Which is the best virtual
tour software? In this video I'll compare not just one or two, but 15 of the most popular options, both free and paid as voted by you guys
in the virtual tour Facebook groups. The contenders are, Pano2VR,
Matterport, Cupix, Kuula, My360, Google Tour
Creator, Panoskin, Gothru, 3DVista, Krpano, Veer
Experience, Theasys, CloudPano, Marzipano and Orbix360, that's a lot. And there are actually way
more so apologies to the
softwares that didn't make the cut. Some of these include popular softwares
of the past like Kolor Panotour Pro, which is no longer available for sale
and Roundme who appeared to be no longer active. So this comparison will give you an
overview of who the main players are right now and what the main
differences are between them. This is a free video for my brand
new video course, Virtual Tour Pro. So if you got value from it, then it's not even 1/100th of what
you'll learn in the full course. So follow the link in the description
to get your copy of the course today. Now the features and prices of these
platforms are going to change and update a lot in the future, so use this video
as a guide to what they offer today. Then check their individual websites
which I'll link in the description if you're watching this video in the future
and want to see what they've added. Now I can't compare every single feature
of every platform because that would make things extremely complicated, but instead I'll focus on the main
things that stood out to me from my time using them, I'll also sort them into categories
and give them each ratings out of 10. And here are the factors I'm going
to judge them by. Firstly, price. How good is the price
and more importantly, how much value does it
deliver for that price? I'm also going to include hosting here
because with some of them it might seem like a great deal at first, but then you have to pay a lot more down
the line to add new tours as well as keep the existing ones
online. Next, is features. How many great features does it have
that will increase the professionalism of the tour? Ease of use. How intuitive is the software to use
without having to go through hours of tutorials to fully understand how it
works and what the workflow is like? Also, how fast is the overall process from
start to finish? Photo playback. How good do 360 photos look
when uploaded to the platform? This includes not only
displaying them at full quality, but things like the ability to
color correct and fix imperfections, adding photo effects and what the
end viewing experience is like, navigating around the 360 photos as
well as the transitions between shots. Interface and graphics. What do
the navigation buttons look like, how professional do the skins look? And skins are essentially
customizable menus. How much can you customize other things
like logos, texts, hotspots, and so on? Finally, the end result. How professional does the tour look when
all of these things are put together into the end user experience? Now I'm going to start by grouping them
into four categories. Beginner free, beginner paid, intermediate, and advanced. Here's how I see them fitting into each. Now I'll go through them one by one
and give each software an overall score based on the categories I just mentioned. Then at the end of each section you'll
see a completed table of how each software ranks compared to others
in its category. Spoiler alert, as the video goes on, the scores
will get better and better, so be sure to hang around until the
end so you can make a fully informed decision and see what all the options are. As well as seeing which of these
platforms is my personal choice and why. I have my photos from the apartment here
that I edited earlier and I'm going to upload the exact same tour to all of
these platforms to see the differences. Now let's get started. The first free software is Google Tour
Creator and this is made by Google and it allows you to create a super basic
virtual tour. So if we click new tour, we give it a title, we can give it a description and
a cover photo and hit create. One interesting thing about this software
is you don't actually need your own 360 photos to begin with, you could make a virtual tour of photos
that are already uploaded to Google street view. But it doesn't really help us because
we want to create a custom virtual tour using our own images, so we'll hit upload. And this software is about as simple
as it gets. You import your photos, you do a basic edit within
30 seconds and you're done. However you have to upload
your photos one by one, which is quite annoying and you only have
the most basic level of customization. We can add audio, we can add a point of
interest, and this isn't even a hotspot, it's just an information card, we can't
create hotspots in between photos. All of your photos will
show up down the bottom, then when you publish your
tour, it shows up as a carousel. I don't really like how
my photos look here, I can tell the quality has been
reduced a bit and when published, it's even worse than this. It adds this weird nadir for no reason
and this tour just feels so beginnerish, I would not really want to do any
kind of virtual tour in this software. If it had a redeeming quality, that would probably be free
Google street view upload, but it doesn't even have
that, I don't think, I couldn't see any option here to do
it. So I'm sorry Google tour creator, your features are just too basic, this isn't really usable so I
can't even give you a 5 out of 10. A much better free software to use
would be Veer Experience and Veer are an established VR company who are now
specializing in just 360 video content. However, they made this tour a year ago and it's
still active and you can create some really decent virtual tours in it. What I like about it is that it's one
of the few platforms to support both 360 photos and videos, as well as 3D
or stereoscopic photos and videos. This is what the editor looks like,
it's really minimal and easy to use. You have all of your photos at the
top and your editor on the left, it's super easy to add hotspots. Yes,
you only have a basic amount of options, but you can add a custom hotspot
if you wanted to add a logo. You can add information cards
with videos, photos, and links. You can also add text and images
throughout your tour. It's easy to use, you just click and drag the elements and
you can actually make a halfway decent tour with Veer Experience. Another great feature of Veer is they
have their own app in the Oculus store, so you can connect your account up in a
headset and download and view your tour in virtual reality, this is especially
good for 360 video and 3D content, it really comes to life within the Veer
app. And it's one of the only ones, if not the only one on this entire
list that has its own dedicated VR app. So while I probably wouldn't use
veer experience professionally, I would definitely use it for personal
use because it's professional enough, it looks good, it looks like you know what you're doing
and is potentially going to be one of the better platform to use if you're
making a virtual tour made of 360 videos. So definitely do consider Veer
Experience, it's a good software, it's not great, but it more than does
the job for a free beginner software. Next is Marzipano and this
is an interesting one because
one of the more common questions I've been getting is can you
download a tour and host it offline? And this is the very first
software I found that could do it, it's completely free, you have
to build your tour online, but once it's built you download it, you can view it offline or you
can upload it to your own server. This is what the editor looks
like, it's pretty basic, but it does allow the adding of hotspots
and most other things we saw in Veer Experience. As far as I can see, you
can't customize your tour very much, so we can't add custom
hotspots, we can't add logos. You just upload your photos,
you set the initial view, you create a basic hotspot
to another part of the tour, you can also add other info hotspots. From looking at some of
the samples on their site, it looks like you can actually
do a bit more with hotspots, however you need to code them. So you can't just drag and drop like a
lot of the other softwares on this list. So that's actually a really
cool effect and so is this, but this isn't an option to drag
and drop, you have to code that in. And for someone like me who struggles
to speak the English language sometimes, coding is a no go. Oh that's cool.
