They are not the same category of product
A coat of exterior paint on render is somewhere around 0.1mm thick when dry. It is a film sitting on the surface.
A texture coating is typically 1mm to 3mm thick depending on grade, it contains graded aggregate, and it is tinted through the material rather than applied as a colour film. It has body.
That difference in thickness is roughly a factor of twenty, and almost everything else follows from it.
How long each one lasts in Sydney
Quality exterior paint on render in Sydney conditions typically wants redoing every seven to ten years. Sooner on north and west facing walls that take the full UV load, sooner again near the coast.
A quality texture coating is generally a twenty to twenty five year proposition, and colour through acrylic systems can go longer still because there is no film to fail and no separate colour layer to fade off unevenly.
Run that over twenty years. Paint means two to three full repaints, each one carrying its own preparation, access and labour. Texture means one application. Even though texture costs more on day one, the twenty year total is usually lower, and you have had scaffolding up on your house once instead of three times.
The thing texture does that paint cannot
Paint is a thin film that follows the surface exactly. Every ripple, every trowel mark, every slight variation in the render underneath is still there afterwards, and gloss level tends to exaggerate it.
Texture has enough body to even a wall out. Minor substrate imperfections disappear into the grain. On an older wall, or one where the render is sound but not perfectly flat, this is a substantial practical advantage.
It cuts the other way too. If your base render is genuinely flat and true and you want a sharp contemporary look, a fine texture or a good paint finish will both show that off, and a coarse texture will hide the quality of the work underneath.
When paint is the right answer
Paint is not the wrong choice. There are situations where it is clearly better.
- You want to change colour relatively often, or you are preparing a property for sale on a short timeframe
- The budget genuinely does not stretch, and a repaint now beats a texture coat in three years
- The existing surface is already texture coated and sound, in which case painting over it is straightforward
- You want a specific colour or sheen level that texture systems do not offer
- The wall is protected, such as under a deep verandah, where UV exposure is low and paint will last much longer than the typical figure
When texture is clearly worth it
Full exterior walls with real sun exposure, coastal properties, any wall where the render underneath is sound but not perfectly flat, and any situation where you would rather not have painters back in a decade.
Front fences are a particularly good case, because they take weather on both faces and the top, and getting access to repaint them repeatedly is a nuisance.
It is also worth saying that texture coating is what most people are actually picturing when they imagine a rendered house. That subtle grain catching the light is the texture coat, not the render underneath.
Getting the colour right either way
Whichever you choose, do not pick from a small card. Colours read dramatically brighter across a whole wall in full sun than they do on a swatch under indoor light, and this catches people out constantly.
Get sample patches applied to the actual wall, at least A4 sized, and look at them in morning light, midday and late afternoon before deciding. A renderer who offers to do this is doing you a genuine favour.
And think about heat. Deep charcoals and near blacks look superb and they push surface temperatures on a west facing wall very high. If you want dark, use a flexible acrylic system that can handle the thermal cycling rather than a rigid one that will craze.