The best AI landscape design apps, and which ones name real plants

Every app on this page takes a photo of your yard and returns a new picture of the same yard with planting added. Some ask for a style first, some ask for your zone and sunlight, some infer those from your location. The picture comes back in anywhere from half a minute to a few minutes.

That part is now table stakes. Five of the seven tools ranked here do it, and the two that do not quite fit (Planner 5D, whose generator is built for interiors, and the manual placement apps like iScape that we left out) are not really the same category.

What separates them is everything after the picture. Does the app tell you what the plants are, with botanical names you can take to a nursery? Did it check those plants against your hardiness zone and the light in that bed, or did it paint whatever looks good? Can you change one plant without regenerating the whole image?

Is there a list with quantities, a planting plan, prices, anything that gets you from a convincing render to a Saturday at the garden center?

That is the lens for this roundup. We did not score render beauty out of ten; the renders from the two tools we ran were both convincing enough to show a partner. We scored what you can do with the result. The checks, in the order they matter:

Two, properly. Neighborbrite on its free web tier and Sow on a fresh free web account, then Sow again on an iPhone to capture the editing and planting-plan screens that only exist in the app. Both test photos are in this section. The front yard is deliberately ordinary: a brick ranch, a concrete and brick walkway, two bare pine-straw beds under pines, part sun. If an app can make this look planted and tell you what to buy, it can handle most front yards.

Hadaa, DreamzAR, Gardenly, OutdoorBrite and Planner 5D are paid products with no free render of your own yard (Planner 5D has a free tier, but its generator is interior-first). For those five, every fact on this page comes from their own pricing and feature pages, checked October 12, 2026, and anything we could not confirm is marked "Unverified" in the table rather than guessed.

The three App Store apps that rank for these searches on their names alone, Yard AI, AI Garden Design and Garden AI, are listed at the end but not ranked. They are App Store listings we could not install on a simulator. They have their own page, linked at the bottom.

Both front-yard results kept the house, the walkway, the pine straw and the bird feeder, and both put a cottage border on each side of the path. Neighborbrite planted it more densely with hostas, coral bells and sedges; Sow planted it more sparsely with foxglove spires, white peonies and a yellow rose by the house. Neither touched the lawn.

Both carry a watermark in the bottom right on the free tier, and both came back at 1024 by 1024 pixels.

Tap or hover any cell for the note behind it.

• Real plants

  Every tool except Planner 5D names them in some form.

• Zone

  Sow, Hadaa and Gardenly state a zone check. Neighborbrite showed zone 8a while it worked but does not say what it checks.

• Mature size

  Sow carries height and spread on every plant, and DreamzAR says it has growth data. Nobody else publishes it.

• Editing

  Sow, DreamzAR and Planner 5D have drag-and-drop editors, and Sow also swaps one species at a time on a generated design. Neighborbrite, Gardenly and OutdoorBrite regenerate; Hadaa is one-shot.

Accurate enough to be useful, and not accurate enough to trust blindly. Here is what the two hands-on runs showed, with the screenshots, because this is the question people ask most and the one most roundups wave away.

• Real plants

  Yes, from both tools. Neighborbrite's front-yard palette was five named cultivars, Annabelle hydrangea, Concord Grape spiderwort, Northern Exposure Sienna coral bells, Evergold sedge and Big Daddy hosta, with botanical names on the list (Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle', Carex hachijoensis 'Evergold' and so on).

  Sow on the web returned five named plants linked to catalog pages: Buff Beauty rose, Duchesse de Nemours peony, Camelot Lavender foxglove, Baltic parsley and Snowflake catmint. Sow on the iPhone returned five species with botanical names and counts: The Fairy Rose (Rosa x hybrida) x8, Foxglove Sugar Plum (Digitalis purpurea) x28, Hawera Daffodil x66, Anemone x14, and one more. Nobody invented a plant.

• Zone

  Neighborbrite inferred Raleigh from our connection and put zone 8a on the confirm screen, which is correct for this address on the 2023 map. Sow on the iPhone starts from a saved space that already carries the zone and the light, so the design began at zone 8a, part sun. On the web, every Sow plant links to a catalog page with its zone range.

Sun is where Neighborbrite slipped. It guessed "Full sun" for a bed the photo shows under pine trees. We changed it to partial sun before generating, and the palette it then chose (hydrangea, hosta, coral bells, sedge) is sensible for part shade in 8a. Had we clicked through, it would have planted a sunny border in the shade.

