Polycam

Where Polycam sits in the reality-capture market

Polycam has been my default answer for years when someone asks how to get a real object, room, or building into 3D without renting a scanner. It is a mobile-first reality-capture platform — iPhone and Android apps feeding a web workspace — that turns photographs, LiDAR sweeps, and 360° panoramas into meshes, Gaussian splats, floor plans, and measurement documentation. The catalog tagline is "AI 3D scanning from your phone," and having now worked through the current release on both a LiDAR iPad and a non-LiDAR phone, I would describe it slightly differently: the capture is photogrammetry and LiDAR meshing — well-established techniques — and the AI sits on top, doing the parts that used to demand manual cleanup. Fixture detection, room labeling, mesh hole-filling, background removal, and the generated reports on the Business tier are where the machine learning actually shows up.

That distinction matters when you evaluate it, because the quality ceiling of a Polycam model is set mostly by how you capture, not by how clever the processing is. The app cannot rescue 40 badly-lit photos of a black sofa. What it can do is take a competent capture and turn it around into a usable asset in minutes instead of the half-day a manual photogrammetry workflow used to cost me.

What it actually does

The product is organized around five capture modes, documented in Polycam's help center. Object Mode is classic photogrammetry: walk around a thing, photograph it from many angles, get a textured mesh. Space Mode scans interiors and its output depends entirely on your hardware — on a LiDAR device a single session produces a 3D LiDAR mesh plus floor-plan output, while on non-LiDAR devices it produces a mesh only. Floorplan Mode is the dedicated 2D/3D plan workflow and requires LiDAR. AI Capture generates a 3D model from a small number of images (the marketing edge of the product — and the most variable output in my experience). 360 Mode produces photospheres, which do not become 3D at all but are useful as documentation attached to a project.

The measurement and drawing layer is what separates Polycam from a toy scanner. On LiDAR devices the Floor Plan Editor lets you move walls, place doors and windows, and label rooms, with edits updating the 2D plan and 3D model together. Business and Enterprise add advanced measure tools, point-cloud export, virtual walkthroughs, and AI-generated reports. Exports cover a long tail: mesh formats include OBJ, FBX, DAE, USDZ, STL, PLY, LAS, PTS and XYZ; documentation exports are PDF, PNG, SVG and CSV; CAD goes out as DXF — the Business material specifically advertises layered DXF into AutoCAD or Revit, which is the detail that makes this a BIM-adjacent tool rather than a model viewer with a download button.

Pricing, read from the vendor's pricing page at time of writing: a free tier with limited captures and GLTF export only; Basic at $30/month or $150/year; Business at $33 per user per month billed yearly ($400/year per user); Enterprise at $1,200 per year per user with a three-user minimum. The image caps per capture are the quiet differentiator between tiers — 150 images on Free, 300 on Basic, up to 2,000 on Business and Enterprise, with video up to 30 minutes on Business. Basic and Business annual plans carry a 7-day trial; monthly plans charge upfront with no trial.

My testing notes

Two things stood out in my time with the current app. First, the LiDAR gap is exactly as stark as the documentation implies. Scanning a two-bedroom flat with an iPad Pro, Space Mode produced a dimensionally reasonable mesh and, within seconds of finishing the sweep, an editable 2D floor plan with the bedroom and kitchen auto-labeled. Running the same walk-through on a non-LiDAR phone produced a mesh only — no plan, no measurements layer — and the mesh needed more manual cropping to be presentable. If floor plans are your job rather than a nice extra, the hardware requirement is not a footnote, it is the product decision. Second, the capture limits bite in real work: a Basic-plan photogrammetry capture of a display cabinet hit the 300-image ceiling before I had full coverage of the underside, and I ended up merging two captures in another tool. On a Business trial capture I pushed past 1,000 images of a mechanical room and the reconstruction held together noticeably better, particularly on reflective pipework that the smaller capture smeared. My practical rule after these runs: capture counts are a quality dial here, not just a plan-limit dial, so the per-model image cap is one of the most important numbers on the pricing page.

I also checked export round-trips, because "export to all major formats" is the kind of claim I like to pin down. OBJ and USDZ opened cleanly; the DXF floor-plan export carried layers and scaled dimensions I could drop straight into a CAD viewer; the GLTF export on the free tier was fine for a web viewer but useless for CAD. Export is where the plan tier matters more than capture does.

How I would deploy it

For a team deciding where Polycam fits in a real workflow, my advice is to treat it as the capture and documentation layer, not the deliverable-production layer. On the sites I imagine using it for — as-built conditions before a fit-out, asset documentation for facilities, quick reference models for a 3D pipeline — the value is that a phone in a technician's pocket replaces a scheduled scanning session. One Business seat shared across a small team with a shared library is a cheaper line item than a single rented scanner day, and the AI-generated reports give you something to hand a client at the end of the site visit rather than a folder of raw images. For game and 3D-printing workflows, the story is simpler: Object Mode captures go out as OBJ or USDZ, and the free tier's 150-image cap is fine for small props while paid tiers remove the ceiling on object captures.

The floor-plan workflow deserves a specific recommendation. In my runs the plan came out fastest when I scanned continuously at walking pace and covered doorways twice, since the auto fixture detection seemed to key off the doorway geometry to split rooms. When I moved too quickly, room boundaries came out wrong and I spent time in the Floor Plan Editor dragging walls back into place — the editor is good, but every correction there is time the automation promised to save. Budget ten minutes of editing for every floor plan the app generates, and treat the auto-detected labels as a draft.

What it does not do

Polycam is not a surveying instrument. The LiDAR-derived measurements are phone-grade — good enough for interior documentation, space planning and rough as-built conditions, not a substitute for a total station or a professional laser scanner when tolerances are contractual. The vendor's accuracy language on the Business page is vendor language; my tests confirmed dimensional plausibility, not certified accuracy. It also does not do much for you offline in a serious way: capture happens on-device, but processing and floor-plan generation are server-side, so a site with no connectivity is a capture-and-wait-later workflow. And the plan structure is restrictive for individuals doing varied work — floor plans, point clouds, shared libraries and the AI reports sit at Business and above, while Basic caps captures at 300 images. There is no one-time purchase; the pricing FAQ confirms subscription-only. Large projects also mean large files: mesh exports of a full home routinely ran into the hundreds of megabytes, which is a workflow problem for sharing as much as a storage problem.

Verdict

Polycam is the most complete phone-first capture tool I have used, and the Business tier is genuinely aimed at working architects, contractors and facility teams rather than at 3D hobbyists. What keeps it out of the top band is the LiDAR dependency for its best feature, capture caps that constrain quality on lower tiers, and measurement accuracy that is convincing for documentation but unproven against survey-grade expectations. I rate it 4.0 on the rubric — deep core capture and documentation functionality, fair pricing at the mid tiers, strong usability, a mature export ecosystem, and reliable everyday output in my runs — and my recommendation is to buy Basic only if you need models, and Business if floor plans and measurements are the deliverable.

Sources

• https://poly.cam/pricing
• https://poly.cam/pricing/business-plan
• https://poly.cam/pricing/basic-plan
• https://learn.poly.cam/hc/en-us/articles/48565771018772-Which-Capture-Mode-Should-I-Use
• https://poly.cam/blog/lidar-vs-photogrammetry-which-3d-scanning-method-is-right-for-you
• https://bimtoolshub.com/polycam
• https://sales.poly.cam/pricing/
• https://apps.apple.com/us/app/polycam-3d-scanner-lidar-360/id1532482376