Decato vs Fohlio across the specification handover
Fohlio is explicit that it does not source products — it gives you a clipper, an AI spec-book importer and manual entry, then runs everything downstream: purchase orders, budgets, supplier quotes, shipment tracking. Decato is the upstream half. It decides what the products are, from a floor plan.
Decato
Nothing here was clipped from a vendor site — it was matched to the plan and measured against it.
An FF&E specification and procurement platform covering design through installation, aimed at firms working across hospitality, retail chains, healthcare, senior living and education. Products arrive by web clipper, AI extraction from PDFs and URLs, manual entry or Pinterest, and everything after that is managed.
The step before any of that. Decato reads a floor plan, matches real in-stock products to the rooms within a budget, drops what will not physically fit, and hands back each item with its dimensions, supplier, price and a link.
If your problem is hundreds of line items across several sites, with quotes, purchase orders and shipments to reconcile, that is precisely what Fohlio is for and Decato would be useless at it. If the problem is deciding what those line items should be, Fohlio says outright that it leaves that to you.
What each one does
Decides what to specify
Fohlio states it does not source products
Reads a floor plan
Checks a piece physically fits
Imports existing spec books and PDFs
Purchase orders and quotes
Shipment tracking and reconciliation
Budget analytics across projects
Works at multi-site programme scale
Useful for a single room
Built for far larger programmes
Published pricing
Fohlio publishes none
Neither tool wins everywhere
Fohlio does things Decato cannot do at all. Knowing exactly where the line falls is more useful than being told one tool is better.
- Decides the specification instead of managing one you assembled by hand
- The plan is part of the answer, so a piece that will not fit never becomes a line item
- Dimensions and prices are read off the product rather than extracted from a page
- Small and cheap enough for a single room, where a procurement platform is overkill
- Procurement Decato does not touch: purchase orders, quotes, shipments, reconciliation
- AI extraction from spec books and PDFs, turning existing documents into structured data
- Budget analytics and historical purchasing data to inform supplier negotiation
- Built for multi-site programmes — hospitality and retail chains — far past one room
If you move across
Nothing to switch: Fohlio manages what Decato produces. The only question is whether the rows arriving in it were decided by a person clipping pages or by a tool reading the plan.
- The specification rows: item, room, quantity, dimensions, supplier, price and link
- The floor plan and its measurements, which Fohlio has no field for
- A budget, tracked by Decato while sourcing and by Fohlio across the programme
- Purchase orders, quotes, shipments or reconciliation — Decato has none of it
- Spec books and PDF libraries: Decato cannot import them and Fohlio is built to
- Multi-site programme management, which is outside Decato entirely
Compare Decato against the next closest workflow.
If this page is close but not exact, use the routes below to compare Decato against staging-first, retail-first and render-first alternatives with the same decision lens.
Decato vs REimagineHome
Both source real furniture. REimagineHome fits it to a photo; Decato fits it to a dimensioned plan.
Staging-firstDecato vs Virtual Staging AI
Staging sells the photo. Decato specifies the room — real products, measured fit, a priced spec.
Service-outputDecato vs BoxBrownie
BoxBrownie sells edited images per job. Decato sources a room into a priced specification.
Retail-workflowDecato vs Wayfair
Wayfair plans your room and fills its own cart. Decato checks the fit and hands over a spec.
Most comparison tools judge the screenshot. Designers still have to deliver the room.
Decato is optimized for the step after concept approval: matching real products, checking fit, keeping the room inside budget and turning the output into a defendable package instead of a render to reverse-engineer.
Common questions
Does Fohlio source products?
No, and it says so plainly: products arrive through the Web Clipper, AI extraction from a PDF or URL, manual entry or Pinterest (Checked August 2026). That is a reasonable design for a procurement platform — it manages the data once you have decided. Deciding is what Decato does.
Is Decato a Fohlio alternative?
Not in any useful sense. Fohlio runs purchase orders, supplier quotes, shipment tracking and budget analytics across multi-site programmes, and Decato has none of that. They meet at exactly one point: the moment a specification exists and has to be managed.
What does Fohlio cost?
It publishes no pricing on its site, so we will not quote a figure (Checked August 2026). For comparison, Decato is a free Mac download with paid plans from $20 a month that raise sourcing and render volume rather than unlocking features.
We are furnishing a hotel. Which one?
Fohlio, without much doubt — that scale is what it exists for, and reconciling shipments across sites is not something Decato could help with. Decato might still earn its place on the room-type prototypes, where the question is what goes in a room rather than how to buy four hundred of them.
Can the two be connected?
Not directly today. Decato exports a specification as a PDF whose rows open the supplier page they came from, so the items can be re-keyed or clipped into Fohlio. There is no integration between them, and neither vendor advertises one.