Sow's mobile Auto Design sheet has a sun chip pre-filled from the space, and with Part sun set it chose foxglove, anemone and daffodil.

Quantities and sizes. Neighborbrite's list gave quantities (41 plants in total) and prices, but no mature sizes or spacing, so you cannot tell from it whether 15 spiderworts fit. Sow's mobile result gave quantities per species, and each species opens to its catalog entry with mature size. Sow's web Shopping List PDF gives quantities and prices too, and like Neighborbrite's list it leaves mature size and spacing to the plant pages.

So the honest answer to "are they accurate": the plants are real, and the zone is handled by the tools that ask for it. The weak point in October 2026 is light. Set it yourself, in any app, before you generate, and read the plant list rather than trusting the picture.

Prices checked October 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page or in-app billing screen. Sow's web price is lower than its App Store price, and both are shown.

The spread is wide. At the low end, Sow Pro at $39.99 a year on the web ($59.99 a year through the App Store) and Gardenly at $54 a year are the cheapest ways to get unlimited photo redesigns with a plant list.

Hadaa charges per render, $12 for one and $9 each for three or more, which is the cheapest route if you want exactly one yard done once and the most expensive if you iterate. DreamzAR is $19.99 a month or $199 a year with no free tier.

Neighborbrite has a limited free tier with a watermark; its Pro plan at $24.99 a month keeps the watermark, and only Business at $49.99 a month removes it. OutdoorBrite starts at $29 a month ($276 a year) and goes to $149 a month, with no free trial.

Planner 5D has a free tier with half its catalog and Premium at $59.99 a year.

Two things to notice before you pay. A monthly price that looks small is not small over a season: Neighborbrite Pro is $299.88 over twelve months paid monthly (no annual price is shown), against Sow Pro at $39.99 or Gardenly at $54 for a year. And watermark removal is not always where you expect it.

On Neighborbrite it is a Business feature, not a Pro one. On Sow it comes with Pro.

Yes, two. Sow gives everyone 10 free designs to start and keeps giving free designs for taking part: posting a design earns 25 credits (five designs), a referral 100, and challenges and helpful answers earn credits too. Neighborbrite's limited free tier gives four designs a day, downloads allowed, a plant list with prices on the first design, and a watermark on every image.

Planner 5D has a free tier with unlimited projects and half the catalog, but the catalog has no plant species, zone or climate data, so what you get free is a 3D model with generic plant objects, not a planting design.

DreamYard and Gendo both rank at or near the top for the free-AI searches, with pages titled "DreamYard: #1 Free AI Landscape Design, No Subscription" and "Free AI Landscape Design Generator Online". Treat those titles as claims until you have tried them.

If you do not need a picture at all and want a scaled plan you can hand to a nursery, Klora gives you one complete property design free, with no account, then charges $24 or $69 a year, with a 1,422-species library that carries sun and zone data.

Nothing is generated for you; you draw the beds and place the plants over an aerial of your lot. It is not an AI app, which is why it is not ranked here, but it is the best free planning tool we tested.

The free-tier question most people are really asking is "will I get a watermark?" Yes, on every free AI tool we tested, and on Neighborbrite's paid Pro tier as well.

This is the question that separates a design tool from an image generator, and the answers differ more than the marketing suggests.

• Sow, on mobile

  Every generated species can be removed, counted up or down, or swapped, and the Plant Editor lets you drag plants, furniture and paving by hand. Tap The Fairy Rose in the plant list and you get Remove, Fewer, More and Swap, with the count in this design shown.

  The Edit design sheet also takes a free-text instruction ("add a stone path"), offers restyles (Golden Hour, Volumetric, Winter, Nighttime, Future growth) and opens the Plant Designer. On the web, Design Studio opens the render for manual placement over it, with a plant and object library and quick filters for native, full sun, shade and deer resistance.

  We could not confirm that individual generated plants are movable objects on the web; that is the mobile Plant Editor's job, and the table says "Yes" on the strength of mobile.

• NE

  Neighborbrite

  Edits on the free tier are regenerations. Generate again, choose another style, or go back and change the plan text before the image is drawn. The tools that touch the picture itself, Add elements, Magic edit, Erase elements and text changes, carry a Pro badge at $24.99 a month, and even then they edit the image rather than named plant objects.

DreamzAR advertises a drag-and-drop 2D editor on the photo and chat-based refinement. Hadaa is explicit that renders are one-shot: to change the design you buy another render. Gardenly and OutdoorBrite describe edits as regeneration, in OutdoorBrite's words "change plants, paving and layout". Planner 5D is fully editable because it is a 3D modeler, but what you are moving is a generic plant object with no species attached.

