8th Wall vs AR.js Studio

8th Wall provides tools for building 3D experiences and WebAR for web browsers or self-hosted projects. Its XR Engine includes World Effects, Absolute Scale, Image Targets, Face Effects, and Sky Effects, and is designed to work with A-Frame, Three.js, Babylon.js, and PlayCanvas. 8th Wall Desktop is an XR game engine with a visual editor; downloads are available for Apple Silicon Mac, Intel Mac, and Windows x64. Projects can be deployed and hosted wherever a developer needs. The Free plan costs nothing, with no login required. The engine binary is closed source, cannot be modified or reverse engineered, and is subject to a limited-use license; other listed tools and example projects use MIT licenses. The distributed binary omits Niantic Spatial VPS, Lightship Maps, and Hand Tracking. Native export is coming soon, and export through the retired hosted platform is no longer available. Projects exported before February 28, 2026 can be moved to local or self-hosted use. Hosted projects are scheduled to remain live through February 28, 2027, when hosting is due to be decommissioned.

AR.js Studio is a free, open-source web authoring platform for building augmented reality experiences without coding. It supports location-based projects, which place AR content at GPS coordinates, and marker-based projects, which anchor content to a black-and-white visual marker. Location projects can use a dropped pin or entered coordinates for up to 10 locations. Marker projects can use a premade marker or an uploaded image; simple, high-contrast, rotationally asymmetric markers are recommended. Uploadable content includes GLTF, GLB, or ZIP 3D objects, JPG, PNG, or GIF images, and MP4 videos. Maximum upload sizes are 50 MB for 3D objects, 15 MB for images, and 25 MB for videos. Published experiences run on the web without requiring viewers to install another app. Publishing requires a GitHub login and depends on a privately hosted OAuth server that may become unavailable. The documented fallback is self-hosting a fork and Gatekeeper. The repository is MIT licensed.