How the two differ in kind
The two skins are sold beside each other in the same yard and they belong to different structural families. A brick veneer is an anchored veneer: the leaf is a self-supporting wall one unit thick that carries its own weight straight down onto a shelf cast into the foundation or onto a steel angle, and hands nothing but wind pressure sideways through anchors into the backup behind it. Manufactured stone veneer is an adhered veneer: nothing under it carries anything, the bond between mortar and substrate is the entire load path, and that is precisely why the adhered provisions of TMS 402 and the model codes cap how heavy a unit may be, how thick it may be and how large a face it may present. One system stands on the building. The other hangs off it.
Neither of them keeps water out, and pretending otherwise is where most of the damage on both sides comes from. Both are rain screens with an admitted leak rate, and both depend entirely on the assembly behind them to send that water back out. They do it by opposite architectures. Brick drains through a real air space — nominally an inch clear in North American practice, a residual fifty millimetres in front of partial-fill insulation in British practice — onto base flashing and out through weeps, with vents at the head, and the whole path is a void a mason can sweep, a batten can defend and a mirror on a stick can inspect. Manufactured stone has no cavity at all. Its drainage plane is a water-resistive barrier and lath under a scratch coat, discharging at a weep screed, and once the setting bed is bonded over it, that plane is buried. It is not a worse system, but it is a system you only get one attempt at, and one whose failure reports itself from inside the house rather than at a weep hole.
The money behaves differently too, in a way no per-area comparison can show. Brick's cost is a straight function of wall area — unit count follows face dimension plus joint, mason-hours follow unit count — plus one item that has nothing to do with area at all: the support. On a new build with the foundation still on paper, a brick shelf is a detail. On a finished house it is a foundation-scale job, and the size of the wall barely moves it. Manufactured stone splits its cost between area and perimeter: flats price by the field, but every external corner takes purpose-made L-shaped units bought along the running length of the return, and those are the dearest things on the pallet. A long flat gable and a facade full of bays, columns and returns produce very different stone quotes at identical square footage. Before you compare faces, work out whether a ledge exists and how much of this elevation is corner.
The factors that actually differ
| Brick veneer | Manufactured stone veneer | |
|---|---|---|
| What carries the weight | The leaf stands on its own support — a brick shelf, a widened footing or a bolted steel angle — and the anchors resist wind only. The dead load lands on the foundation, and lintels over openings are sized to carry masonry. | Nothing supports it; the mortar bond does. That is why the adhered provisions limit unit weight, thickness and face size, and why an ordinary sheathed stud wall can take it without anything being added below. |
| Putting it on a house that already exists | The hard case. There is no ledge under a finished wall, so it has to be created — engineered steel or new concrete — and the elevation grows a leaf plus an air space that every window return, sill, threshold and eave overhang has to absorb. | The easy case, and the reason the product exists. A sound substrate, a correctly built drainage plane and lath, and the wall takes the veneer without anything happening at the foundation. |
| How the water gets back out | Through an open, ventable, inspectable air space onto flashing and out at the weeps. The failure — a mortar dam sitting on the tray with the weeps buried under it — is preventable on the scaffold and visible afterwards. | Down a barrier behind the lath and out at the weep screed. The path is real but sealed under bonded mortar; you cannot sweep it, look up it or correct it once the scratch coat goes on. |
| Setting out | Everything snaps to the module of face dimension plus joint. Course heights decide sill and head levels, the bond has to run out at every opening, and a dimension off the module is paid for in cut units all the way up. | No module whatever. Units are selected, cut and fitted by eye, and the discipline is blending — pulling from several pallets at once so the repeated moulds do not land twice in the same square of wall. |
| What corners do to the estimate | Brick turns a corner in whole units in bond. A corner costs cuts and a little more care; the estimate stays an area estimate and the perimeter never appears in it. | Every external corner needs manufactured L-units bought by the running length of the return. Corners are a separate, dearer line that scales with perimeter, so bays, columns and jogs move the price without moving the area. |
| Thickness the rest of the wall must absorb | A full wythe with its air space behind pushes the finished face several inches off the sheathing. That has to be designed in from the start — jamb returns, sill projections, roof overhang depth, thresholds — or the house looks like it was clad in the wrong thing. | Adds little more than the stone profile and its setting bed, so it sits happily on a wall detailed for thin cladding — and it wraps columns, soffits, curves and returns that brick cannot turn at all. |
| The bottom of the wall | Fired clay at grade is normal practice; frost and de-icing splash attack the mortar joints before they touch the units, and a joint is repointable. | An absorptive concrete casting that must keep a stated clearance above earth and a smaller one above paving. Running it down into soil, or hard against a deck ledger or a walk, is the single most common way these walls destroy the sheathing behind them. |
| The part that decides service life and can never be seen | The anchors. Right length into real framing, right corrosion class, properly embedded in the bed with mortar cover — invisible the moment the next course closes over them, and the thing that quietly ends an otherwise sound wall. | The barrier, its laps and the lath fixings. Buried under bonded mortar on day one, and when they are wrong the news arrives as rot in the sheathing rather than as anything on the face. |
Which one, and when
Choose brick veneer when…
- New build, with the foundation still a drawing — a brick shelf costs a detail now and a rebuild later.
