The Best Modsy Alternative in 2026 (And What Changed Since It Shut Down)

When Modsy shut down in 2023, it left a real gap. People had finally gotten used to the idea that they could see their room redesigned with actual furniture before buying anything. Then overnight, the service was gone, and the obvious replacements were either much slower (human-designer services like Havenly), much more limited (in-app AR tools that show one product at a time), or much more abstract (3D planners with generic stock models).

In the 18 months since, the space has changed more than it changed in the previous decade. AI image generation got good. Retailer Shopify catalogs got more accessible. And a new category of tools emerged — ones that take a photo of your actual room and redesign it using real, purchasable products from real stores.

This is a guide to where the category went, what to actually use now, and where Roomellow fits.

What Modsy did well — and where the gap is now

Modsy's bet was that people don't want to imagine furniture in their room. They want to see it there. The product worked: you uploaded photos and dimensions, a human designer built a 3D model, and you got a shoppable rendering back. For ~$90 a room, it beat hiring a designer cold.

What Modsy didn't have was iteration. Want to swap the sofa? Wait three days. Want to try a different style? Pay for another package. The economics required human designers in the loop, and human designers don't scale to "try fifteen things in an evening."

The category gap after Modsy closed:

• AR apps (IKEA Place, Wayfair, Amazon) show one product at a time. Useful, but no design vision — you have to be your own decorator.
• 3D room planners (Planner 5D, HomeByMe, Roomstyler) give you generic stock models. Not a real $1,800 sofa from a brand you'd actually buy from.
• Human-designer services (Havenly, Decorilla, Decorist) kept Modsy's quality but inherit the slowness — and start around $99/room.
• AI image tools that fill rooms with imaginary furniture you can't buy anywhere.

The thing that's actually missing — fast, iterative, real-products-only design — needed AI to catch up. It did.

What replaced Modsy: AI room design built on real catalogs

Modern AI tools take Modsy's premise and rebuild it without the human bottleneck. The best of them share three properties:

1. Your actual room. Not a 3D approximation. The AI works from a photo of the room you already live in.
2. Real products. Every piece of furniture in the rendering is a real SKU from a real store, with a working link to buy it.
3. Instant iteration. Want a different sofa? Generate a new version in seconds, not days.

This is the category Roomellow lives in. Some quick honesty about the landscape before we get into what's different about us:

• AI design tools that use generic furniture (most "interior design with AI" apps) — fast and free, but the renders show furniture that doesn't exist. Cute, useless for shopping.
• AI tools attached to a single retailer (e.g., IKEA Kreativ) — real products, but only one store's catalog. Good if you've already decided to buy from IKEA.
• AI tools that read public Shopify catalogs (Roomellow) — designs from 27 stores' real inventory, click-to-buy at the retailer's site.

How Roomellow works

You upload a photo of your room. You pick a style or describe what you want ("mid-century modern living room, lots of natural light, room for a sectional"). The AI generates a redesigned version of your room — same windows, same walls, same view from your couch — but with new furniture in it.

The furniture isn't invented. Every piece is a real SKU pulled from one of the Shopify stores in our catalog. The Roomellow catalog includes 40,000+ products across 27 stores — DTC brands like Floyd, Maiden Home, The Citizenry, Joybird, and Inside Weather, larger retailers like Lulu and Georgia, and Texas-local stores like Five Elements and World Interiors.

When you tap a sofa in the rendering, it opens that retailer's product page. You buy it from them; we don't take a cut from the sale.

Don't like the coffee table? Swap it. Want a different style? Regenerate. Want to see what World Interiors' walnut dining table looks like in your specific dining room? Try it in 30 seconds.

