Compare · Poché vs magicplan
Poché vs magicplan, compared honestly. magicplan is a mobile field-capture app — walk the building, scan or measure it, document and price the job. Poché works from the builder's floor plan PDF, reading the drawing scale off the sheet, for the case where there is no building to walk yet. Free tiers, real pricing, and when magicplan is the right tool.
magicplan measures a space you are standing in. Poché measures a drawing you were handed. Almost everything else follows from that.
magicplan is a phone-first app for people who visit buildings for a living. You walk the property, capture the layout in real time — manual measurements, laser-assisted measurements, or a LiDAR scan on an iOS Pro device — and everything you record becomes documentation, a scope of work and an estimate on the way out. It is available on iOS and Android and carries a 4.7-star average across 290,000-plus ratings.
Poché has no camera, no scanner and no app. It has a floor plan reader. You upload the sheet — the builder's CAD-printed PDF, or a photograph of a paper plan — and it takes the drawing scale off the drawing, recovers each room's outline and floor area from the wall mass, and hands you true-scale furniture footprints with clearance rules to arrange on the architect's own linework.
magicplan keeps turning up on "best free apps for arranging furniture" roundups, and it is worth understanding what those lists are recommending. magicplan is professional software priced per job site. From their own pricing page today:
| magicplan plan | Per project | At the 10-project entry point |
|---|---|---|
| Free start | — | 2 free projects, "full features, no strings attached" |
| PROFlex — month to month | $40 | $400 / month |
| PRO12 — 12-month plan | $30 | $300 / month |
| PRO24 — 24-month plan | $25 | $250 / month |
| Extra projects | $40 | Added automatically to the next cycle |
A project is one property or job site, and unused projects roll over. For a restoration company running twenty losses a month that is straightforwardly good value. For one person furnishing one house, two free projects is the whole allowance, and the eleventh thing you would want to do costs more than a sofa.
Poché has one plan and it is free. The money comes from disclosed affiliate commission if a shopping link you followed ends in a purchase, and the rule attached to that is written into the product: results are ranked by fit, never by payout.
| Poché | magicplan | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | A drawing — the sheet you upload | A building — the one you are standing in |
| Requires access to the property | No | Yes — capture happens on site |
| How the scale is established | Read off the drawing — wall thickness on a CAD PDF, printed dimension strings on a photo | Manual and laser-assisted measurement; LiDAR scan on iOS Pro devices |
| Platform | Web browser. No native app, no offline mode | iOS and Android; works entirely on a phone or tablet, offline mode included |
| Furniture library | 280 pieces, 17 categories, researched real-world inches with clearance rules | No furniture dimension library is advertised on their pricing or features pages |
| Clearance and collision warnings | Redline on overlap, amber on tight clearance, on every piece | Not among the features listed on their pricing or features pages |
| Shopping by fit | Searches 40+ live stores for the exact footprint; ranked by fit, never payout | Estimating against your own price lists — a contractor's tool, not a shopper's |
| Exports | PDF at the original drawing scale; per-room placement sheets | ESX for Xactimate, FML, professional PDF reports, shareable project links |
| Price | Free, no tier above it | 2 free projects, then from $25/project on a 24-month plan ($250/month at 10 projects) |
| Who it is sold to | People furnishing a home from its plan | Restoration and trade crews — "Join 10,000+ Restoration Professionals" |
magicplan figures read from magicplan.app, magicplan.app/pricing and magicplan.app/features on 2026-08-21. Prices and plans change; check theirs before you decide anything on ours.
Most comparisons in this category are between near-identical products. This one is not, and that makes it easy to answer.
If the house exists and you can get into it, magicplan wins. A LiDAR walkthrough on a Pro iPhone produces a measured record of what is actually built, including the wall that ended up two inches off the plan. No amount of reading a drawing gets you that, because a drawing is what was intended, not what was framed.
If the house does not exist yet, magicplan has nothing to point at. This is the ordinary situation for a new-construction buyer: you signed in March, you close in November, and between those two dates the only dimensional truth in your possession is a PDF from the builder. You cannot scan a slab. You can, however, read the sheet — and the sheet is drawn to a stated scale with dimension strings printed on it, which is exactly what Poché consumes.
The same holds for an existing house you have not bought yet, a listing plan from an agent, an apartment you are moving into next month, and a parent's house three states away. In each of those the drawing is available and the building is not.
And plainly the other way: if you are a homeowner or a buyer with a plan PDF, trying to work out whether the great room takes a 96-inch sectional, magicplan's pricing page is not written for you and Poché's is — because Poché does not have one.
There are 2 free projects to start, described on their pricing page as full features with no strings attached, and one project means one property or job site. After that it is priced per project on plans that begin at 10 new projects a month: $40 a project month to month, which is $400 a month; $30 a project on a 12-month commitment, which is $300 a month; and $25 a project on 24 months, which is $250 a month. Extra projects beyond your plan are $40 each. Unused projects roll over.
Restoration and trade crews, and they say so themselves. Their site is organised around site assessment, moisture mapping, equipment placement, affected areas, scope of work and estimating; it exports ESX for Xactimate; and it integrates with Leica, Tramex meters and Ricoh360. Their own call to action is "Join 10,000+ Restoration Professionals". Homeowners do use it — the app has a 4.7-star average across 290,000-plus ratings — but the pricing and the feature set are aimed at people who bill for the walkthrough.
Whether the building exists. magicplan measures a space you are physically standing in — manual measurements, laser-assisted measurements, or a LiDAR scan on an iOS Pro device. Poché measures a drawing: it reads the scale off the sheet you upload and recovers each room's outline and floor area from the wall mass, which is the only measurement available when the house is a slab and a plan set. They answer the same question from opposite ends.
It will give you an accurate room, which is most of the job, and a customer review quoted on their own site praises its furniture and room options. What their pricing and features pages do not advertise is a library of researched real-world furniture dimensions with clearance rules attached, or a warning when two pieces overlap or a walkway pinches. That is the specific thing Poché is built around: 280 pieces across 17 categories at true dimensions, redline on overlap and amber on tight clearance, and a search across 40-plus live stores for pieces that fit the footprint you just settled.
No. Poché needs a drawing, not a device. A CAD-printed builder's PDF calibrates from its own wall thicknesses; a photograph of a printed plan calibrates from the dimension strings printed on the sheet. It runs in a browser on anything, and there is no native app at all — which is also the trade-off, because magicplan is a proper mobile app with an offline mode for sites without a signal.
Poché, for the simple reason that you cannot scan a house you do not have the keys to. Before closing, the builder's plan set is the only dimensional truth available, and Poché is built to read it — scale off the sheet, rooms off the walls, furniture at true size on the original drawing. Once you have the keys and want a measured record of what is actually there, magicplan is a much better tool for producing one.
The demo sheet is 2,080 sq ft with 13 rooms measured off their own walls and 53 pieces standing at true scale. It opens in the real editor with no account and no email — from wherever you are.
Open the demo plan →