A render is a decision aid. A plan is what you build from. Here is what each tool hands you after the picture.

Neighborbrite gave us a plant list with the first free design: 5 varieties, 41 plants, with Nature Hills prices (Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle' x5 at $19.99 each, Heuchera 'Northern Exposure Sienna' x8 at $43.86, Hosta 'Big Daddy' x3 at $32.85, and so on) for a total of about $1,049 before shipping. That is genuinely useful.

The button that opens it carries a Pro badge, and we could not confirm that the list stays free after the first design. There is no top-down plan and no mature-size data.

Sow on the web gives a Shopping List PDF that is a plant schedule: one row per species with its quantity, a unit price and a line total, and an estimated total at the bottom.

The unit price is the lowest price listed by the online nurseries Sow tracks, shown as "from", and Sow is not paid by any of them; where a species has no current listing the PDF uses a typical price for that plant type and marks it "est.", and a species with neither is shown as "no listing" and left out of the total.

On our backyard design, "Romantic Cottage Haven", that was 5 species, 39 plants and an estimated total of $644.74, with three species priced from listings (October Skies aster from $11.99, Dwarf Lady's Mantle from $10.80) and two marked est. Two things to know: the lowest listed price is usually for the smallest pot, and the PDF does not show mature size or spacing, which are on each plant page.

The per-bed plan with an editable unit price per species lives in Planting Plans on mobile: the app finds beds on a satellite view of your address, fills each one, and the Review Costs screen lists every species per bed with quantity, an editable unit price and a subtotal before you export the PDF.

On our test account that was 17 beds across its spaces, with an estimated total of $8,919.70 for 602 plants on one plan. A Sow design on mobile also shows quantities per species right on the result.

Sow also checks 18 online nurseries every day for prices and deals, and every plant in a design links straight to where you can buy it at the lowest price it found.

Hadaa's whole pitch is this step. A planting guide in which every plant is verified against your USDA zone, with botanical names and quantities, a contractor blueprint with plant placement, path widths and material volumes, and a bill of quantities, per render. On paper it is the most complete single deliverable in the group. Gardenly includes a climate-zone plant list and a shopping list. OutdoorBrite includes a plant list on its Plus and Pro plans only. DreamzAR and Planner 5D do not publish a shopping list feature, and neither has a planting plan.

For a homeowner who wants to plant the result, yes, with the obvious caveat that this is our app and you should weigh that.

The case rests on four things we can show rather than claim: every plant in a design is a real species from a 12,000+ catalog with zone, sun, mature size, bloom and care data; the design stays editable plant by plant on mobile, and the Editor lets you place plants, furniture and paving yourself; the same project carries on into a planting plan with quantities and prices, care reminders after planting and live nursery prices; and it runs on iPhone, Android and the web with one account. Sow has 95,000+ designs and 40,000+ gardeners behind those numbers.

• The hands-on run

  A fresh web signup took about 10 seconds. Style Design with Cottage cost 5 credits. The front-yard render itself took well under a minute, though the gallery showed it 90 to 150 seconds after submit because the page polls rather than streams. The result kept the house, walkway and bird feeder and placed five named plants linked to catalog pages.

  The backyard run came back in about 90 seconds with a continuous mulched bed of roses, foxgloves and catmint along the fence and the lawn left as photographed.

  On the iPhone the same front-yard photo came back in under three and a half minutes end to end, with botanical names and quantities, and the sun chip, pre-filled from the space, steered it to part-sun plants.

• Where it loses

  No AR, no 3D walkthrough, no hardscape CAD or construction documents. Weather-aware care is US-only and the catalog is outdoor plants only. Free designs beyond the first 10 are earned by taking part, rather than refilled daily as Neighborbrite's are.

  The web Shopping List PDF prices each species at the lowest listed nursery price, often the smallest pot, and does not show mature size or spacing. Sow is free to start; Pro from $39.99 a year on the web ($59.99 a year through the App Store); Pro+ $99.99 a year.

Very good. Neighborbrite is the tool most homeowners try first, and after running it we understand why. Signup is an emailed code with no password, about a minute to the first screen.

It inferred our location and zone, offered 18 styles plus a designer's choice, wrote a short design plan with a five-plant palette in about 60 seconds, let us edit that plan in text before drawing anything, and produced the image in about 33 seconds.

The first design came with a plant list: botanical names, quantities, prices from a nursery partner, print and share buttons, and the header "Raleigh, NC, Zone 8a, Partial sun".

