The role of reality capture has shifted from a specialized task to a daily operational standard. In 2026, the question is no longer how to digitize a space, but how to do so at the pace of a moving job site. Documentation that waits for scheduled hardware, trained specialists, or cloud processing cannot keep up with work as it unfolds.

Matterport and Polycam take different approaches. Matterport, acquired by CoStar Group in early 2025, has deepened its focus on property marketing and real estate marketplaces.

Polycam focuses on operational documentation. It turns the mobile devices your team already carries into professional 3D scanners, enabling capture that happens in minutes, by the people already on the ground

Both platforms enable teams to digitize real-world environments, but they are built around different workflows and priorities. Some teams are looking for flexibility and low barriers to entry, while others prioritize things like presentation or standardized outputs. Understanding those underlying differences is often more helpful than comparing features in isolation.

How Teams Capture Spaces Today

The reality is that most teams don’t approach 3D capture as a standalone activity. It’s usually part of a broader process: documenting existing conditions, coordinating across teams, validating work, or creating a record that can be referenced later without another site visit.

In practice, capture tends to fall into a few common patterns:

• Who is doing the capture: Sometimes it’s a specialist or dedicated scanning team. Other times it’s a superintendent, facility manager, designer, or project engineer already on site.
• How often spaces are scanned: Some teams scan occasionally for major milestones. Others capture frequently. Weekly, daily, or whenever conditions change.
• What happens after capture: The output might be used for internal coordination, shared with external stakeholders, imported into design tools, or simply archived as a reference.

This is where different platforms begin to diverge.

Matterport has been used in workflows that emphasize standardized capture, often with dedicated hardware and more formal scanning processes. Polycam is commonly used in workflows where flexibility matters — capture happens more frequently, by more people, using devices already in hand.

Polycam vs Matterport — Unified Comparison (2026)

Where Polycam Tends To Fit Best

Polycam tends to fit best in workflows where capture needs to be easy to start, easy to repeat, and easy to adapt.

Teams that gravitate toward Polycam often value lower upfront and ongoing costs because scanning isn’t an occasional event. It’s something that happens regularly. When capture is frequent, cost quickly becomes a practical consideration. A lower barrier to entry makes it easier to scan more often, across more sites, without having to justify each capture as a separate expense.

Cost plays a practical role in how often teams actually scan. With Polycam, the pricing model makes frequent capture easier to justify. Most teams are working with a low subscription that runs in the tens of dollars per user, not thousands in upfront hardware, and without per-space or per-export fees layered on top. You can purchase a business plan for Polycam as low as $400/yr, and get started with a 7-day free trial. 

Flexibility and portability also matter in these environments. Capture may happen opportunistically during a walkthrough, between meetings, or while work is already in progress. Because scanning doesn’t depend on dedicated hardware, more people can participate, and documentation can keep pace with how work actually unfolds in the field.

Teams using Polycam often want to reuse scans in different ways. For coordination, reference, design, or archiving without adding friction or additional steps. The combination of mobile capture and straightforward access to outputs supports workflows where the value comes from using the data, not just viewing it.

Teams using Polycam frequently need their scans to move easily into other tools whether that’s design software, coordination workflows, or internal documentation systems. Polycam offers access to well over a dozen formats. Here’s a look at just a few of the formats you can get with a paid plan: 

Where Matterport Tends To Fit Best

Matterport tends to fit best in workflows where teams value a standardized, managed experience from capture through presentation.

Organizations that choose Matterport are often making a deliberate investment in a consistent method of capture, specifically in the residential or commercial real estate space. While this makes the process somewhat limiting in how it's done and the frequency with which it’s done, it does create a consistent method of capture.

Cost plays a role here as a trade off. Higher upfront investment, dedicated hardware, and ongoing hosting fees tend to align with teams that scan less frequently. Scanning is often planned, intentional, and tied to specific deliverables rather than ongoing documentation.

For teams that prioritize a fully managed environment over adaptability, this model can be a fit — especially when digital twins are meant to be shared broadly and maintained over time.

The same structure that makes Matterport useful for standardized, client-facing use cases can introduce trade-offs in day-to-day flexibility. Dedicated hardware, higher upfront investment, and ongoing hosting or usage-based costs tend to limit how broadly scanning is adopted within a team.

Capture In Seconds vs. Scheduled Scan Days

Matterport which is closer to traditional reality capture, often creates a bottleneck. Standard hardware requires a "scan day," a deliberate process of tripod placement and calibration that can turn the documentation of a single room into an hour-long task. These delays compound. Research from McKinsey & Company in their 2024 "Construction Productivity Imperative" highlights that large construction projects still average a 20 percent delay in schedule, often due to slow information cycles between the field and the office.

Polycam closes that gap. The app allows a user to capture an entire room in minutes just by walking through the space. Because processing occurs quickly on-device, the visual record is available for review while the team is still on-site.

Cost, Scalability, And Accessibility

The hardware gate remains a significant barrier to digital maturity. If a firm only owns a few expensive scanners, scanning only happens when those devices are available. Matterport is built around this dedicated hardware model. The Pro3 camera starts at $5,995, and higher-end kits run nearly $8,000. On top of hardware, Matterport requires a subscription tied to the number of hosted spaces, with additional fees for exports like MatterPak.

Polycam removes this barrier by making the technology accessible on standard consumer devices. While the app leverages LiDAR for maximum precision on iPhone Pro devices, anyone with an iPhone 13 or newer can now generate 3D scans for free. For Polycam Business users, plans start at $400 per year per user and include unlimited exports and hosting. This predictable model encourages teams to scan early and often, treating 3D documentation as a routine part of work rather than a special event.

While both approaches can work, teams that prioritize frequent capture, flexibility, and predictable costs often find that mobile-first platforms align better with how work actually happens. When scanning is easy to start, inexpensive to repeat, and accessible to more people, it becomes part of the workflow rather than a gated process. That’s typically where Polycam stands out.

If flexibility, frequent capture, and predictable pricing are important to your workflow, getting started with Polycam is straightforward. You can try it for free to see how mobile-first scanning fits your day-to-day work, or start a 7-day Business trial to evaluate it across projects and teams.

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