I use Blender with Cycles for every architectural render I deliver. Not because 3ds Max is worse (for some studios it's clearly the better tool) but because for a one-person studio selling fixed-price images, Blender gets the same picture out of the door with less overhead. If you're the client, the honest answer to "3ds Max vs Blender" is that you shouldn't be able to tell from the image.
You can tell from other things, though. File exchange, mostly.
Where 3ds Max still wins
I'll start with the case against my own setup, because it's a real one.
The asset ecosystem is built around Max. Most paid furniture and lighting model libraries publish a .max file with Corona or V-Ray materials first, and every other format second, often as an FBX with half the materials missing. A Max artist drags a designer armchair into the scene and it looks finished. I download the same chair and spend ten to fifteen minutes rebuilding its fabric and its metal legs.
Scattering is the second point. Forest Pack and RailClone have been the standard for vegetation and repeating facade elements for well over a decade, and for a masterplan with 50,000 trees and 300 balconies they're still ahead. Blender's Geometry Nodes can do it. It takes more setup.
Third is hiring. A studio with ten artists needs everybody on one pipeline, and 3ds Max with Corona or V-Ray is what most job adverts in architectural visualisation still ask for. That's a perfectly good reason to choose it, and it has nothing to do with image quality.
And I'll admit one more: Corona's defaults flatter interiors. You get a pleasing, soft image from the first test render with almost no tuning, where Cycles makes you earn it with exposure, light portals in older versions, and careful tone mapping.
Where Blender earns its place
Cost comes first. Blender is free. A 3ds Max subscription runs to roughly two thousand euros a year at list price, before the render engine and before plugins. For a big studio that's noise. For a small one it ends up inside the per-image price, and it's part of why I can publish architectural rendering prices that start at EUR 250 per interior camera angle and EUR 450 per exterior.
Speed is close enough not to matter. A 4,000 px interior typically renders in 25 to 50 minutes on my workstation's GPU with denoising, and an exterior with heavy planting takes longer. Nobody's deadline has ever depended on that half hour. Modelling and revisions are where the days go, which I've broken down in how long a render really takes.
Modelling is where I think Blender is plainly good. Most of my interior rendering work is custom joinery: kitchens, wardrobes, wall panelling, built to the millimetre from the designer's drawings. That's fast in Blender, and because nothing is a locked library asset, changing a 600 mm cabinet to 450 mm in revision round two takes a minute.
For a single house with a garden, Geometry Nodes scatters grass, shrubs and trees without complaint. The modern cabin exterior study has a forest behind it, all instanced, and it rendered on one graphics card.
Imports are fine too. SketchUp models, Revit exports through FBX or IFC, DWG plans via DXF: they all come in. I've written up what survives the trip for Revit models and for SketchUp files.
The part clients feel: file exchange
Here's where the software choice stops being invisible.
Last year an architect in London sent me a finished .max scene with Corona materials and asked for two extra camera angles. I can't open a .max file. Nobody outside 3ds Max can, since the format is closed. He exported an FBX, which took him about ten minutes, and the geometry arrived intact with the cameras in place. Every material arrived as flat default grey. I rebuilt 31 of them in roughly half a day.
Was that a sensible use of his budget? Not really, and I told him so. If a scene is already built and lit in Max and you only need more angles from it, a Max artist will be quicker and cheaper than I am. I'd rather lose that job than charge for rework that software compatibility created.
For anything starting from drawings or from a bare model, it makes no difference at all. What crosses between programs reliably is geometry, object names, UV mapping and (mostly) cameras, though I always check focal length and sensor size. What doesn't cross: materials, lights, render settings and anything made by a scatter plugin. Forest Pack objects either arrive as nothing or, if they were collapsed to mesh first, as several million polygons of hedge.
The reverse direction matters as well. If your in-house team works in Max and needs the scene back afterwards, tell me before I start. I can hand over an FBX with textures. I can't hand over a native Max scene with working Corona materials, and I won't pretend an FBX is the same thing.
Most clients only ever need the images.
Does the software change the image?
There's a persistent myth that V-Ray or Corona "looks more real" than Cycles. All three are path tracers solving the same light transport problem, and given the same scene, materials and tone mapping they produce images you'd struggle to tell apart. The differences people notice come from defaults and from the person driving.
What makes an interior believable is dull stuff. A door that's 2,100 mm high and a worktop at 900 mm, so furniture doesn't look like it's from a doll's house. A 1 to 2 mm bevel on every edge, because nothing in a real room has a razor-sharp corner. Surfaces with slight variation in roughness. Light that comes through the actual window openings at a plausible colour temperature, around 5,500 K for daylight and 2,700 to 3,000 K for lamps.
None of that is a feature of any program.
The marble in the spa bathroom study is a good example. It reads as stone because of the veining scale and the way the polish breaks up near the edges, and I'd have had to make the same decisions in any renderer. Have a look through the portfolio at full size and judge the work that way.
What I'd pick in your position
It depends which position that is.
If you're buying renders, don't choose by software. Look at the visualiser's images at full resolution, read the revision terms (mine include two consolidated rounds), and ask how quickly you'll see something. My target is a first preview within 3 business days of a complete brief. Then ask one practical question: what format do you need from me? If the answer is PDF plans, DWG, SketchUp or Revit, you're fine with anyone competent.
If you're an architect choosing a tool for the office, be honest about hiring. A practice already inside the Autodesk world that plans to employ visualisers should probably go with Max, because that's who is on the job market. A small practice that wants quick in-house visuals with no licence bill should try Blender, and should expect two or three months before the results stop being embarrassing. That learning curve is the same in either program, by the way.
If you're a student or a freelancer starting out, I'd pick Blender unless your goal is a seat in a large studio.
And if you just need a house or a room visualised, send me the drawings in whatever format they exist. I'll reply with a non-binding quote based on the published price list, and you can use the quote form to attach a short description of the views you have in mind. For houses and facades, the exterior rendering page lists what I need to start.