5 Best Free Home Design Apps for Homeowners

Whether you are flipping houses or looking to make a new patio to flip burgers, home design apps are a must when it comes to adding onto or renovating a home.

But as with any need, the marketplace is overflowing with products that are middling, not quite up to par, or outright bad. What you need is a rundown of the best Home Design apps out there right now. So that is exactly what you are going to get!

5. Floorplanner

This should always be the first home design app you try to use because it is so accessible. The big advantage of Floorplanner is that it is browser-based, meaning that you do not have to download anything or set anything up.

Naturally, Floorplanner’s main function is planning floor plans. It can also help you decorate, but those tools are limited. So why should you use it before trying any other home design app?

Well, simply put, not every project needs a complex design tool. Floorplanner is not only simple and accessible, but instructional on whether your project needs a more nuanced touch.

If a project cannot be properly planned in Floorplanner, then that teaches you something about how complicated that project is. That does not mean you should not do the project. It only means that it is out of Floorplanner’s reach, not your own.

Floorplanner also provides both 2D and 3D design options. Most home design apps force you into one or the other, so it’s great to be able to switch back and forth, or do everything in one if you find that you cannot stand the other.

4. HomeByMe

HomeByMe is a tool focused on interior decoration. It allows you to layout a floorplan in 2D, after which you decorate the room you have made in 3D.

All of its features are free, but the developer’s expenses are compensated by companies paying to have their products featured in the 3D portion’s catalogue. This symbiotic relationship extends to you, the user, as well.

The furniture catalog being filled with actual products means that you are always decorating with real furniture. Nothing about the process is hypothetical. It is all done with real furniture!

3. DFS Room Planner

Few home design apps let the user control the nuances of their digital spaces like DFS Room Planner does. You can view your room in 3D once you input its dimensions, but it also lets you add features like radiators and wallpaper that other apps skip altogether.

DFS primarily sells furniture, so the focus is on finding the right piece for the right price. As such, they have a huge selection of in-app buying options to suit your needs and budget.

If you aren’t looking to buy furniture and are just looking to experiment or redecorate, the app is still highly functional to that end. It does not show furniture down your throat (thankfully).

2. Sketchup

No list of home design apps would be complete without acknowledging Sketchup. The tools of Sketchup are practically the lingua franca of the home design app world.

The reason the app has become so ubiquitous in so many design industries is because while it does not do any one thing the best, it can at least do anything the second best.

Sketchup is a natively 3D piece of software. You can build your dream home with the click of a few buttons and fly the camera through it like you were there yourself.

This is unique because while some 3D home design apps require you to input measurements, Sketchup allows you to drag and drop shapes like you are making a painting.

You can input measurements if you want. The app would be nearly useless otherwise. But not every plan starts with measurements. Sometimes you just want to draw the more outrageous shapes and only find out what is possible after you have already dreamed your dream home.

1. SmartDraw

Is SmartDraw the most powerful home design app? No. But power is not all there is to design. Quite the opposite, in fact. SmartDraw is easy to learn and for every minute you put into understanding its intricacies you are rewarded with dividends of design opportunity.

SmartDraw’s simple interface and tool structure mean that the potential complexity of its depth is offset onto its breadth.

It is a home design app for conceptualizing the entire home, not just the living room as many home design apps are wont to do. It not only has the ability to plan your spaces using custom dimensions (as most home design apps do) but different materials as well.

This means it can be used for more than just planning, but execution too.

Beyond that, it also affords you a vast array of furniture and, unlike its many competitors, vehicles as well. Too many garage constructions have neglected to consider what kind of car the builder is actually trying to fit into the structure.

Perhaps the best feature SmartDraw has is its design templates. Many apps have design templates, but on top of SmartDraw’s other features, design templates help bring focus to the massive variety of tools that the home design app gives you.

In Conclusion

You can’t go wrong with any of the apps on this list. They all fulfill different functions, as slight as those differences may be.

But the reason why this list only features these five home design apps and no others is because the safety notices on these apps is superior to all the rest on the market.

Particularly in the case of Sketchup and SmartDraw, a home design app should not just be about getting money out of your pocket as fast as possible.

Building, rebuilding, and even decorating your house can be dangerous. It is too easy to strain yourself at best, or smash an appendage under the weight of your new couch at worst. These apps will help you build, as well as keep you safe.