Cutlistor vs MaxCut

MaxCut if your bottleneck is quoting: client quotations, cost versus selling price, labour inputs and a reusable library of standard cabinet configurations.

Cutlistor if your bottleneck is getting from a design to a cut plan: spreadsheet, PDF and 3D CAD import, linear cutting alongside sheet, DXF to a CNC, and access from any device without a per-device licence.

MaxCut's Community Edition is free with no time limit and no card required, which is unusually generous for desktop software. The Business Edition is USD $20 per month or $200 per year, licensed per device.

Cutlistor's Pro plan is $12 per month or $99 per year, licensed to a user account rather than a device.

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.

The per-device detail matters more than the monthly difference. Two machines on MaxCut Business is $400 per year; two people using Cutlistor from wherever they happen to be is still one subscription.

That sentence is the whole comparison, and it explains why both can be right.

MaxCut Business adds professional client quotations, cost versus selling price comparison, labour cost inputs, an unlimited library of reusable cabinet configurations, batch reporting and job item labelling. For a cabinet shop whose day ends with sending a customer a price, that is a large amount of directly useful machinery.

Cutlistor has none of that. What it has instead is the path from someone else's file into a cut plan: CSV and XLSX import, AI scanning of PDF plans and sketches, 3D mesh import from glTF, GLB and Collada, plus DXF export for CNC and a persistent stock inventory across jobs.

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:

The costing and quoting stack, unambiguously. If you need to tell a customer what a kitchen costs and what it will sell for, MaxCut has built that and Cutlistor has not. Assembling it yourself in a spreadsheet is a real ongoing cost that belongs in the comparison.

The Community Edition is also a genuinely strong free offer - core optimization, no time limit, no card - and it is more capable than most free tiers in this category.

And it is purpose-built for cabinet makers rather than general-purpose, so its defaults, terminology and reports already match how a joinery shop thinks.

These two overlap less than most pairs in this category, and some shops genuinely run both: MaxCut for quoting a job and tracking its cost, Cutlistor for pulling parts out of a designer's model and sending DXF to the machine.

That is not a cop-out recommendation. It costs roughly the price of one mid-range subscription to cover both ends properly, and it beats forcing one tool to do a job it was not built for.

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.