Marzipano is definitely a great option and one of the top contenders
for free virtual tour software. The key feature that I think is both a
blessing and a curse is the ability to download and hosts offline. That's a great feature for people who
want to do that, but if you don't, they don't offer the option to
host your tours on their site. So basically you're forced to download
the tour and host it elsewhere. So if you want a really fast workflow, then this probably isn't going
to be the software for you, but if you want to watch back your
virtual tour directly from your desktop without needing an internet connection, then Marzipano is going
to be your best friend. And I'd suggest using it when
you specifically need that, you don't have to use it for every tour, but only when you want offline
tours I would suggest Marzipano. I think Marzipano is a great software
and it's really raising the bar for the kinds of tours you can make
without having to spend a cent. The next free option you should
consider is called Orbix 360. And again, this is a super simple drag
and drop virtual tour editor. Here's my tour of the apartment,
the dashboard is super simple, we just click editor and straight away
we're into it just like the others, we click and drag to move around and we
can position our hotspots anywhere we want. I would say this is a slightly more
advanced version of Google Tour Creator. With both of them, you could turn around
a virtual tour in under five minutes, I reckon. Again, the customization is only really basic
with only basic hotspots and the graphics are also really basic. One feature I really like about Orbix is
you can add a custom nadir and it moves when you move to photo. Not
many of these softwares do that, so that's actually a really cool feature
from a software you don't have to pay a cent for. Moving around the photos
is a little jerky, personally, I prefer a smooth navigation
experience. And yes I'm being picky, but I'm allowed to be because we've got
15 softwares and some of the others have super smooth navigation that actually
makes the photos feel higher quality because you're having a
smoother interactive experience.
Here's the final tour, it looks okay, not amazing, but again, this is going to be good
enough for personal use, I wouldn't use this
for client work though. It just doesn't have enough professional
features and also it doesn't have too many unique selling points above
the other softwares on this list. Orbix is a decent option for complete
beginners who want a super simple interface, however, there is one more free platform I want
to show you and it's called Theasys. When I first discovered Theasys, I went to their website and took a look
at some of their sample tours and I thought, damn, that looks good. I saw this sample tour of Shipwrecked
beach and I had a play with it and I thought, wow, this actually
looks quite professional. Are you sure this software's free?
The navigation is really nice, the hotspots look good, the overall interface looks
like a legit paid software. So then I uploaded my photos and
I got the same result. Firstly, they've got hundreds of great icons
to choose from to use as hotspots. You can do a whole bunch of cool things
with the hotspots. Like in this example, the viewer clicks the map on the
table and up comes a map of Barcelona. You can customize the
smoothness of the viewer, you can make it hard and fast
like that or soft and smooth, just the way I like it. It's
got panorama backlinking, you can add sound and music, you can add
pitch and zoom limits for your photos. You can adjust the leveling of
your photos. How good is that? In most softwares this
would be a paid feature, but Theasys offers it completely free.
The navigation looks really professional, the photos look crisp and clear, and you have a high degree of
customization of your hotspots. So with this map on the table,
I changed the X, Y and Z axis, so it looks like it's
laid flat on the table. This means you could put hotspots
on walls and they'd look realistic, on the floor, on the ceiling,
change the size and scale. And you can really do so much
with your hotspot customization, including adding your
own image if you want. You can add 2D and 3D text to your
tours, You can add a lens flare, you can add custom shapes that you can
turn into hotspots and you can save presets. So if you like your hotspots
a certain way, like I did in this tour, I saved it as a hotspot. So
then I just drag and drop. So every time I add a new hotspot,
it shows up exactly the same way. You don't have to change
the size and scale, it'll be exactly the same each time. Another thing I love about Theasys
is it has a device emulator, so if we want to see what our tour looks
like on desktop, tablet and mobile, it's as simple as clicking the icons at
the top and you can see what it looks like on each device. Not only that but it has a high level
of customization with your export settings, to do with autoplay, adding
logos, choosing the starting panorama You can patch the Nadir, you can add a menu and did I mentioned
this is all completely free. Yeah, I think it probably did, but still
this is free. Can you believe it? That's incredible, I don't know
how they offer it for free, but seriously take advantage of it. It may take a little bit more time
to build the tour than the other free platforms, but as a result you get a much more
professional looking tour in the end. Theasys is the only one of the free
virtual tour softwares that I'd be happy charging clients for.
