Ivy vs Mydoma for Design Studios

Ivy and Mydoma are the two names that come up whenever a studio owner searches for a proper interior-design business-management tool, the kind that runs sourcing, invoicing and the client relationship rather than just the pretty boards. There's a wrinkle worth knowing up front, right, because Ivy was acquired by Houzz and now largely lives inside Houzz Pro, so when people say "Ivy" today they often mean the sourcing-and-billing DNA that Houzz Pro inherited. Mydoma has stayed independent and focused. So this comparison is really about two flavours of the same idea, a business hub for a design studio, and then the harder question of whether either flavour actually works once you drop it into an Indian studio's tax and procurement reality.

Let me compare them the way an owner lives them, and be honest about the gap both leave open.

Both are business hubs, with different centres of gravity

Ivy made its name on product sourcing and the money that flows through it. Its strength was pulling products in, tracking them on a project, and handling the invoicing and markups, so it felt like a tool built by people who understood that a big chunk of a studio's margin comes from what it procures, not just the design fee. Mydoma grew up around workflow and client experience, so its heart is onboarding, project stages, tasks and a tidy client portal, and billing sits alongside rather than at the centre.

So the honest split is this: if procurement and the margin on supplied product is where your studio makes and loses money, the Ivy lineage speaks your language. If your pain is that projects feel chaotic and clients feel out of the loop, Mydoma's disciplined workflow is the better fit. The catch, and it's the whole reason this post exists, is that both were built for a US procurement and tax world, so the interior design business logic is right but the compliance plumbing underneath it is foreign.

Feature by feature, plainly

Here's how they line up on what studios actually assess, with the column that decides it for an Indian owner.

The pattern is the same one I keep running into, right. The design-business logic is genuinely good in both, and then the moment you need an Indian tax invoice, an Indian payment rail or an Indian accountant's ledger, both point you somewhere else. That "somewhere else" is where your month-end goes to die.

Procurement is where the real money hides

Since Ivy's strength is sourcing, let me stay on procurement, because it's the part of a studio that quietly leaks the most. Procurement is a chain: spec approved, then quote, then a purchase order to the vendor, then goods received, then the vendor's invoice. If any link lives in someone's head or a WhatsApp thread, that's where margin escapes, a PO raised at the wrong rate, a delivery that slipped past handover, a vendor billing above the agreed quote with nobody cross-checking. I broke this whole chain down in how to run procurement from PO to delivery without chaos, because it's the single most under-managed part of most studios.

Ivy and Mydoma both help you track product, but neither ties that procurement chain to a compliant Indian quote and GST invoice inside one workspace. So even when the sourcing is clean, the PO rate and the client quote and the final tax invoice live in different systems, and reconciling them is manual. The point of keeping specs, approvals, procurement and billing together is that the leaks have nowhere to hide, which is exactly why I argue that one connected system beats five disconnected tools.

The GST invoice gap, and the seat trap

The billing story is the familiar one. Both produce invoices built for US tax, so they don't do a HSN or SAC line, they don't split tax into CGST and SGST for an intra-state supply or flip to IGST across state lines, and they don't hand your CA a clean GST document. That means re-entry into Tally, which I keep flagging because double entry is where errors breed. If you want the clean version of the flow, I wrote how to turn a quote into a GST invoice in minutes.

And both price per seat in dollars, so growth is penalised, every new hire raises the bill in a currency you don't earn, and giving clients portal access can feel like it costs you. Designa flips both problems: one flat founding price for the whole studio, billed in rupees, no per-seat maths, no forex markup, and unlimited free client logins so the portal is something you use freely on every project.

So which one fits you?

Choose the Ivy lineage inside Houzz Pro if product sourcing and the margin on supplied goods is the beating heart of your studio and you have Indian compliance handled separately. Choose Mydoma if your bottleneck is workflow and client experience and you want a focused, independent tool. But if you read the procurement section and thought "yes, that's exactly where my money leaks, and no, I don't want the tax invoice living in a different app", then a connected, rupee-native workspace is the shape you're actually reaching for.

Before you decide, it helps to see how generic tools stack up too, so read ClickUp vs monday.com for design studios and how spec-and-presentation tools compare in Zygn vs DesignFiles for design studios. For the full picture there's the best software for interior designers in India guide, and a direct look at a work OS in Designa vs monday.com. As you scale, staying close to the Council of Architecture and the Institute of Indian Interior Designers keeps your practice credible in the eyes of the clients you want.

The fastest way to judge any of this is to click through it. The live demo at demo.designa.work lets you follow a spec into a purchase order, into a GST invoice with a Razorpay link, and if it fits your studio the founding offer is one flat rupee price for the whole team at go.designa.work.