StagingBench is an independent benchmark of AI virtual staging tools, built for real estate agents and real estate photographers who need to know which tools can be trusted with listing photos. Instead of relying on marketing pages or cherry-picked demos, every tool is given exactly the same input and judged on what it actually returns.
How the benchmark works: every tool stages the same 10 public-domain (CC0) empty-room photos. Each tool is run with its default settings, and only the first output counts. There are no retries, no hand-picked best results and no manual touch-ups. This keeps the comparison fair and makes the results easy to reproduce.
What is measured: after staging, an automatic check aligns each result to the original photo and measures two things. The first is framing changes, meaning whether the tool cropped, shifted or rescaled the picture. The second is architecture drift, meaning how much walls, windows and doors moved compared with the original room. This matters because MLS rules and local regulations treat misrepresenting a property as a serious problem. Furniture may be virtual, but the room itself should stay the same. A staged photo in which a window is smaller or a wall has moved can mislead buyers and expose an agent to complaints.
What you will find on the site: Round 1 tracks 20 tools. For each tool you can see before and after images for the same rooms, the measured results, and the price per staged photo taken from the tool's public pricing page. There is also an MLS disclosure guide that explains how to label virtually staged photos so that listings stay compliant.
Who it is for: real estate agents choosing a staging tool for their listings, photographers who offer staging as an add-on service, brokerages that want a consistent policy, and anyone curious how well current AI staging tools preserve the real structure of a room. If you already use one of these tools, you can check how it performs on architecture drift and framing before you publish another listing.
Independence: scores are never for sale. No tool can pay to change its result or its position. The methodology is the same for every tool and is described openly on the site. StagingBench is bootstrapped and has no outside funding.
Current status: results are partial while testing continues. Round 1 is still being completed, and some tools may be added or re-measured as the work progresses. Anything that is not yet finished is marked as such instead of being filled in with guesses.
Why we built it: virtual staging has become popular because it is cheap and fast, but the quality varies a lot, and the differences that matter most to a professional, such as whether the architecture stays intact, are rarely shown in the tools' own examples. A neutral side by side comparison on identical photos gives agents and photographers a practical way to choose, and gives the tool makers a clear and fair target to improve against.
Pricing: StagingBench is free to read. Visit the site to browse the comparison, look at the before and after images, and read the MLS disclosure guide.
Methodology in more detail: the 10 empty-room photos were chosen because they are public domain under CC0, so anyone can download the same originals, run them through any tool and compare the outcome with our numbers. The photos cover a range of room types and lighting conditions so that a tool cannot score well by handling just one easy case. Default settings are used because that is what most busy agents will do in practice: upload a photo, pick a style if asked, and accept the result. Counting only the first output reflects real usage, where there is rarely time to regenerate a picture many times and compare. After each result is collected, the alignment step registers it to the original photo, so that differences in walls, windows, doors and framing can be measured on the same coordinates rather than judged by eye. The goal is not to declare a single winner but to show, tool by tool, how much of the real room survives staging, alongside what each tool costs per staged photo. Readers can then weigh price against fidelity for their own market and for their own MLS rules, and can see the before and after images themselves before trusting any score.
How to use it: start with the comparison table to see the measured results and the price per staged photo, open the before and after images for any tool you are considering, and read the MLS disclosure guide before you publish staged photos in a listing. If you represent a staging tool and think a result does not reflect your product, the methodology section explains how each run was produced so the discussion can stay factual.