It looks professional, you get a high level of customization
and will be a perfectly fine option for small to medium sized businesses. If you want to share your tour they
have all kinds of options to do so. And the only paid feature they have is
the ability to download the entire tour for $10 if you want to
host it on your own server. Otherwise the tour will be hosted on
the Theasys website completely free. So there you go. Theasys beats the other four by quite a
big margin and the obvious choice if you have no money to spend and you want to
get started with virtual tours. However, we've got some softwares to come that
will give Theasys a run for its money. The first paid beginner
software is Matterport, and Matterport is one of the more widely
known virtual tour softwares and it kind of has the reputation
of, Ooo, Matterport. As in being super fancy and only for
elite photographers who buy the expensive Matterport camera set up. The good news is they've now opened it
up for use with regular 360 cameras and you can now create an entire virtual
tour with certain 360 cameras. Not all compatible yet, but some are and I'm sure many
more will be in the near future. Matterport is actually much more
simple to use than you might think. One of the things Matterport is well
known for is the dollhouse effect, where you essentially 3D scanned an
entire house and it presents it to your viewer exactly like a dollhouse. You can move it around as if it was a
miniature house and it's just a really cool, unique and fun view
point to view a location from. It also has this amazing
walkthrough effect, where the transition between two photos
feels really real and you can set automatic camera movements to move
throughout several points throughout the location and it basically
moves around on autopilot. Where it's currently limiting is in
the fact that you can't manually upload photos, you have to use the Matterport
app when you're there on location. Then the photos process in the cloud and
you're emailed a link to edit your tour in a few hours. Which is great and all, but it takes away the
ability to shoot manually, as well as do any kind of
editing on your photos, because it has to be done
then and there in the app. And while the Matterport
app is really good, you can't do any photo editing or
change any settings on your camera. I've actually reached out to the
Matterport team and they've told me that they're working on this and they will
allow manual uploads probably within the next year, so while I see
this as a big barrier for now, it won't be in the not too distant future. Here's what the Matterport dashboard
looks like and due to the issue I just mentioned, I can't manually
upload my Spain virtual tour, so I'm going to have to
show you one I shot earlier. This is of a gym around the corner from
me. I shot this in around 10 minutes, it was super fast and the result was
really good, the client was really happy. The actual tour editor is so easy, a complete beginner could pick
it up within an hour or two. You've only got a few options here on
the right hand side and you can do some pretty advanced things with them. Where Matterport is lacking
is in its customization. All Matterport tours look basically
the same because you're using the same hotspots, you'll have the same
texts in the top left hand corner, and usually it's just really
obvious if it's a Matterport tour. Now this isn't a bad thing, but it means that this takes away the
ability for the tour to have a more personalized feel. If you wanted
to use, say your client's colors, you couldn't do that, you can't add their
logo, you can't even change the nadir. They blur the nadir because they don't
allow manual editing and the tripod is going to be there, so that's
their solution, but it's not good, I don't like having a blurred nadir. I think my tour looks
professional for sure, but after using it with a paid client, it made me realize Matterport is really
better optimized for real estate, virtual tours. Having the dollhouse
effect and the floor plan, these are all things that a
real estate listing would have. When you're trying to sell a house,
you don't really need custom branding, you only need basic
information about the house, basic hotspots and the amazing 3D
effects overpower what any kind of custom branding could do. The biggest issue I have with Matterport
is with their pricing and their hosting. Once you start your
Matterport subscription, you have to keep it going or your tours
are going to be taken offline and even the most basic paid package allows
you five tours and that's it. If you want six, you have to
upgrade to the next subscription, which is way more expensive. And this kind of pricing model makes
it really hard to build up a library of virtual tours without
having to take some down. And ideally with most virtual tour shoots, you want your tour to
be there for a while. Which again is why I think Matterport is
best suited to real estate because you might make a Matterport tour, you
put it online to help sell the house, then the house sells and you don't need
the tour to be online anymore and you take it offline. That's how most
Matterport photographers do it, and while it is workable, if you're
shooting exclusively real estate, if you want to make any other kind of
tour, I'd say you should forget it. Because the ability to keep your tours
hosted online forever is a really important thing for businesses,
for personal virtual tours, basically any other kind of virtual
tour other than a real estate tour. I have to give Matterport a 10 for
its amazing 3D features, however, for its overall ability it's
going to be closer to seven. The next paid beginners software is
Cloudpano and this is one of the newest softwares to enter the market. And I see these guys as one of the
best up and coming platforms out there. Firstly, their pricing is really good, but when you start an account
it's so user friendly. I love the graphic design of their
dashboard and when you edit your tour it's really simple and user friendly. I really
liked the way the editor is laid out, everything is really big and
it's easy to find what you need. The customization elements
are basic for now, this is what the hotspots look like. You
do have a basic level of customization, you can make them black or white or
add this weird Christmas bauble looking thing. This is what my tour looks
like, I added a logo up the top, it's got a carousel down the bottom. I'm
not the biggest fan of the navigation, it's a little bit too sensitive
and you can't customize it. I'm just making very small clicks and
drags here and it's moving quite a lot and it's quite jerky. So while the photos do
look good and they're relatively sharp, I think this is something they
probably will need to improve. So along with adding basic hotspots and
info spots, you can add a floor plan, you can add a lead capture form, if you want to collect people's email
addresses within the tour and you can also download your Cloudpano tours
and upload to your own server. They've also got a white label option, so if you don't want the
Cloudpano URL to show up, you can enter your own custom URL. I'd definitely feel comfortable using
Cloudpano professionally and in while it might not be the obvious choice,
it's a really nice simple experience. I love how user friendly they've made it
and it's one of the few tour makers on this list where you can create a tour
from start to finish in under five minutes. I really like Cloudpano a lot and I
can't wait to see what these guys do with it, because it's evolving really quickly
and I know it's going to become an intermediate software pretty
quickly with way more features. So I would definitely keep a close
eye on Cloudpano in the future. The final beginner virtual
tour software is Kuula. And I remember discovering Kuula two or
three years ago and what really stood out to me with these guys
was their 360 photo player. I remember it was just so smooth and nice
to drag the 360 photo around and every time I go back and browse some of their
