Spectora vs HomeGauge: one company, two products

The framing everyone gets wrong: this is written up everywhere as a rivalry, the modern cloud upstart against the veteran desktop incumbent. It stopped being a rivalry in 2025. Spectora announced its acquisition of HomeGauge on 1 April 2025. Go to HomeGauge's own pricing page today and the logo at the top of the software card reads "HomeGauge, a Spectora Company", the page sells Spectora right next to it with its own trial button, and both trial buttons point at spectora.com. The FAQ underneath says HomeGauge is now part of the Spectora family.

So the question is not which company deserves your money. One company gets it either way. The real question is which of that company's two products fits how you work, and whether the price difference everybody argues about survives contact with the annual plan. It mostly does not.

The $20 a month that is actually $22 a year

Every comparison of these two leads with $89 against $109 and stops there. Run it out to a year and the gap collapses:

At a typical $400 to $600 inspection fee, $22 a year is a rounding error inside a single job. Which means price is not the deciding factor here, whatever the forum threads say. The deciding factor is the one nobody prices: where the software runs.

What you are actually choosing between

Those add-on numbers matter more than the base price argument. Spectora's Advanced tier is billed per inspection, so a 250-inspection year adds about $1,000 on top of the $1,090 subscription. That is the line item that turns a $109 tool into a $2,000 one, and it is opt-in, with a 30-day trial of its own. Decide on the base product first.

Choose HomeGauge if…

• You already work on Windows and you want a desktop writer that keeps working the way it has for years. HomeGauge has been shipping since 2001 and the workflow is the point, not the novelty.
• You want the longest look before you pay: 30 days of the full product beats two inspections if your calendar is busy this month.
• You are a solo inspector with no near-term plan to add a second, so the unpublished multi-inspector price never becomes your problem.

Choose Spectora if…

• Your only computer is a Mac, or you switch between machines. This is the whole decision for a lot of inspectors and it takes about four seconds to make.
• You expect to add an inspector. The price is published, so you can model the second hire before you make it.
• You want to try it without a clock running. Two inspections with no time limit and no card means the trial waits for your calendar instead of the other way round.
• You want the annual plan. It is the only one of the two with a published annual price, and it is what makes the $20 gap disappear.

The thing to ask before you migrate

Both companies say the acquisition changes nothing for existing customers, and as of August 2026 that holds up: HomeGauge is still sold, still $89, still supported, still shipping its Companion app. We have no evidence of a wind-down and we are not going to invent one.

What we will say is that the incentive shape has changed. The cheaper product is a Windows desktop tool now owned by the company whose flagship is a cloud platform. If you are choosing between them for the next twelve months, that is irrelevant. If you are about to move a decade of custom templates and comment libraries into one of them, ask a sales rep for the multi-year roadmap in writing and keep the answer. That question costs nothing and it is the one thing a price table cannot tell you.

What we have not evaluated

This page compares exactly two products, because those are the two that our home inspectors stack puts in front of you and the two you will hear named in every inspector forum. There are other report writers in this category and we have not evaluated them, so we are not going to rank them. We have also not run a full inspection season inside either product: everything above comes from the vendors' own current pricing pages and public statements, checked in August 2026, which is why this page is labelled a Research Edition rather than a test result. When the hands-on cycle runs, this page gets re-scored and the changelog records what changed.

See these tools inside the full stack: Home Inspectors stack → · related work for property professionals: Real Estate Agents → · Tradespeople →

Common questions

Are Spectora and HomeGauge the same company?

They are now. Spectora announced its acquisition of HomeGauge on 1 April 2025. HomeGauge's own pricing page carries a logo reading "HomeGauge, a Spectora Company", sells both products side by side, and sends both free-trial buttons to spectora.com. Its FAQ says plainly that HomeGauge is part of the Spectora family. So the rivalry inspectors argue about in forums is, commercially, a choice between two products from one vendor.

Which is cheaper, Spectora or HomeGauge?

Less than the headline suggests. HomeGauge is $89 a month after a 30-day free trial, which is $1,068 a year. Spectora is $109 a month, but $1,090 a year on its annual plan. That makes the real gap about $22 a year, not $20 a month, provided you take the annual plan. Pay Spectora monthly and the gap becomes $240 a year. Prices verified August 2026 on both vendor pricing pages, so check them before you buy.

Does HomeGauge run on a Mac?

Not natively. HomeGauge's classic report writer is Windows desktop software, and its own FAQ tells Mac owners to run it through Parallels or a similar program. The Companion app for field data collection runs on Android and iOS. Spectora is web based with a mobile app, so it has no Windows requirement. If your only computer is a Mac and you do not want a virtualisation layer, that single fact settles the choice.

What happens to HomeGauge now that Spectora owns it?

Both companies say nothing changes for existing customers, and as of August 2026 HomeGauge is still sold, still priced at $89 a month, and still supported. We have no evidence of a wind-down and we are not predicting one. The honest framing is that the cheaper product is a legacy desktop tool owned by the company that sells the cloud platform, so ask about the multi-year roadmap before you migrate a decade of templates into it.

What does a second inspector cost?

Spectora publishes the number: additional inspectors are $99 a month or $999 a year. HomeGauge's pricing page publishes no multi-inspector figure at all, so a two-person shop has to ask. That is not a reason to rule HomeGauge out, but if you plan to hire, one of these two lets you do the arithmetic today and the other does not.