There’s a handy tutorial window that helps you navigate your way around this software so that you’ll be able to get to grips with it fairly quickly. With easy-to-use tools and simple navigation, this software also has a good library of plants, branded items, and it benefits from good drawing tools. Virtual Architect Ultimate Home Design helps you visualize what your outdoor space could look like. Best landscape design software for visualization But SketchUp Shop is likely to be the best fit for home users – it's affordable, and intended for non-commercial projects. More expensive subscription tiers unlock extras such as real-time shadows to reflect the season and time of day, photorealistic rendering, fly-overs, walkthroughs and even virtual reality (VR) integration. Even the basic free package provides a suite of landscape-building tools, a palette of useful garden textures, and access to a vast online repository of pre-built models for free in the online 3D Warehouse. SketchUp offers almost endless potential for modelling your perfect landscape design. To take things to the next level, a subscription to SketchUp Shop is $119 per year, putting it in a similar ballpark to the other pro-standard landscape design tools in our guide – Realtime Landscaping Pro and TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro.

SketchUp is also available as a free, web-based 3D modelling tool to help visualize your landscape design ideas. Indeed, the most advanced version, SketchUp Studio, costs an eye-watering $1,199 per year.īut don't be put off by the maximum price-tag. Best landscape design software for professionalsįavored by professional landscape designers and architects, you'd think that SketchUp would be far out of the reach of the average home user. Be warned, however: the Mac version of TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro is substantially more expensive. You can also drag and drop into zone-specific groupings.Īnother reason to swing your decision away from Realtime Landscaping Pro is if you're a Mac user, as our top pick is PC-only. TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro is particularly effective for designing custom decking for your garden, with a range of easily customized template designs, as well as the IntelliDeck tool, which follows the contours of your house as you draw.Īdditional useful time-savers include the Visual Array tool, which makes complex planting schemes easily by aligning plants to a pre-determined path, with custom spacing. While it has a substantially smaller object library than Realtime Landscaping Pro – including around 2,000 fewer plants to choose from – the fact that TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro also enables you to design the inside of your home may be a factor that swings it in your favor. At just under $100 it's in the same price bracket as our overall top pick Realtime Landscaping Pro, which makes direct comparison inevitable. TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro is an easy-to-learn yet feature-rich tool that includes both landscape design and home design functionality. Best landscape design software for custom decking This impressive feature set makes Realtime Landscaping Pro hard to beat among landscape design tools – especially for less than $100 – which is why it's our overall pick for best landscape design software on the market right now. Once your design is complete, you can view it in 3D from the perspective of your choice, or activate the immersive walkthrough mode – complete with realistic lighting, shadows, running water and even moving leaves – to help you visualize how your finished garden will feel. Then plan your garden using the extensive library of 5,700 realistic plants, and thousands more garden accessories – many of which are replicas of real-world brands available for purchase. Realtime Landscaping Pro is a premium-quality landscape design tool that's powerful enough for professional designers to use, but accessible and intuitive enough for homeowners to get to grips with too.ĭesign an accurate model of the exterior of your house, and sculpt the surrounding land to match your own backyard using the built-in topography builder.

Free online landscape design app