use of photos, I'm reminded of that. I really loved the subtle slow movements, I think it makes the 360 experience much
more enjoyable and less intimidating. And in that time since starting, they've moved their branding towards
virtual tours and they now offer a paid virtual tour option. Firstly,
what's great about it is the price. It's one of the cheapest virtual tour
platforms out there and I think you'll be amazed at what it offers
for that price. Firstly, you can make unlimited tours
and host it on their website, but also their editor is one of the
best and most user friendly editors out there. As you can see their smooth photo rotation
also applies to the virtual tours and it just makes them look so good. It's funny how the exact same photo can
look good with some softwares and really bad with others. Adding hotspots is
super simple, just click that and bam, you've got yourself a hotspot, you can customize it by
putting your own photo there, or you can use one of their builtin icons. One of my favorite effects within
Kuula is the lens flare effect, you just click this button
here and now it adds a hotspot, and we're going to position it where the
sun is and it creates an automatic lens flare that will move around as the
viewer navigates around the photo. This really makes the 360
viewing experience even
more realistic and how cool does that look? I love
the lens flare effect. It's not the only
software that can do this, but it's one of the best that I've seen. You can add custom hotspots
like this and this. See what I did there? I found a photo of a map and I positioned
the orientation so it looks like it's sitting on the table. Then when you
hover over it, it comes to life, you click it and you see
the map in full screen. You have a good amount of
customization here of your photos, you can add filters to them, and this is one of the only
softwares so far that allows this. Where you can actually change
the colors and what not, once the photos are in the software. And you're not going to do all of your
color correction in your virtual tour software, but it's good to have the option of
turning up the saturation 10% or so You can also customize the
zoom settings and pitch limit. Another cool feature is
the horizon correction, you just drag the slider left
and right and, there you go, you've got a straight horizon. I'm really
happy with the tour I made in Kuula, it looks super nice and I would definitely
use this software with a paid client. It gives you enough customization along
the way to get a really specific looking tour. There you can see
I've added a floor plan, I can customize the transition type.
They've even got walk through mode, which means you set a
hotspot once in one photo, then when you go to that photo
that's linking to and turn around, the hotspot will be there
in the opposite place. I like Kuula so much that I even use my
Kuula virtual tour on my Virtual Tour Pro website. And it looks really
cool embedded on a website like this, with my logo up the top left, I've
got the carousel down the bottom, access to the floor plan and there I've
got hotspots within the floor plan. For me though I've got to come
back to it, I love this viewer, it's such a nice experience
looking around these photos. And I would say it's probably one of the
best platforms out there for actually moving around the 360 photos. And yeah, I'd be really happy using this
for paid jobs, it looks great, I know clients would be happy with
Kuula. So for the the price you pay, Kuula way over delivers especially
if you're shooting virtual tours professionally. Maybe you're just starting your virtual
tour business and you want to start contacting small to medium
sized businesses for jobs, Kuula will give you the best overall
result of all of the platforms we've covered so far. Congratulations Kuula, your officially the best virtual
tour software for beginners. Okay, moving on to the intermediate softwares, there are four of them and the
first one on the list is Cupix. For those of you who
follow my YouTube channel, you'll know I've made a few videos about
Cupix, and I really like Cupix a lot. It's a great software and it's been one
of the leaders over the past few years. However, that does not
mean Cupix is the best, it's simply the one I've
been using the most, but by the end of this video I can tell
you that's probably going to change. So Cupix is a really good platform, you can use a 360 camera with it
and it really is feature packed. There's so much you can do with it and
it seems to be targeted towards the construction industry, towards architects, there are so many great features for
documenting and visualizing a space in the form of a virtual tour. The pricing is good and you should only
need their most basic package to get full usage out of it for
basic virtual tour creation. And here's what the virtual
tour editor looks like. It does come across as a bit intimidating
and it's the kind of software that you need to spend a few days to fully get
your head around it and understand everything it can do. Connecting
your photos up isn't super easy. It's the kind of software where you
need to shoot your photos in quick succession of each other for it to be
able to link them up automatically. So this tour, I have 11 photos total throughout the
entire apartment and it's just not enough for Cupix, it wasn't able
to see where they link up, and now I have to do them all manually. Here's a sample tour made with Cupix
and while you can get a basic level of customization, so they've got their
logo up there and at the nadir, and they've added these
icons around the restaurant. As you can see on the left you can add
a floor plan with interactive hotspots, and they've also added a high
resolution photo and a video here. I mean this is a decent
level of customization, but I still feel like I'm walking
around an architect's floor plan. The graphic design isn't
great, the hotspots are very
generic and to be honest, I don't know if I would use it in this
context. If you're shooting a restaurant, you want some better custom branding, which is okay because I don't think
that's what Cupix is really made for, Cupix seem to be targeting
construction and real estate. I've seen heaps of samples where someone
will walk around with a 360 camera attached to a helmet, they'll walk around a construction
site taking photos every few feet. And what I'm doing here
is a really cool feature, it's a side by side comparison, so I think Cupix is great
for documentation purposes. Because you can do cool stuff like this, this is showing two different stages of
the build and this is a really powerful tool for anyone in construction or
architecture that needs to document a location, add notes, do measurements, any kind of technical stuff
you can do with Cupix. They really do have a lot of features
that help with this, for example, I can measure point A to B. You can
simulate new additions to the space, so if you wanted to put
a painting on the wall, or if you wanted to put in the dimensions
of say a piece of furniture you were thinking of adding to the space, you can basically include all the
measurements and put a simulated piece of furniture in your space. That looks good
by the way. I really liked Cupix a lot, it's highly packed with features. However, it's also kind of complicated and not
going to be the most user friendly software if you want to turn around
virtual tour as quickly and easily. So if you're shooting for documentation,
construction or architecture, Cupix is the number one choice by far. For custom virtual tours like mine though, I just think it's overkill and is more
complicated than what I need and overall won't deliver as good of a result as the
previous software Kuula would give you for everyday business type situations. I've got a bunch of Cupix tutorials
on my YouTube channel already, so I'd definitely suggest checking them
out and overall I'm giving Cupix a 7.3 out of 10. It's good, but it is a niche software and you can't
use it for all types of virtual tours. Next is Panoskin, and Panoskin is
a great software and a great price. So Panoskin seems to focus around
