Five apps that can help you arrange your new home

The best apps are those that save you a significant amount of time or genuinely fire up your imagination. Room planners make a strong claim to do both. These tools are able to give you 2D or 3D visualizations of your new home quickly and easily, letting you dream about the sort of spaces you want to create while also making sure you don’t waste hours on furniture arrangements that don’t work.

If you’re already on the way to moving to a new home, or just thinking about it, these apps can help. They’re all different in terms of the exact features and customizations they offer, so you can pick something that suits the amount of time and learning you want to invest — from quick 2D floor plans done in minutes, to 3D fly-byes of your ideal living space that will look better but take you significantly longer.

RoomStyler gives you everything you need to put together a floor plan and then visualize it in 3D. There’s also a busy community that has built up around the app, so you can share your designs publicly if you want some feedback, or get inspiration from what other people are doing, if you want to. You can even use someone else’s design to start off your own with a couple of clicks.

It’s really easy to just jump in and get started. The web interface is a little-old fashioned and clunky, but not hard to understand. You’ve got lots of furniture and objects to pick from, though outside of the walls and floors the customization options in terms of sizes and colors are limited (and you can’t import your own objects into Roomstyler).

One of the clunky aspects is the process of taking a 3D rendering. Rather than getting real-time visuals as the camera moves, you have to place the camera, hope it’s pointed in the right direction, take a photo, repeat as needed. High-resolution versions of these snapshots are the only part of Roomstyler that isn’t free: If you want to go above 960 x 540 pixel images, you need to buy credits, which start at $1.10 for a single 1920 x 1080 pixel rendering.

Plan Your Room very much sticks to the basics, but it does them well — and maybe the basics are all you need to quickly get a floorplan together. You can use exact measurements in this web app, and move and resize objects to get them precisely where you want them, so it’s suitable for getting everything correct, down to the feet and inches.

It’s also incredibly straightforward to load up and use. You don’t need to pay anything, and you don’t even need to register an account (unless you want to save your floor plans and come back to them later). Choose your furniture type from the gallery on the left, then drag the elements into place, changing the sizes and cloning items as you need to.

There’s a lot that isn’t included though. You can’t create your own furniture, the available selection of items is relatively limited, you can’t change colors or styles of anything you drop in, and you can only go room by room (rather than create an entire living space). There are no 3D tools here either.

Built partly on open source software and free to use in its basic form, Sweet Home 3D is packed with features for imagining a home, and available across all platforms. You can go into an incredible level of detail in 2D and 3D, with every aspect of your layout editable, but it does mean you’ll need to invest more time in navigating it.

The software feels quite old-school in terms of its design and interface, but it’s not difficult to use — there’s just a lot of it. You can work in 2D and 3D by dragging in premade elements and customizations, or rolling up your sleeves up and sketching everything yourself (or a combination of the two). It’s flexible, versatile, and detailed.

Paying for the software gets you a lot more in the way of bundled resources — some 1,600 models (up from 100) and more than 400 textures (up from 26) — so you might want to consider investing if you find the software helpful. Pricing starts at $2.99 for a week’s access, and goes up from there (and you can pay a one-off $179.99 fee for lifetime access).

If you want something serious for your floor planning, Live Home 3D fits the bill. The fact that it’s available for the Vision Pro as well as desktop and mobile platforms gives you an idea of what you’re dealing with. It also comes with a steep-ish learning curve, though there are plenty of tutorials and room templates.

Just about every aspect of your design can be customized, from the height of the tables to the color of the open brickwork. The app does a good job of helping you with your layouts, with tools for aligning different elements and snapping them to various guides, and you can get a 3D rendering or even a video walkthrough at any time.

You can try Live Home 3D for free, but a lot of features are locked behind a paywall, including most furniture models, a wider choice of materials, higher-resolution video walkthroughs, and terrain editing. A Standard plan will cost you $5.99 a month or $49.99 for life, with the top-tier Pro plan available for $14.99 a month or $99.99 for life.

This is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive floor plan and house plan apps out there, covering everything from basic plans to 3D tours. Planner 5D will even connect you with actual designers if you need more help. Despite how many features are packed in, though, the web and mobile apps never feel cluttered or difficult to use.

A wide variety of indoor and elements can be dragged into your designs, and moved, customized, and resized to suit. Colors, textures, and materials can be tweaked with a click or a tap, and you can make changes in both 2D and 3D views. Advanced options like object alignment and grouping are intuitive to use, even for beginners.

Most of this functionality comes with a cost, though there’s enough that’s free to give you an idea of whether or not the app suits you. A premium account (from $4.99 a month) gives you access to much more of everything: objects, materials, and extra customizations. You also get AI design tools to create layouts from prompts, and unlimited, hi-res 3D renders.