Enormous Buildings vs Paca

Enormous Buildings and Paca are both productivity tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

Enormous Buildings

Upload dimensioned drawings, pick a country and currency, and the engine returns a trade-by-trade, line-item Bill of Quantities with source-cited unit rates — the vendor states typical analysis runs around five minutes. Coverage spans 190+ countries with localised pricing, which means a feasibility number in Harare or Helsinki does not require hunting down a local QS first. The output is exportable to PDF and saved to your account for re-download. The ceiling appears when drawings are undimensioned or when a project requires the kind of specification-level judgement calls — material substitutions, site-condition adjustments — that a human QS would flag in a meeting. At that point teams treat the output as a first-draft baseline, not a submission-ready document.

Paca

Paca is a self-hosted, open-source Scrumban board where AI agents participate in the full sprint cycle alongside humans: planning BDD specs, picking up tasks, running QA verification, and feeding retrospective data into the next sprint. The P·A·C·A loop — Plan, Act, Check, Adapt — mirrors Scrum phases and gives agents structured context through living BDD scenarios and System Design Documents, so they aren't operating blind. An in-app chat converts plain-English instructions into real backlog items without tab-switching. Every change — from agents and humans alike — lands in a diff-based activity feed with one-click revert. The ceiling appears when your workflow departs from Scrum or Scrumban structure; teams running Kanban-only or highly custom processes will find the framework opinionated.

Attribute	Enormous Buildings	Paca
Pricing	Paid	Free
Price	1% of building cost per analysis	—
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	No	Yes
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Web	Linux (Docker), browser-based UI
Pros	Source citation on every unit rate, so a QS or contractor reviewing the output can check individual line items against their own data rather than rejecting the whole document on sight. 190+ country coverage with localised currency and unit rates, which means international feasibility estimates do not require sourcing a regional QS just to get a number into a deck. Upload-to-BoQ in approximately five minutes per the vendor, so a specification change mid-design does not mean a two-week wait before the budget is updated. Trade-by-trade, line-item output grouped to the same structure a QS would use, so the document can move directly into contractor review or tender comparison without reformatting. Flat 1% of building cost pricing with no subscription layer, which means low-volume users and one-off projects are not subsidising a seat they use twice a year.	Agents appear as assigned teammates on the live Scrumban board and post real-time task updates, which means sprint visibility stays in one place instead of split between your board and a separate AI dashboard you have to manually reconcile. BDD scenarios and living System Design Documents anchor every agent's context to how the product actually works, so agents don't generate output that contradicts your existing architecture or acceptance criteria. One-click diff revert on every change — agent or human — means teams can let agents move at full speed without a separate approval bottleneck on every action, and roll back anything that lands wrong without hunting through logs. Self-hosted under Apache 2.0 with no per-seat cost, so data stays on your infrastructure and the tool stays off your SaaS budget regardless of team size. In-app project-level chat converts plain-English instructions directly into backlog items and docs without leaving the board, which means product managers without technical fluency can drive sprint planning alongside agents without a separate tool in the chain.
Cons	The engine requires dimensioned drawings — plans, elevations, or sections with explicit measurements. Sketch layouts, concept drawings, or undimensioned PDFs return no usable quantities, so teams early in schematic design cannot use the tool until drawings reach a minimum level of completeness. Output is a starting-point document, not a submission-ready BoQ. Site-specific conditions — unusual ground, access constraints, specialist subcontractor rates — are not factors the engine can adjust for, so any project where those variables are material requires a QS to rework the figures before the document goes into a tender package. No API access and no self-hosted option means the tool cannot be embedded into an existing estimating or project management workflow; teams that need BoQ generation as a step inside a larger automated pipeline will reach this ceiling immediately and look elsewhere. A single pricing tier structure means teams that need iterative re-runs across multiple specification options — comparing timber frame against masonry for the same footprint, for example — pay the 1% fee each time, which adds up on high-iteration value-engineering exercises and pushes some teams toward manual take-off software with a flat licence cost.	The P·A·C·A cycle is the structural backbone of the product, not an optional configuration — teams running Kanban-only flows, shape-up cycles, or heavily customized processes will find the sprint-phase assumptions surfacing constantly, and adapting the tool to a non-Scrum workflow means working against the grain of how agents are wired into the board. At v0.4.0, the plugin ecosystem and community extension library are early-stage; teams that need a mature integration surface — existing webhooks, third-party CI/CD hooks, or established plugin catalog — will hit gaps that require them to build rather than install, adding engineering overhead before they get to the actual agent work. Any team that needs auditable, manager-approved gates before agent changes affect the board — regulated industries, client-facing projects with contractual deliverable sign-off — will find the current revert-after-the-fact model insufficient; when the compliance requirement is approval before the change lands, not rollback after, teams in that situation will move to a tool with explicit pre-ship review steps built into the workflow.

Bottom line

Enormous Buildings is paid while Paca is free; Paca is open source; only Paca exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Enormous Buildings and Paca?

Enormous Buildings is Paid, while Paca is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Enormous Buildings better than Paca?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.