Google street view. Right now, when you build a tour, you have
to start it as a street view tour, and then you're able to customize it
with your own branding and hotspots and whatnot later on, this is something
that will be changing pretty soon. To get started making a
Panoskin virtual tour, first you need to add a
client to your database, and I just put a dummy client in
because I'm not ready to add that yet, but it does require you to do
this before you get started. That's not ideal, but it's
not a deal breaker. Firstly, you start by pinpointing your location,
then you upload your photos. By the way, gives you the ability to blur your photos
if you have faces or anything else you want to blur. Next you build the tour, and this is done by dragging and
dropping one photo over another to add a hotspot and basically you're
linking up the photos first, then you'll add custom branding later. One thing that initially scared me
about Panoskin is when I did this, I saw my straight lines turn into wavy
lines in my photo and I thought, WTF, and then I asked about it and then
it turns out this is just for preview purposes, so it's essentially creating
a super low resolution version here, which makes it much
faster and easier to edit, then everything will look normal
and high quality in the final tour. I'd say the overall interface
isn't super easy to navigate. For me it's not obvious what
the next step might be like. Do I have to publish to Google?
Do I click one of these? There's no instructions about what
is what and what I need to do, so it does take a bit of time to learn
Panoskin. Once it's all connected, that's when you customize it, so you can choose custom colors and a
logo and here's what the custom builder looks like. Now that we got here, it's now feeling a lot easier to use and
it has a bunch of really cool features like adding an interactive floor plan to
the top left hand corner of the image. And you can customize your tour quite
a bit even more than all of the virtual tour platforms that we've covered
so far. So as you can see here, I've added an opening
graphics, so this will show up, then the viewer will click, start 360
tour and we're into it. Down the bottom, I've added a carousel, on the right we've got some
options for our viewer to pick. They can look at a map of the location,
they can book to stay at this apartment. We can add a full screen
info card like this, and then finally there's a contact option. I would say probably my favorite feature
of Panoskin is the floor plan at the top left, that looks so cool. And as
you navigate around, it moves in sync. By the way, I had the actual design
of the floor plan done by a designer, this is not a feature
of Panoskin, however, you can add the custom radar and you
can set it to follow you in the right direction. It's features like this that give you
a reason to charge more for your tours because you're adding that extra
professional element to the tour. You're also able to add in a
flat image gallery to the tour, so if you want to include photos that
might already be on your company or businesses website, you can do that
within the virtual tour player. This is what happens
when you click a hotspot. it's a proper menu that shows up on
the left and same with the info spot. Here's another Panoskin example I
found, and this one is really good, and to me this looks like a
highly professional virtual tour. It's the next level up
yet again from Kuula, and it has features that
go beyond just beginner. It also integrates really nicely
within the hosts websites. So if you see this bar up the
top, this is their actual website. now down here is Panoskin, and then down
the bottom we've got the website again. I bet you thought this was all one
display, well it's not, so no question, Panoskin has great website
integration. I rate Panoskin highly, and I think you could do some highly
professional tours with this for big businesses and get paid good money when
using it. It's not super easy to learn, but once you do, you'll be able
to make tours relatively quickly. Another reason the price is so good is, that includes 20 Google street
view publishings per month. This is probably the best you will
find it on any of these platforms. Oh and by the way, all platforms in the intermediate to
advanced categories also have a Google street view upload feature. Next is Gothru and I see Gothru as being
similar to Panoskin in the fact that it bases its tours around
Google street view upload. As you can see that's how
they're branding themselves here, and if you're a photographer who intends
on uploading to street view a lot, you should definitely
consider Panoskin or Gothru, here's what it looks like
inside the dashboard. And when you start a project this
is what it's going to look like, you've got your various options here
and when you click one it opens a new window and you do one specific thing
about that tour. So this is the moderate, window where we connect
up all of our photos. Basically you move them from the
right hand side into the middle, you line them up and then
they go to the left hand side, which means they've been
connected. Once that's done, you close that window and go
back to the previous screen, where we can now do other things
like edit the tour in more detail. Gothru has features to
straighten and center images, and some other nice features like easily
being able to add multiple levels. You can add multiple levels
with the previous two
softwares as well, by the way. Now that we're in intermediate territory, I'm noticing a trend of how easy it is
to pick up the software without having to look it up, with Gothru again,
just like the previous two, I'm finding myself a bit
confused about what to do next. It's not super easy and intuitive like
the beginner softwares we saw earlier. Once you learn it though, you can actually do some really cool
things within Gothru and get a high level of customization. It's pretty
easy to add a menu up the top, you can add custom branding,
custom colors, custom hotspots. Here's a sample tour I found using Gothru
and this looks really professional. The hotspots look nice, the menu on the left looks really good
and down the bottom you can see it as a Google street view box. You can also add a logo to any corner and
add yourself a menu wherever you like. I'm not the biggest fan
of the Google arrows, which seem to show by default in
Gothru. You can replace them though, they just haven't here. The menu design does look good and it
allows you to navigate around your entire virtual tour pretty quickly. I have noticed though from seeing a few
samples that they're all laid out in a similar way, where it's a box up the
top, you've got multiple options here. You can change a bit of the graphic
design and the font and the colors, but it's basically the same
box that does the same thing. Gothru has heaps of other great features, I simply don't have
time to cover them all, but I would say it's one of the more
Google street view friendly softwares. Would I say it's better than
Panoskin? I don't know about that. I see Panoskin as being a better price
and having slightly more features, especially in terms of customizing the
graphic design and the overall look. It's this design, compared to this design, and I just prefer the graphic
design elements within Panoskin. Once you really get to know GoThru, I'm sure you can customize
the design a lot better, but for now I'm going
to give go through an 8, it's a great software and
I know it will get better. The final intermediate virtual
tour software is My360. And something funny I found about
all of these softwares so far, is when you go to their website, the way their website is designed is
usually going to be an indication of what the experience is going to be like and
what your end virtual tour is going to look like. And I can safely say that's
case with My360. When you log in, this is what you see. I have no idea what
to do right now. Do I scroll down do, I read articles, do I click one
of these things? Dashboard? No, I'm already in the dashboard.
