Camera Kit vs 8th Wall
which no-install AR fits your campaign?

In short: Camera Kit is the right call when you already want a Snap lens and need it to also live on your own site or app. 8th Wall's hosted platform shut down in February 2026 and is now a self-hosted open source engine, still the right call when the brief has no Snap dependency at all, but it now needs a studio that can self-host it and, if the build needs world tracking, license 8th Wall's SLAM separately.

These solve different problems, not the same one

Every quarter or so, a brief lands with "should we do Camera Kit or 8th Wall" written at the top, as if they were two vendors bidding on the same job. They are not. Camera Kit is a delivery mechanism for a lens that already exists in Snap's ecosystem. 8th Wall is a from-scratch WebAR build platform with no connection to Snap whatsoever. Comparing them head to head only makes sense once you know which starting point your brief actually has.

This guide breaks down what each one actually is, what it costs, who it reaches, and which briefs each one is built to answer. For the broader question of Snap AR versus WebAR versus a native app, our format comparison guide covers that decision at a category level. This article goes one level deeper, inside the WebAR and Snap-adjacent space specifically.

What Snap Camera Kit actually is

Camera Kit is Snap's SDK for running a Lens Studio lens outside the Snapchat app. The lens is built the same way any Snapchat lens is built, in Lens Studio, using Snap's tracking, effects, and rendering pipeline. Camera Kit then lets that same lens run inside a web page or a native iOS/Android app that the brand controls. The tracking quality, the face and world effects, the render fidelity, all of it comes from Snap. What changes is the surface: instead of opening inside Snapchat, the lens opens on your product page, your event microsite, or inside your own app's camera screen.

That matters for one specific reason. A brand can build one lens and get two audiences from it: the organic reach of Snapchat, Snapcodes, Snap Ads, Discover placement, plus an owned-surface version embedded wherever the brand wants it. The visual experience is identical in both places. Nobody visiting the website version needs to have Snapchat installed or logged in.

The trade-off is that Camera Kit does not exist independently of the Snap ecosystem. The lens is still authored in Lens Studio, still bound by what Lens Studio's engine supports, and still requires Snap's runtime to render, even when the visitor never sees the Snapchat app. It is repackaging, not a separate platform.

What happened to 8th Wall in 2026

If your last brief involving 8th Wall predates 2026, the platform you remember does not exist anymore. Niantic, which owned 8th Wall, retired the hosted 8thwall.com platform on February 28, 2026: new account creation and the cloud editor closed that day, and export access ended with it. Projects already hosted there keep running until February 28, 2027, after which every hosted link goes dark and the data is deleted.

In its place, 8th Wall released the engine itself as open source under the MIT licence, now maintained at 8thwall.org. Face tracking, image target tracking, and sky segmentation shipped in that open release, free to self-host. World tracking, the SLAM system that lets an experience anchor to a physical room or a large outdoor space, and hand tracking did not ship open. Both are held back under a separate binary licence you get directly from 8th Wall. That is the detail most "8th Wall is dead" takes miss: it is not dead, it is a self-hosted engine now, and the feature that made it worth choosing over a simpler face-effect tool still exists, just gated behind a licence instead of a monthly plan.

For a brand or agency, this changes the shape of the decision. Briefing "an 8th Wall experience" in 2026 means briefing a self-hosted build with infrastructure, a SLAM licence if the experience needs world tracking, and a studio that has actually rebuilt its pipeline around the open source engine, not a vendor account you sign up for in an afternoon.

What 8th Wall actually is now

8th Wall is a self-hosted, open source WebAR engine for building AR experiences that run entirely in a mobile browser, with no app, no SDK install, and no dependency on any social platform. Experiences are authored using web technologies, typically A-Frame, three.js, or a custom JavaScript stack, then deployed to infrastructure the brand or its studio controls outright, not a vendor's hosted dashboard.

Because there is no Snap layer underneath it, an 8th Wall build starts from a blank canvas every time. There is no existing lens to repurpose and no organic distribution channel built in. Every visitor arrives because something, a QR code, a paid ad, a link in an email, sent them there. What that buys in return is total platform independence: the same experience works the same way whether the visitor found it through Instagram, TikTok, a billboard, or a product box, because none of those channels care what AR engine is running underneath the URL.

8th Wall is also the stronger choice when the tracking need is genuinely custom, image-target product packaging recognition, precise world tracking across a large physical space under a licensed SLAM build, or a multi-scene experience that needs its own UI framework rather than Lens Studio's component model.

Side by side

When Camera Kit is the right call

Camera Kit earns its place when a lens is already in the plan for Snapchat and the brand separately wants that same creative available on its own website or app, without asking anyone to open Snapchat first. A try-on lens for a beauty or fashion brand is the clearest example: build it once in Lens Studio, publish it to Snapchat for organic and paid reach, then embed the identical experience on the product page for shoppers who never open the app at all. One build, two surfaces, no compromise on render quality in either place.

It also fits when the brief specifically wants Snap's tracking and effects quality, which is genuinely strong for face and hand effects, but the brand needs the interaction to happen on a domain it controls, for data ownership or for a retail integration Snapchat itself can't provide.

When 8th Wall is the right call

8th Wall is the better fit when the brief has no reason to touch Snap at all, a museum trail triggered by QR codes at each exhibit, a product package that needs to recognise its own artwork as an image target, or an event activation aimed at an audience where Snapchat penetration is low. It is also the right call whenever the tracking need is custom enough that Lens Studio's toolset doesn't cover it cleanly, large-scale world tracking across a venue, or precise image recognition against branded packaging.

For Chester Zoo, the studio built exactly this kind of experience: a WebAR trail triggered by QR codes at animal enclosures across the site, with no Snapchat or app download involved anywhere in the journey. See the Chester Zoo Luna's Lost Spell case study for how that trail was built and what it needed technically. That same platform-agnostic thinking sits behind the studio's WebAR studio service.

What building on both actually looks like

The studio has shipped inside Snap's ecosystem on campaigns including House of the Dragon, a Snap Map lens that reached hundreds of thousands of users through Snapchat's organic and paid distribution, and 007 First Light, a WebAR experience built for reach across platforms with no app download required. Between those two, the practical difference between "build once, distribute through Snap plus an owned embed" and "build once, distribute anywhere a link can travel" becomes very concrete rather than theoretical. On the self-hosted side, the live demo portal runs world-anchored demos built on 8th Wall's SLAM tracking under the studio's own licence, so you can try world tracking that survived the platform shutdown, not a spec sheet describing it.

Related reading: for the wider decision between social AR, WebAR, and a native app, see social AR vs app AR for brands. For the full landscape of where WebAR fits into a 2026 brand campaign, see the WebAR for brands guide.

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