iPano360 Stitcher vs PTGui
PTGui is an excellent program with more than twenty years of history, and we do not claim to beat it at everything. Here is what each one actually offers — no embellishment:
| Feature | PTGui | PTGui Pro | iPano360 Stitcher |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | about €175 one-time | about €345 one-time | Free |
| Updates | one year, then paid | one year, then paid | Free forever |
| Try before you buy | trial with watermark | trial with watermark | No need — it is free |
| Operating system | Windows & macOS | Windows & macOS | Windows only |
| Automatic stitching of photos from any regular camera | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Manual control points and line constraints | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Masks (include/exclude areas of a photo) | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Exposure and lens vignetting correction | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Filling gaps in the sky and floor | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Removing the photographer or shadow with an AI brush | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Direct export into a virtual tour | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| GPano tag for Facebook and Google | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| True HDR merging from bracketed exposures | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Viewpoint correction | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Fisheye lenses | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Batch processing of hundreds of panoramas | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
Prices are for personal licenses from the official PTGui website in September 2026 and may change. ✗ means the feature was not available in that edition when this page was written.
Honestly: when is PTGui worth its price?
If you shoot with a fisheye lens, need true HDR merging from bracketed exposures, process hundreds of panoramas in batch, or work on macOS — PTGui Pro is a professional tool worth its price. But if you shoot with a phone or a regular camera and want a clean 360° panorama for a virtual tour, our program gives you the same result for free — with one step less, because the image goes straight into your tour.
What does the program do?
Automatic stitching, the PTGui way
Finds the matching points between photos, computes the position of each photo on the sphere, then blends at full resolution with multi-band blending — the same pipeline professional software uses.
Manual control when needed
Manual control points, include/exclude masks, and horizontal/vertical line constraints to straighten the image — for difficult scenes where automatic stitching goes wrong.
AI repair
Brush over the photographer, their shadow or a gap in the sky or floor, and the AI (LaMa) fills it in to match the scene.
Exposure and vignetting correction
Evens out exposure between shots and corrects lens edge darkening automatically, with an optional HDR look after stitching.
Built-in 360° viewer
See the result as if you were inside the space before you export it.
Export ready for your tour
An equirectangular image with GPano tag: upload it to iPano360 directly, and VR headsets, Facebook and Google recognise it automatically.
How long does it take?
About 22 photos become a complete 360° sphere in 10–30 seconds on a mid-range machine (laptop i7), with no dedicated graphics card.
How to use it
- Sign in and add your photos (any camera — phone, DSLR, drone).
- Optionally refine: masks, line constraints and manual control points for tricky scenes.
- Pick quality and output size, then hit Stitch.
- Fix the result: rotate, tone, blur brush, gap repair.
- Check it in the built-in 360° viewer and export with VR metadata (GPano).
What do you need?
Who is this program for?
Before you shoot: understand parallax
The best stitching software cannot fix photos taken the wrong way. Five minutes in Panorama School saves you hours of corrections.
Panorama ready? Build your tour now
Upload the image to iPano360, link it with your other scenes, and publish the tour with a single link.