What about this one MM management? My account? It's really not clear.
So you can click create first tour, but first you need to add
yourself as a photographer, which is done in this menu here. So again, this is a software where you have to
fill in all kinds of forms before you're able to get started editing your
tour. Okay, let's try again. So this is how the editor starts, what they call 360 photos are spheres
and you click this really small button on the right hand side to add your
photos. I mean, to their credit, they do have a video tutorial that
teaches you the ins and outs of My360, but at the same time I just wish they
had more intuitive elements where you could pick it up, start
editing straight away. And this is what the editor looks like. Remember when I said the graphic design
of the website is an indication of what the editor is going to look like. This
top menu looks like it was made in 1989, the year I was born. And this is
the process of adding a hotspot, drag this little blue
circle into your image, now I'm going to click the arrow and
this will link it up with the photo outside. Now it's getting better,
I gotta give it credit for that, I'm going to press save and now when
I go to that photo and turn around the hotspots there, albeit on the ground. Taking a look at some of the
sample tours on their site. I'm seeing better results
than what I just got. As you can see there's a carousel and
there are basic buttons for navigation. There's a contact form, that's
nice. Info, that's good, I like this flashing icon here
too. So just like with the others, you can add basic hotspots
with images and texts, there they've added a video
of a fireplace, that's cool. I'd say the graphic design
elements though are just too basic. I'm not the biggest fan
of these transitions, that loading texts and it just
feels a bit too simplistic. You can add a custom logo and text in
the top corners and you can also add your own custom nadir, that stays put
when you move the photo around. You can enable or disable the
graphics pretty easily, that's good. But to be honest, I just see no
unique selling points with My360. All of the other editors offer these
features and more, and at a better price. The previous three softwares
in the intermediate category
are literally half the price of My360 and they do more overall. So while you can get a decent result with
My360 and get your tour published onto Google maps, it's just not as good as the others and
I can't justify paying that price over the others for more or
less the same features. So overall in the intermediate
category, Panoskin is the winner. Congratulations. You can do a lot with it and it also
happens to be the cheapest of all four options. With that said, I think all four of them are good
softwares and you can use all of them professionally and start
earning money with your tours. And I'm not just talking small businesses, but medium size and even
large size businesses, you could probably get away with editing
in any of these for those customers. Okay. Now I want to give you a really
quick look at three advanced softwares. Now I'm only going to scratch the surface
because there have been entire Udemy courses made about these softwares, but I want to try and give you a quick
overview of what they are and what they do. The first one is Pano2VR, and I'd say this is one of the most
widely used softwares among professionals. It was the most popular software when I
did that poll on Facebook and so many of my friends who are high end
virtual tour shooters use Pano2VR. The biggest difference
between the beginner and
intermediate softwares and the advanced softwares, is all three of these advanced
softwares are downloadable programs. So you don't access them online,
you need to download them, enter your license key and
open it within your computer. The others are software as a service, which means you can access
them online any way you want. Both have pros and cons, but there's nothing wrong with a
good old fashioned desktop software. The first thing I'm going to say about
Pano2VR is the price is extremely good. You can buy a license starting at 149
Euros and this is the equivalent of say, 10 months of subscription fees
from most of the other softwares. So with Pano2VR, you buy it
once and you own it forever. There are two different licenses
with two different prices, but even the most expensive price is
still very affordable given you're buying it outright and you don't
have to pay ongoing fee. Especially when you see what this software
can do and the kinds of clients you can work with using it. I think you'll find it very
cheap considering how much
money you could make with it. Here's what the software
interface looks like. I've imported my 360 photo into the main
window here and you've got settings on either side. Pano2VR allows you
a high level of customization, there isn't much you can't do
with virtual tours using it. Even though the interface
looks relatively simple, it still does take a bit of learning to
properly understand the workflow of the software. Now I want to show you some
samples that were made in Pano2VR. So this tour looks great, it's
got custom branding up the top, I love this little icon.
The menu looks really good, we have a logo in the top right. There's a menu on the side that pops out
and you can click through to the next photo, we've also got options to click
in every single corner of this viewer. I think that's really cool and it's what
separates lower end tours with higher end ones. When I hover over
the hotspot, look at that, that looks highly professional.