- Big, plain, full-height elevations with few returns, where brick's estimate stays an area estimate while stone's grows at every corner.
- You want a drained air space you can flash, vent and inspect, and you will pay the thickness it costs.
- The face has to look the same in fifty years as the day it was laid — fired colour does not depend on a pigment surviving the weather.
Choose manufactured stone veneer when…
- The wall is already built and there is no ledge under it. This is the case adhered veneer was invented for.
- A wainscot, a water table band, a chimney breast, columns or a curved form — shapes brick either cannot turn or cannot be supported on.
- Weight is constrained: an upper storey, a light frame, or a structure already sized for cladding rather than masonry.
- The intended look is stone rather than brick, and full-bed natural stone would bring the ledge requirement back with it.
Now run your own numbers
This page holds no prices on purpose — a national average is wrong for almost every real project. Quantify both options with your dimensions and your local quotes.
Frequently asked questions
- Which one is cheaper?
- There is no honest general answer, and the reason is that the two costs are shaped differently rather than sized differently. Brick's cost tracks area almost linearly — units follow face dimension plus joint, hours follow units — and then carries one item that ignores area entirely: the support. If a shelf is already in the foundation, that item is nearly free; if it has to be built under a finished wall, it can dominate the whole job regardless of how much brick you buy. Manufactured stone splits between area and perimeter, because corner units are bought along the running length of every external return and cost far more than the flats they meet. Compare assemblies rather than faces, too: the stone side is buying barrier, lath, scratch coat, setting bed, pointing and a weep screed, while the brick side is buying anchors, flashing, weeps and a cavity. Run both calculators against your own dimensions, then price the assemblies locally.
- Can I put real brick on my existing house?
- Sometimes, but it is a structural project rather than a cladding one, and people usually arrive at manufactured stone by discovering that. The leaf has to stand on something — a widened footing, new concrete, or a steel angle bolted back to the structure and designed by somebody rather than judged on site — and the whole elevation then gains a leaf plus an air space in thickness. Windows sit deeper, sills need to project past the new face, the eave overhang shortens, thresholds and any door swinging outward have to be reconsidered, and the anchors have to reach real framing through whatever is currently on the wall. None of that is impossible. It is simply a different order of work from bonding a veneer to a substrate that is already there.
- Why does manufactured stone have a reputation for water damage?
- Because a large stock of it was installed to an older, thinner standard, and the failures were consistent rather than random. Manufactured stone is a concrete casting set in mortar; both are absorptive, so water reaches the barrier behind by design, and everything depends on that barrier being continuous, correctly lapped, drained and terminated at a weep screed with the required clearance at grade. The documented failures share the same features: no drainage layer behind the lath, the veneer run down into soil or hard against a walk, stone taken behind a deck ledger, and no weep screed at the base. Installed to current practice — ASTM C1780 and the manufacturers' own drainage-plane details — it performs. Installed to lath and one layer of felt, it is the most expensive mistake on this page, because the damage is in the sheathing and the repair is stripping the whole field.
- Does manufactured stone fade?
- It can change, and it changes in a way brick does not. Brick colour is fired into the body of the unit and is effectively permanent; a hundred-year-old brick has weathered, not faded. Manufactured stone is pigmented concrete, with the colour partly integral and partly applied to the surface of the mould, so ultraviolet exposure, efflorescence and de-icing salt all act on it — and the acid wash that is routine for cleaning brick is off the table entirely, because it strips the colour. Product quality varies far more here than it does across brick, so this is a question to put to the specific manufacturer rather than to the category, and it is worth asking what a south elevation of theirs looks like after a decade.
- How does natural stone fit into this comparison?
- It splits into two products that sit on opposite sides of the same line. Thin natural stone veneer is adhered, so it behaves like manufactured stone in every structural respect — with the caveats that it is heavier, so the adhered weight limit actually matters, and that the units are irregular, so waste and fitting time run higher and no corner unit comes pre-made. Full-bed natural stone is an anchored veneer, so it brings back the ledge, the air space and the flashing exactly as brick does. That is the useful way to read this whole page: the real question is not brick or stone, it is anchored or adhered, and once you know which of those your wall can accept, the choice of face is a matter of taste and availability.
- Can the two be used on the same house?
- Very commonly, and it is often the sensible answer — a stone water table or wainscot under brick or siding above, or stone on the chimney and entry with brick across the field. The thing that decides whether it works is the horizontal transition between them, because an anchored system and an adhered system have to terminate their drainage separately: the brick above needs its own flashing and weep line, the stone below needs its cap or sill to shed clear of the face rather than dump onto it, and the two barriers must lap in the right direction. Detail the joint first and choose the materials second, because a transition that dumps the upper wall's runoff into the top of the lower one fails faster than either system would on its own.