Alternatives
If you are weighing up MaxCut, here is what the two tools each publish, where they start from, and where our numbers come from.
By Cutlist Evolution ·
MaxCut is Windows software you install. Its own site describes it as "an easy to use tool that creates optimal cutting plans and accurate costings that you can have confidence in", and offers a Community Edition it calls "always free". Cutlist Evolution runs in a browser tab on any machine, with nothing to install and no account needed to start.
That difference decides more than it looks. A desktop install is one machine, one operating system and one person. If the estimator quotes from a laptop and the saw operator works from a shop PC, a browser tool is the same tool in both places, and on a Mac or a Chromebook it is the only one of the two that runs at all.
Free to use, nothing to install
Their site advertises optimal cutting diagrams, job costing with flexible configurations, professional quotations with material summaries, panel labels printed with each component's details, barcode and label printing, mass changes across components, a library of reusable cabinet designs, and supplier order lists.
That is a cabinet shop's workflow, and a strong one. It is worth saying plainly: if your work is cabinetry and you want quoting, costing and a cabinet library in the same program as the optimizer, that is the shape MaxCut is built to.
Two things their site does not publish are import and export file formats, and the pricing of anything above the Community Edition. Not published is not the same as not available, so ask them rather than assuming either way.
Cutlist Evolution is a free browser cutlist optimizer for sheet, linear and roll materials. The free tier allows unlimited calculations of up to 40 parts each, unlimited stock, 3 saved projects and PDF export. Paid plans add trim cuts, edge banding, printable part labels, CSV, SVG, DXF and PTX export, beam saw settings and a material and stock cloud database. A separate true shape nesting optimizer handles irregular contours.
The engine behind it is measured rather than described. Across 2,083 real production jobs it lands on the fewest stock the parts could physically fit into 82% of the time, with a typical result in under two seconds. Head-to-head results against other tools are published in full at smartcut.dev/benchmarks, including the jobs where a competitor ties or wins.
We have not benchmarked MaxCut head to head, so there is no sheet-count comparison between the two on this page. If that is the number you care about, run the same parts list through both and count. That is the test we would want you to apply to us.
Take one real job, not a demo. Put the same parts, the same stock sizes and the same blade kerf through each tool and check three things: how many sheets each plan needs, whether the cutting sequence is one your saw can actually follow, and what comes out at the end that the workshop can hold. A layout that saves a sheet on paper is worth nothing if the cuts cannot be made in that order.
The free tiers make that cheap to do. MaxCut's Community Edition is free to download and Cutlist Evolution needs no download at all, so the comparison costs an afternoon and tells you more than any page written by either of us.
Try it on your own job