learn more about it, check out their website as well as several in-depth videos that you'll find on the We Get Around Network Forum. Whether you use Matterport or another software, if you want to take your virtual tour business seriously, you're going to have to come up with a solid business plan because a mistake I see all too often, especially with Matterport shooters, is they undercharge and over-deliver. Hopefully, this isn't you, but if it is, then I hope you would let me be your mentor and show you step-by-step how to build a profitable virtual tour business from scratch regardless of the software and camera you're using, as well as your skill level. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner, intermediate, or pro, as long as you understand the business side of virtual tours, then you absolutely can live an awesome life as a virtual tour photographer and make money while you do it. If this video saves you time and money, then there would be no better way to reinvest that money than in my Virtual Tour Pro course which is filled with my best shooting, editing, and business techniques to help take your virtual tour business to the next level. I'll also leave a coupon code down below for viewers of this video only, if you're interested in enrolling in the course, check that out. That's it. Matterport versus its competitors, which was your winner? Let me know down there. I do plan on making some more Matterport related content soon. As you can see, I got myself a Pro2 and while owning one of these is totally unnecessary, I will be experimenting with the overall Matterport technology to figure out the best workflows and use cases for this amazing 3D 360 technology. That's it. See you next time. |
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| Ben is the best, I truly enjoy all the coverage and details only he can provide - a great asset for us all. So, it's like when the first car you drive is a Lamborghini Aventador, and you spend all your money on that car, for years - and then someone hands you the keys to a Porsche 911 Turbo, you just can't refute the original experience and base everything off of that first love - if you made the right pick originally. For myself, Matterport is the Lambo! I love the Porsche, the GTR, the McClaren, and so forth. They are all epic in their own right. It's the "BUZZ" that the original ride gives you which captures your interest and imagination, that embeds it as your favorite, indelibly. Like a Sharpie(tm)! | ||
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