Cutlistor vs Cutlist Evolution

If you occasionally run one very large job - a full kitchen in a single nest, several hundred parts at once - Cutlist Evolution's part-tiered pricing lets you buy exactly that capacity, including single-day access for a one-off project. That is a genuinely good fit for a specific and common situation.

If you run many normal-sized jobs continuously and need them saved, costed, exported to a CNC and pulled in from spreadsheets or CAD, Cutlistor's capability-based pricing works out simpler and you stop thinking about part counts entirely.

Cutlist Evolution runs six levels - Free, Starter, Pro, Expert, Enterprise and Custom - separated primarily by the number of parts a single optimization can contain: 40 parts free, then 150, 300, 1,000 and 2,000. Stock quantity is unlimited on every tier, and organisation subscriptions cover everyone in a team automatically.

Cutlistor does not meter parts on paid plans at all. Pro at $12 per month gives unlimited calculations and unlimited cut list rows; what it caps instead is storage and AI usage. Cutlistor's free tier meters something different: editing parts and re-optimizing the layout are unlimited, and only PDF export and starting a new project count against a daily allowance of 3. Cut lists are capped at 20 rows, CSV and XLSX import is limited to 5 rows per file, and nothing is saved between sessions.

Neither model is objectively better. Part-tiered pricing is cheaper if your constraint is one big annual job; capability pricing is cheaper if your constraint is doing many jobs well.

Both tools go beyond flat panels, which distinguishes them from most browser optimizers.

Cutlist Evolution handles sheet, linear and roll material - roll being the notable one, for fabric, vinyl, membrane and other continuous goods. Cutlistor covers sheet and linear, including cross-section aware linear cutting for pipe, tube, bar and angle stock, but does not do roll material.

If you cut from rolls, that is a clear reason to choose Cutlist Evolution and this comparison ends there.

Cutlistor's design assumes parts arrive from somewhere else and results go somewhere else. Spreadsheets import as CSV or XLSX, PDF plans and hand sketches come in through AI scanning, and 3D models import as glTF, GLB or Collada meshes that become panels. Layouts leave as kerf-aware PDFs or as DXF for a CNC.

It also keeps a persistent stock inventory, so the offcuts and part-sheets from last week's job are still there as available stock this week - which for a working shop is often worth more than any solver difference.

Cutlistor recalculates as you type. Change a part width, add a sheet, adjust the kerf - the layout redraws immediately. There is no Calculate button in the interface, because there is nothing to wait for.

That sounds cosmetic until you price a real job. Cut lists are not entered once; they are edited twenty times as a design settles. A tool that recalculates on demand charges you a click and a pause for every one of those edits, and the cost lands precisely when you are iterating hardest.

It is also worth noting what Cutlistor does not do: charge for calculation speed. Every plan, including the free tier, runs the same solver at the same speed. Some competitors reserve faster calculation for a higher tier - so the customer who edits most, and therefore waits most, is the one asked to pay extra to stop waiting.

Typing a cut list by hand is where the time actually goes, and it is where almost every optimizer leaves you. Cutlistor accepts parts from four directions:

You do not have to guess the format. Download a sample below, replace the rows with your own parts, and import it - sheet files take name, length, width, qty, grain direction, material code, material name and a free-text column; linear files take name, length, qty, material code, material name and a free-text column. Column matching handles the common variations, so headings like “Width (mm)” or “Quantity” are recognised without renaming.

Most optimizers stop at rectangles and lengths. Real work has awkward parts, and these are the ones that usually get handled by hand on a notepad:

Three things, stated plainly.

Roll material support, which Cutlistor simply does not have. Single-day access, which is the honest right answer for someone with one project and no interest in a subscription. And a free tier that allows 40 parts in one nest against Cutlistor's 20 - if you are evaluating on the free tier with a medium-sized job, Cutlist Evolution will let you run it and Cutlistor will not.

Its organisation subscription model, where members inherit the organisation's plan automatically, is also cleaner than seat-counting for shops with fluctuating headcount.

Count the parts in a typical job first - not your largest job, your typical one. That number tells you immediately whether Cutlist Evolution's tiers cost you anything, because if you sit comfortably inside a tier the part limit is invisible.

Then ask where your parts come from and where the cut plan goes. If both ends are manual, the tools are close. If either end is a spreadsheet, a CAD model or a CNC, the import and export paths matter more than the nesting.

Cutlistor is small enough that feature requests reach the person who writes the code. Several of the features above - laminate handling, miter-aware linear cuts, cross-section stock - exist because someone cutting material asked for them and explained why the workaround was costing them time.

If your workflow needs something that is not here, describe it and we will look at building it. That is a genuinely different proposition from filing a ticket against a twenty-year-old desktop product or a tool maintained as a side project, and it is worth weighing alongside a feature table.