Then when I click through, to look around inside this ship,
we've got the same kind of hotspots. The images look really good
inside of Pano2VR. Firstly, this was shot with a DSLR, which
is why it's such high quality, but also the player is really nice
and smooth. Here's another example, with this one they've
got a welcome screen, you click the button and
it takes you into the tour. There's more custom hotspots here
that move when you hover over them. We have a flashing hotspot here, when
you click it, it tells you what it is. This menu on the side looks great and
the graphic design is really different to the one we saw in the last
example. So with Pano2VR, you can really customize the overall
skin and lay out a lot. Honestly, I can't think of too many things I don't
like about this tour. Here's one more, and they've started
with a video this time, you press play and then
you get into the tour. And yet again we've got another
kind of graphic design style,, with custom branding, using custom
colors of the business. I love this tour, and to think this was made for a few
hundred dollars is pretty incredible. Because you could charge well over $2,000
for a tour like this and they've made it in Pano2VR to get a really high end
result. When I go back to the software, it's not super clear how I
would get all of these results, but I really need to spend more
time on their YouTube channel, they've got hundreds of tutorials
that teach you everything. So Pano2VR is the kind of software that
takes time to learn, but once you can, you can get stunning looking
virtual tours for high end clients. I have very few complaints about Pano2VR. The tours look stunning and the
price is really, really good. Congratulations Pano2VR. You had the
highest score so far by quite a bit. The next advanced software is Krpano and
this is what their website looks like. If you're like me and contemplating
hitting the refresh button cause the site didn't load properly, then your
attempts to refresh will be futile, because this is what the
website looks like. Yet, Krpano is one of the most high end and
most trusted softwares used by virtual tour professionals. And this is
what the software looks like, it's like a software version of
their website. In all seriousness, I haven't been able to
build my tour within Krpano. This is because it's a software that
allows you to customize your tours 100% including doing all the coding,
and not only is that optional, but it's essential. You gotta be able
to code to use Krpano. And if you can, you can get among the best results
possible from a virtual tour. Here's a sample, one of my friends made of my beautiful
home city and this tour is simply stunning and one of the best
virtual tours I've ever seen. Yes, part of it is because he
got this awesome drone shot, but also the hotspots look
good, the menu looks good, the branding looks good. I really
liked this custom intro he made, it looks super professional.
When I walk through the tour, this is what it's like. That
menu looks like a proper website, the animations are really good, the
overall experience is just really good. And this stunning virtual
tour was made in, this thing. I know it's hard to
imagine it, but it was. So while I can't show you the interface
too much because I simply don't understand it, and also there aren't
too many tutorials out there teaching. It on their website, they have a little bit of information
about Krpano you could say. So if you have a year to read this, then you'll be able to
get results just as good. Or if you understand
coding from the start, then you're probably going
to pick it up a bit faster. And when you dig into their website, you can actually find some really
good samples of tours made in Krpano Check out this one, Little
Temple of Abu Simbel. So I can walk around this tour using
the W,A,S,D keys? Look at that, that's incredible. This is like
the 3D feature from Matterport, and that's not the only Matterport
feature it has. Look at this, we've got a dollhouse. Here's another cool example
of their depth map technology. So this is a 360 photo and I'm moving
around it and the depth is changing. This technology could be
groundbreaking, I think in the future, if developed a bit more. I have no idea
how to get that from this, but still, cool. And there are a bunch of other
fantastic examples on their website. I do have a small issue
with their pricing, while it starts good at 159 Euros,
to simply remove a Krpano logo, you have to pay another 299 and then
there are optional add ons here, that add up to around a thousand
euros. You don't need these, so I'd say the price would be
closer to around 450 euros, which is still a good price
for an advanced software. So basically if you can get over the
intimidating complexity of Krpano, you can create yourself some seriously
stunning high end tours that have 100% customization. Is it for me,
uh, uh, I don't understand code. And I like having a super fast work
flow and this is quite literally the opposite of that because you're
building your tours from scratch. So while I've not properly
used Krpano personally, a lot of the best virtual
tour photographers in the
industry do use it and they get amazing results with it. So while
I've got to give it a two for ease of use, the end result is amazing.
And if you understand coding, I've got no doubt you'd be able to
create a masterpiece with Krpano. TThe final software on this list
is 3DVista and brace yourself, awesome stuff is coming. 3DVista is an advanced software
that you may not have heard of, but it has among the best features
of any virtual tour platform. It's compatible with most
cameras and most types of media, it's highly VR friendly. They have their own app for
displaying virtual tours on the go. You don't need to navigate to a
URL within Google Chrome or Safari, you can simply open up the 3DVista mobile
app and it displays your virtual tour as nicely as possible. They offer the option to download the
tour and upload to your own server, but they also have a hosting
service which is 99 euros a year, and this gives you basically unlimited
tours. If you compare that to Matterport, this is just so much better and cheaper. Now the main software is not
cheap but is 1000% worth it and here's why. Firstly, it's a desktop app like the previous two
and this one is laid out really nicely. It's easy to understand what
to do. The menus are clear, I'm not feeling overwhelmed
looking at this software. It kind of reminds me of
Adobe Photoshop or premier. And for someone that likes
keeping things simple, I've got to say I'm not feeling
too intimidated by 3DVista. So you edit photos one
by one in the middle, you have your settings on the right and
you have your different categories up the top. 3DVista has a layout that I would say is
even easier than even the intermediate softwares. What stands out to
me about 3DVista virtual tours, is not only do you have the ability
to fully custom brand the tour, but it also has some extremely stylish
inbuild graphic design elements, AKA skins. Take a look at this, this is what the design looks like in
the master bedroom. Then when I move, the same graphic design style changes
slightly differently to whatever room I happened to be in. It honestly makes it
feel like I'm looking around a magazine, it's that stylish. Here's another real
