Verdict in 60 seconds
RetailDesign.ai if the thing you are designing is a shop, showroom, boutique or franchise outlet. ArchiVinci if you need one renderer for interiors, exteriors, landscape and masterplans. Spacely AI if you are a residential interior designer who lives in SketchUp and wants renders without leaving it.
The reason is not image quality. All three produce photorealistic output in under a minute. The difference is what each tool knows about the space you are designing, and what it does with your floor plan.
Prices and features below were read from each vendor's own site on 10 September 2026. This is our product, so read the RetailDesign.ai claims with that in mind; we have kept them to things you can verify on a free account.
What each tool actually is
RetailDesign.ai
A retail store design platform built by the team behind PID Projects, a fit-out firm with 2,500+ delivered stores. It has four create tools (Idea Generator, Design a New Space, Floor Plan to 3D, Fix Renders), a Space Planner for fixture layouts, brand kits, and a gallery and projects layer for client work. It only does interiors of commercial spaces, and it is deliberately narrow.
ArchiVinci
A general-purpose AI architectural visualisation platform: sketch, photo, floor plan or 3D-model screenshot in, render out, across interior, exterior, landscape, bird's-eye and masterplan modes, with video generation and plugins for SketchUp, Revit, Rhino and AutoCAD. Its audience is architects, studios, real estate and students.
Spacely AI
An AI interior design tool that renders sketches, 3D models and room photos in under 60 seconds, with editing modes for lighting, furnishing and materials, a SketchUp extension and a real-time Team Canvas. It reports 580,000+ users and its examples and defaults are residential.
Floor plans: reference or constraint?
This is the single biggest difference and the one most comparisons skip.
When you give ArchiVinci or Spacely a floor plan, the model treats it as a style reference: it will produce a convincing room in the spirit of the plan, and it will freely move a door, widen a window or lose a column to make the image work. That is fine for a mood image. It is a problem when the client is the tenant of a 42 sq m mall unit with a column exactly where the AI put a fitting room.
RetailDesign.ai's Floor Plan to 3D treats the plan as a constraint. Walls, openings and the shopfront line stay where you drew them and the render is generated inside that geometry. The output is something a fit-out contractor can look at next to the plan without arguing about it. We walk through this in Floor Plan to 3D Render with AI.
Spacely partially sidesteps the issue because it renders from your SketchUp model, where you already own the geometry. If you have modelled the store, that is a strong workflow. If you have a PDF plan from the mall and no model, you are back to reference behaviour.
Retail fixtures and brand consistency
Ask all three for "a 1,000 sq ft footwear store with a back-wall lit display, low central tables and a cash counter by the exit". ArchiVinci and Spacely will give you a good-looking room that reads as a boutique; the fixtures are generic and the lighting is residential-soft. RetailDesign.ai's prompts are written around retail fixture vocabulary (wall bays, gondolas, cash wraps, try-on islands, lit shelving) and retail light levels, so the first render is closer to a buildable store and you spend fewer generations fighting the defaults.
For brands rolling out multiple locations, brand kits matter more than any single render. Save a brand's colours, materials and logo once and every render across every store carries them. Neither ArchiVinci nor Spacely has a retail-brand-system concept; you re-prompt the brand into each image.
Fix Renders is the other retail-specific tool: change the shelving finish, swap the counter, add the brand's signature fixture, without regenerating the room and losing what the client already approved. Spacely's Edit mode is the closest equivalent and it is good; ArchiVinci's editing is broader (relight, rotate, refurnish) but not fixture-aware.
Pricing, side by side (September 2026)
| RetailDesign.ai | ArchiVinci | Spacely AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 2 Idea Generator concepts on signup | None (3-day pass $49) | 40 trial credits, watermark-free |
| Entry paid | Lite $9/mo, 10 generations | $39/week or $79/month, unlimited native renders | Personal seat (price on site); credits from $9 per 200 |
| Professional | Starter $19/mo (75) · Pro $39/mo (200) | $549/year (~$46/mo) | Studio, up to 2 seats |
| Team / agency | Agency $149/mo (600) | 5-user team from $1,271 / 3 months | Agency, up to 5 seats, API |
| Metering | Generations per month | Unlimited native + coins for other models | Credits (~2 per render) |
Two things to weigh beyond the sticker. ArchiVinci's "unlimited" is genuinely cheap if you render all day across typologies; it is expensive if you need ten store renders a month. Spacely's credits are the lowest cost per raw render of the three; the cost that matters is per usable render, and for retail that is where a tool with retail defaults wins back the difference. Full RetailDesign.ai tiers are on the pricing page.
Workflow: where each one fits
- Store owner with a photo of the unit: RetailDesign.ai, Design a New Space. Nothing to model, nothing to learn.
- Retail designer pitching three directions by Friday: RetailDesign.ai Idea Generator for the directions, Floor Plan to 3D for the winner, then SketchUp for the set. Our store layout guide covers what to decide before you render anything.
- Residential designer in SketchUp: Spacely, no contest.
- Architecture studio doing a mall facade, a hotel and a housing scheme this quarter: ArchiVinci for breadth, RetailDesign.ai for the retail units inside the mall.
- Brand with 30 stores and a design manual: RetailDesign.ai with a brand kit, so the manual is enforced by the tool rather than by email.
See the difference on your own plan
Sign up free, generate two concepts, then upload your floor plan on any paid plan from $9/month.
Start freeFAQ
Is RetailDesign.ai an ArchiVinci alternative?
For retail store interiors, yes: it does photo-to-render and floor-plan-to-3D like ArchiVinci, adds retail fixtures and brand kits, and starts at $9/month versus ArchiVinci's $79/month. For exteriors, landscape or masterplans it is not; ArchiVinci covers those and RetailDesign.ai does not.
Is RetailDesign.ai a Spacely AI alternative?
For commercial and retail work, yes. Spacely is strongest for residential designers working inside SketchUp; RetailDesign.ai is built around store fixtures, retail lighting and brand consistency across many locations.
Which of the three has a free plan?
RetailDesign.ai (2 free Idea Generator concepts on signup) and Spacely AI (40 trial credits). ArchiVinci has no free tier; its cheapest entry is a $49 three-day pass, as of September 2026. For the wider field, see the 7 best AI store design generators.
