Sheer vs light filtering curtains

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• You want the window softened but the room to stay as bright as it is.
• The view matters and you would rather haze it than lose it.
• You are layering — sheers by day, heavier panels at night.
• The window is decorative and the covering is mostly about how the room looks.
• The room is north-facing and already short of light, where anything more substantial would make it gloomy.

• You want daytime privacy without a second layer.
• The glare is strong enough that softening it is not enough — you need it gone.
• It is a single-layer window and you want one product to do the job.
• You are covering a bathroom or a ground-floor room where being seen matters.
• You want the room comfortable in the afternoon rather than bright at any cost.

Sheers are cheaper per panel, and you need more of them — proper fullness for a sheer is 2.5 to 3 times the window width, against 2 to 2.5 for anything heavier. Those two facts roughly cancel out, so budget similarly for either.

Where the cost genuinely diverges is the layered setup. Sheers plus heavier panels means a double rod or two rods, more brackets, and twice the fabric — but it also gives you a window that works properly at every hour of the day, which a single layer never quite does. If you can only do one thing now, light filtering on its own gets you further; if you are building up over time, start with sheers and add.