Home inspection · refereed
Spectora vs HomeGauge
Before anything else, a fact that changes the question: these are the same company. Spectora acquired HomeGauge on 1 April 2025. If you are comparing them as rivals, you are comparing two products with one owner, one roadmap and one commercial interest.
Who wrote this, and what we sell
We make ReportWalk, an inspection app. We are not in this comparison, we have no partnership with either company, and nothing below is affiliate-linked. We mention our own product once, at the bottom, and only for a case neither of these fits.
The short answer
Spectora
Choose Spectora if you are starting out, want a web-based workflow, and want to be on the product the owner is actively developing. It is where the company's engineering effort visibly goes.
HomeGauge
Choose HomeGauge if you already run it, prefer writing on a desktop with a real keyboard, and value an offline model its own documentation describes as doing the whole report without a connection. That is a genuine strength and nobody has announced it is going away.
If you are choosing today with no existing investment in either, the ownership question matters more than the feature list. You are picking a position within one company's portfolio, not between two competitors.
Who actually switched, and why
Both documented switches run the same way, and both are inspectors moving between two products owned by the same company. We found no reverse flow.
HomeGauge → Spectora
“Web based is so much easier for someone new like myself than Cloud based”
Curtis switched seventeen months after the two companies became one owner. Nothing in his review suggests he knew that.
HomeGauge → Spectora
“Did not like the webwriter”
Where they genuinely differ
The architecture, which is the real decision
HomeGauge is a Windows desktop report writer with a phone companion app. Spectora is web-based. That is not a feature difference, it is a different theory of where inspection reports get written — and inspectors are genuinely split on it.
The desktop model is why HomeGauge's offline claim is the strongest of any product we have looked at: the vendor states you can do your whole report offline and only need service to upload it. No cache limits, no prefetch condition.
The web model is why Spectora is easier to start on, as Curtis S. says above, and easier for the vendor to ship to.
Price, from each vendor's own page
HomeGauge lists at $89 a month. Spectora lists at $109 a month — and both figures appear on HomeGauge's own pricing page, which now sells its acquirer's product alongside it.
Inspectors on older grandfathered HomeGauge pricing report figures closer to $499 a year. One of them, Ray Thoroman, reports that his legacy tier is no longer visible on the site. If that is right, losing grandfathered status is roughly a 2.1× increase.
Where the engineering is going
This is observable rather than announced. The cloud product shipped on 9 September, 26 August, 12 August, 29 July and 1 July 2026 — roughly fortnightly. HomeGauge Desktop's last clearly dated release was 17 December 2025.
Nobody has announced that HomeGauge is being discontinued, and we are not saying anyone has. We are showing you the release cadence and letting you weigh it.
What each is honestly better at
Spectora
Getting a new inspector productive quickly, and being the product that ships. Its web workflow removes the install-and-sync problem entirely, and the release notes show sustained investment. It is also the only product in this category that publicly names a competitor, which is more transparency than the rest of the field offers.
HomeGauge
Writing long reports properly. A desktop with a keyboard and a large screen beats a browser for narrative work, and plenty of experienced inspectors prefer it for exactly that reason. Its offline wording is also the least hedged in the category — the whole report, with no connection, and upload later.
What we could not verify
- Whether HomeGauge's desktop product has a stated roadmap. We could not find one either way, and absence of a published roadmap is not the same as absence of a roadmap.
- Ray Thoroman's report that a legacy pricing tier disappeared from the site. It is a specific, checkable claim by a named inspector, and we have not independently confirmed it.
- Reddit was unreachable in every research session. Where we say no reaction was found, that is a gap in our reach, not evidence of silence. For home inspectors specifically, much of the real conversation happens in login-walled Facebook groups we also could not read.
- Capterra rates HomeGauge 4.6 from 501 reviews and not one review we retrieved mentions the acquisition at all. The review sites and the forums are describing different realities, and we cannot tell you which is representative.
If neither fits — a third shape of tool
If what you actually need is the report finished before you leave the property — rather than a desktop to write it on that evening — that is a third shape of tool. ReportWalk is a phone-first inspection app: you photograph, you talk, and a branded PDF exists on site. It has no scheduling, no CRM and no agent portal, so it is not a replacement for either product above if you need those.
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Last updated 15 September 2026