Where Modsy alternatives stand in 2026

A direct comparison:

	Roomellow	Havenly / Decorilla	IKEA Kreativ	Planner 5D / HomeByMe
Uses your actual room photo	✓	✓ (designer reviews it)	✓ (with scanning)	✗ (3D model)
Real, purchasable products	✓ — 27 stores	✓ — designer's picks	✓ — IKEA only	Limited
Speed	Seconds	1–2 weeks	Minutes	Manual
Swap furniture interactively	✓	Limited revisions	Within IKEA's catalog	✓
Cost	Free tier + credit packs	$99–$199+ per room	Free	Free–$10/mo
Best for	Fast iteration across many retailers	Hands-off, designer-led project	Furnishing a room with IKEA	Floor planning, layout

The honest takeaway: each of these has a real job. If you want a designer to drive the project, Havenly is still the right call. If you've already decided you're an IKEA household, IKEA Kreativ is built for you. If you mostly need to figure out whether a 90-inch sofa fits, Planner 5D is the better tool.

If you want to see your actual room with real furniture from a bunch of different stores and decide which combination you like — that's what Roomellow does, and it's the closest replacement to what Modsy used to give people.

The Floyd example: what "real catalog" actually means

A quick concrete: Floyd is a Detroit-based DTC brand known for modular flat-pack furniture. They sell about 165 unique products. Their stuff is well-photographed, modern, and ships nationwide.

In Roomellow, Floyd's full catalog is wired in. If you ask the AI for "mid-century modern living room with modular seating," Floyd's Sink Down sectional is one of the things the system can pull. The rendering shows that exact sectional in your specific living room. Click the sectional in the sidebar, and the link takes you to Floyd's product page where you buy it from Floyd, at Floyd's price.

This isn't unique to Floyd. Same flow works with Joybird's mid-century classics, Maiden Home's custom-built sofas, The Citizenry's hand-knotted rugs, Lulu and Georgia's lighting. Twenty-seven stores' worth of real inventory, designable in one place.

The thing AR apps and 3D planners can't do — see what this Joybird sofa looks like in your living room next to that World Interiors coffee table — is the thing Roomellow was built for.

What's still hard (being honest)

A few things AI design tools, ours included, aren't great at yet:

• Spatial precision. If you need to confirm a sectional will fit between two walls down to the inch, a planner like Planner 5D is still better. Roomellow is for visual decisions, not measurements.
• Furniture you can't find online. The catalog covers stores with public Shopify APIs. If you want pieces from West Elm or Crate & Barrel (custom platforms, no public catalog), those aren't in the system today.
• One-off custom pieces. Roomellow renders what's in the catalog. If you're trying to spec a custom built-in for your living room, an actual interior designer is going to do that better.

For the use case that drove Modsy's popularity — "I want to see my room with furniture I can actually buy" — the gap that opened in 2023 is now closed.

For furniture retailers reading this

A side note for anyone running a Shopify furniture store.

The reason cart abandonment is so high in furniture ecommerce isn't price or shipping — it's purchase confidence. Customers can't picture how a $2,400 sectional will look in their actual living room, so they wait, and most never come back.

Roomellow runs as a layer on top of your existing Shopify catalog. It pulls your products via the public API, lets your customers upload their room photo, and renders the room with your products in it. They buy from your store, at your prices, with your branding.

If you're running a DTC furniture brand and that sounds like a useful addition to your storefront, get in touch. We're adding stores to the catalog regularly and most onboardings take under a day.

Picking your Modsy alternative

If you've gotten this far, here's the short version:

• You want what Modsy gave you — your room, real furniture, instant iteration: Roomellow. Try it free at roomellow.com.
• You want a human designer to drive the whole project: Havenly or Decorilla.
• You're committed to IKEA already: IKEA Kreativ in the IKEA app.
• You want to plan a floor layout precisely before buying anything: Planner 5D.

The category took a year to recover from Modsy shutting down. It's recovered. The version of the tool people actually wanted — fast, real-products, your room — is finally here.

Further reading

• /blog/how-to-visualize-furniture-in-a-room
• /blog/ai-interior-design-tips
• /blog/how-to-redesign-your-room-with-ai