Nouva vs Lookastic: Browsing Outfits or Wearing Yours?

September 8, 2026 | Comparisons

Lookastic has been one of the largest outfit-inspiration archives on the web for years: hundreds of thousands of curated looks, sorted by garment, season and occasion, each one shoppable. More recently it has added an AI stylist that works from a wardrobe you build yourself. Nouva has never had an archive at all. It only ever looks at the clothes you photographed and tells you what to do with them.

That single structural difference — a public library of other people's outfits versus a private read of your own wardrobe — decides almost everything else about how the two feel to use, and which one is actually going to change what you wear on a Tuesday.

At a Glance

	Lookastic	Nouva
Where it runs	The web	iOS and Android apps
Core asset	A large archive of curated, shoppable outfits	Your own photographed wardrobe
Free tier	Up to 12 wardrobe items, plus the public outfit archive	20 items, 3 AI outfits, 3 Style Checks and 3 Stylist sessions a week
Paid tier	Removes the 12-item cap; price shown at sign-up	Plus, $9.99/month or $24.99 every 3 months
How outfits are suggested	Matched against its outfit database, gaps filled from partner retailers	Generated from your closet and scored for colour harmony
Shopping	Central to the model — most looks are shoppable	Shop Scan advises whether to buy, before you do
Best for	Browsing ideas and finding pieces to buy	Deciding what to wear from what you already own

The Twelve-Item Line

Start with the number that will decide this for a lot of people. Lookastic's free plan lets you add up to twelve pieces of clothing to your wardrobe. Twelve is enough to test the idea and not enough to represent a real wardrobe — most people own that many tops alone. Beyond it, the paid tier removes the cap entirely and gives you an unlimited wardrobe along with more daily inspiration.

Lookastic does not publish that subscription price anywhere we could read it from outside the product, so we're not going to invent a figure — check the price on the upgrade screen before you spend an evening uploading. What we can say is that the free tier's ceiling sits far below the point where a wardrobe app becomes useful for daily dressing, which is deliberate: the free product is the archive, and the wardrobe is the upsell.

Nouva's free ceiling is twenty items, which is higher but the same kind of ceiling, and its paid tier does not remove the cap — it raises it to fifty and then to 150 by your third month, and 150 is the end of the road. If your wardrobe is genuinely large and you want every piece in an app, neither of these is your answer, and our wardrobe app roundup covers the uncapped options.

Where the Outfits Come From

This is the real difference, and it is not a small one.

Lookastic's suggestions are grounded in its archive. Its own description of the feature is that the AI reads your items — colours, styles, fits — and then suggests wearable outfits drawn from a database it puts at around 100,000 looks. When it finds a gap in a combination, it fills it with a complementary piece from a partner retailer that you can go and buy. That is a powerful trick when it lands: you are effectively being matched to an outfit that a human already built and photographed, rather than to a machine's guess.

It also means the outfit you are shown is not necessarily an outfit you can wear tonight. Some of it is in your wardrobe; some of it is in a shop. For inspiration, that is a feature — this is how fashion editorial has always worked. For a Tuesday morning, it is a small disappointment repeated daily.

Nouva's outfit generator has no archive to lean on and doesn't try to have one. It builds combinations only from the pieces you actually photographed, and scores each one for how well the colours and pieces work together — colour harmony in the sense a stylist means it. Every outfit it shows you is, by construction, wearable right now, because every item in it is hanging in your wardrobe. What you give up is breadth: Nouva will never show you a look you couldn't already assemble, which is exactly the point and also exactly the limitation.

There's a middle case both apps handle differently. If you already know you want to wear a particular jacket, Lookastic will show you archive looks built around that kind of jacket. Nouva's Studio pins your actual jacket and finds what completes it from the rest of your closet. One answers "how do people wear this," the other answers "what do I wear with this."

Web vs Phone

Lookastic's stylist lives on the web. Its developer account publishes several other apps on the App Store — a colour tool, a sneaker sizing app, a couple of unrelated utilities — but the wardrobe stylist itself is not among them, so on a phone you are using it in a browser rather than an app.

For browsing, the web is arguably better: bigger images, easier to open six looks in tabs, comfortable on a laptop in the evening. For getting dressed, it is worse in a specific and unglamorous way — you are least likely to open a browser tab at the exact moment you most need the answer, which is standing in front of your wardrobe half-dressed. Nouva is a phone app for that reason, and Style Check exists for the same reason: you photograph the outfit you have already put on and get a read on it before you leave.

If the honest answer is that you'll use this on a laptop while thinking about clothes rather than while wearing them, Lookastic is better suited to that and the point stands in its favour.

Shopping, and Who Pays

Lookastic's archive is shoppable by design; that's the engine of the business, and it is why so much of the site is free. If part of what you want from a style app is a route to buying the thing you just admired, this is a strength rather than a caveat — the suggestions and the shop are the same surface.

Nouva earns from subscriptions instead, and its most opinionated feature runs in the opposite direction: Shop Scan looks at a piece you're considering and tells you whether it earns a place next to what you already own, which is frequently a no. Our guide to finding clothes that actually suit you is built on the same premise — that the expensive mistake isn't failing to find something, it's buying the wrong thing confidently.

Neither model is dishonest. But an app funded by purchases and an app funded by subscriptions will, over months, nudge you in different directions, and it's worth choosing the direction on purpose.

Who Each Is For

Choose Lookastic if you want ideas more than verdicts. The archive is genuinely large, the looks are real rather than generated, and browsing it by garment — every way people wear a particular kind of trouser, say — is a better cure for a style rut than any algorithm we've used. If you're building taste rather than solving a morning, this is the better product, and most of it costs nothing.

Choose Nouva if you already have plenty of clothes and no idea what to do with them at 7:40 in the morning. Everything it shows you is wearable today, the colour question gets answered explicitly instead of implied, and Style Check gives you a second opinion on the outfit you're already standing in. Our roundup of outfit ideas using clothes you already own is the manual version of the same idea, if you'd rather try the principle before installing anything.

Using both is genuinely sensible here, more than in most of these comparisons, because they barely overlap: Lookastic in the evening for ideas, Nouva in the morning for the decision. The usual objection — photographing your wardrobe twice — mostly doesn't apply, because Lookastic's free tier only asks for twelve items anyway.

The Verdict

Lookastic is the better place to look at clothes. Years of curated, shoppable outfits, organised the way you'd actually search them, free to browse, and now with a stylist layered on top. If you want inspiration, or you're shopping, it wins and it isn't close.

Nouva is the better place to get dressed. It knows less about fashion in general and everything about your wardrobe in particular, it runs where you need it — on the phone in your hand — and it will tell you the outfit doesn't work rather than showing you a nicer one you can't wear.

Inspiration or decision. They're different jobs, and these two apps are unusually clear about which one each has taken.

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Want outfits you can actually wear tonight? Try Nouva free — colour-scored looks from the clothes already in your wardrobe.