estate example, with these hotspots, as I hover over, the graphic design is
really good. It's not a flashy effect, it's not animated,
although you could do that, but what stands out about it
is the design is really good. With the amount of content put
out in today's day and age, graphic design is extremely important
with all kinds of media that you're posting online. And I really haven't seen graphic design
this good from any of these platforms yet. I mean, look, you could technically get
these same results if you
did the design separately in illustrator or Photoshop, but why 3DVista is great is it has these
designs built into their skin editor. So here I'm simulating what
the skin will look like, and I did this in 60 seconds. I just chose a skin and added my details
there and immediately it's already got that amazing magazine style feel. I haven't been able to drag and drop
this level of design yet with any of the other platforms. And yes, you can
fully customize it to your liking. It's really easy to
choose custom elements. They have this massive
library of skins of all types. We've got texts in one corner,
we've got navigation playback, we've got a side menu. This is really cool because it means
you don't have to spend that much time doing custom designs and you get something
that looks highly professional like this really quickly. It's also really easy to create custom
hotspots like this if you want to focus on one area within your 360. You basically just outline it with the
outline tool and you can do this.Here's another fantastic example Check
this one out. check this one out. So this is a virtual tour,
I know it looks like a game, but this is actually a custom tour. I love the graphic design
here and basically what you
do is you navigate to the next spot and this simulates where
the golf shot would have taken you. This really looks so stylish and it
looks legitimately like a game or an app that was made just for this purpose, whereas really they made this in
3DVista probably pretty quickly. Because of this, now I can watch a
coach's tip, and this is just so cool, this is one of the funnest virtual
tours I've seen. So for me, 3DVista is the perfect combination of
professionalism and ease of use. Well, relative ease of use for an advanced
software. Yes, it's expensive, but again, you could easily charge over $2,000 for
one single tourmade in 3DVista.And this is another one off fee. Once you've
bought it, you own it forever. I plan on learning 3DVista a lot better
and I'll make an indepth tutorial about it in the future. So
in terms of scoring it, it gets almost straight
tens except for the price, which is a little bit intimidating at
first. And the ease of use is easy, but not that easy. For me,
3DVista has the edge over Pano2VR, simply because of the ease of use and
the amazing inbuilt skins and custom design elements that can be
added with relative ease. Allright, well the numbers are in, the scores have been tallied,t's
been a fierce, epic battle, but we have three clear winners based
on the six most important features I identified at the beginning of this
video. In first place is 3DVista, congratulations. Second,
Pano2VR. Third, Panoskin. These are the best overall virtual
tour softwares in terms of price, features, ease of use, photo
playback, interfacing graphics, and the end result you
get. For most people, these are going to be the key
features to look for, however, if you're someone that doesn't mind the
price or the ease of use and you just want something that looks the best
a virtual tour can possibly look. In first place will be Krpano due
to its 100% customization ability. You can get basically any kind of
tour and graphic design you like, it's just going to take
time. Second is 3DVista. Third is Pano2VR. These are no doubt the three best
softwares for getting professional looking virtual tours that you can
sell to high end clients, but are they my software's of
choice? No, they're not. For me, I just want something that is easy to
use that can produce a professional, ish result and that I can turn over
virtual tour with within 10 minutes. Which is why for me, Kuula stands out,
head and shoulders above the rest. It's the perfect mix of
professional features, a super easy to use interface and the
price is one of the best of all of the paid platforms. Coming
in second is 3DVista, for when I want to create something much
more advanced for high end clients or whenever you want to make a really
impressive looking virtual tour, you can do it within 3DVista.
And it's easy enough to use that you can do that without having to do
coding, or take a thousand steps to do it. Third is going to be a tie between
Panoskin and Theasys. Because for me, these were the best in
each category, however, they're also in that awkward middle
ground of being in the middle. They're not the low end software,
they're not the high end software, so I'd probably use these when my projects
need to be somewhere in the middle of the range. I won't use them
as much as Kulua and 3DVista, but I will still use
them. Now I'm curious, which is your software of choice and
why? Let me know in the comments, and that's it. I hope this video helped you come to
a decision about which virtual tour platform is best for you. By the way, a lot of these platforms
offer some kind of free trial, so follow the links in the description
if you want to test them out yourself, before you buy. And on a side note, most of these platforms have a ton of
in-depth tutorials if you search YouTube as well and you want to know more. A few of them even have
their own dedicated YouTube
channels showing off every single feature of the software. I'll also add that as you become
more experienced with virtual tours, you should aim to move up
to more intermediate and
advanced platforms so you can do more with your tours and as
a result, charge more for them. And if you don't know what to charge or
even how to get regular paid clients for your tours, then I've got good
news for you. Over the past year, I've been working super hard on creating
an in depth video training course called Virtual Tour Pro, that covers everything you need
to know about virtual tours. I've condensed my five
year journey into short, actionable videos that will help
you do what you love for a living, AKA shooting virtual tours
and earning money from it. This isn't just another virtual tour
course where we cover shooting and editing and that's it, but also I'll go behind the scenes and
show you how to build a healthy and profitable business out of it so you
can spend even more time doing what you love. The course takes out all of the guesswork
so you don't have to make all of the mistakes in the book like I did. Just finding the right software can
cost hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours of your time, and if you can
save all of that with just one video, imagine how much you'll save getting all
of the best shortcuts for every other step in the process. So underneath this video you'll find a
link to Virtual Tour Pro where you can pick up your copy of
the entire course. Also, I'll be offering exclusive discounts to
almost all of the platforms you've seen in this video for Virtual Tour Pro
members only. On that note, happy 360ing. More virtual tour content coming soon,
and I'll see you in the next one.