The site claims 800K+ registered users, 20M+ designs, 170+ countries and 5,000+ plants. Prices checked October 13, 2026 on the in-app billing page: Free at $0, Pro at $24.99 a month, Business at $49.99 a month.

Where it loses. The watermark stays on Free and on Pro; only Business removes it. Plants are not individually editable objects; the per-element tools are Pro and they work on the image. The plant list has no mature size or spacing. There is no planting plan, no care after planting and no price tracking, so the relationship ends at the list. Four designs a day on free. And it guessed full sun for a bed under pines, so check that setting before you generate.

Everything here is from hadaa.app, checked October 12, 2026. Hadaa is web-only and charges per render, $12 for one or $9 each for three or more, with no subscription.

For that you get a redesign plus a planting guide in which every plant is verified against your USDA zone, with botanical names and quantities, a contractor blueprint with plant placement, path widths and material volumes, and a bill of quantities. The site claims 250,000+ users; we could not verify that figure.

The trade is clear. If you want one yard done once, with a document you could hand to a landscaper, Hadaa is the cheapest route to that document in this list. If you want to iterate, every change is another render, and renders are one-shot: nothing is editable plant by plant afterwards. Mature-size data is not stated.

There is no app; the site mentions a Play listing, but the product is the browser.

Facts from dreamzar.app, checked October 12, 2026. DreamzAR is the one app in this group that combines a photo redesign with a drag-and-drop 2D editor on the photo, chat-based refinement and a 3D AR walkthrough, on iOS, Android and the web. Its library is 2,000+ plants and garden features, and the site says every plant includes care information, growth data and regional compatibility.

The price is the catch. $19.99 a month or $199 a year, and no free tier, so you pay before you see a single render of your own yard. We could not confirm whether a free trial exists, how deep the zone and size data goes, or whether there is a shopping list or a PDF export. There is no planting plan, no care after planting and no prices. If walking through the design in AR on your phone is the feature you want, this is the app for it; Sow does not do that.

Facts from gardenly.app, checked October 12, 2026. Gardenly is $54 a year for Starter ($4.50 a month equivalent, with a 7-day money-back period) or $84 a year for Pro, with no free tier. It runs on the web and iPhone, with no Android app.

The site promises photo redesigns in under 30 seconds, 27+ styles, plant recommendations for your climate zone and a shopping list, and claims 10,000+ designs and 750+ users.

At $54 a year it is the cheapest annual plan here after Sow's $39.99 web price, and a climate-zone plant list plus a shopping list cover two of the checks that matter. What we could not confirm: editability (the site describes regeneration rather than object editing), the depth of the plant data, and the quality of the iPhone app.

The user base is small by its own numbers. No planting plan, no care, no prices.

Facts from outdoorbrite.com, checked October 12, 2026. If you have searched for anything in this category you have seen OutdoorBrite: it publishes a "best X 2026" page for every modifier and an alternatives page for every rival, which is why it ranks.

The product is a web-only redesign tool on three monthly plans: Starter at $29 a month for 25 redesigns in HD ($276 a year), Plus at $49 for 100 at 2K ($468 a year), Pro at $149 for 200 at 4K ($1,428 a year). No free trial.

High-resolution output is the strength. A plant list, with plants picked for your region, appears only on Plus and Pro. Editing is by regeneration. We could not confirm render quality or how plants are named on our test yard.

For a homeowner doing one yard, $29 a month for 25 redesigns is hard to justify against Neighborbrite Pro at $24.99 a month or Sow at $39.99 a year; for someone producing many renders at 4K it may make sense.

Facts from planner5d.com, checked October 12, 2026. Planner 5D ranks second for "ai garden design" with a page titled "AI Landscape Design Generator", and first for several landscape terms, which is why it is on this list at all.

It is a 2D and 3D home and floor-plan tool on every platform (web, iOS, Android, Mac, Windows): free with unlimited projects and half the catalog, Premium at $19.99 a month or $59.99 a year with 100 or 1,200 AI credits, Professional at $49.99 a month or $399.99 a year with 4K renders. An estimated $750K a month in revenue, per ScreensDesign for September 2026.

Its AI generator is interior-first. The product is built for rooms and floor plans, and landscape output from a photo of your yard is something we could not verify. More fundamentally, the outdoor catalog is generic furniture and plant objects: no species, no hardiness zone, no climate data, no spacing data.

You can draw a 2D outdoor layout and walk through it in 3D, which nothing else in this list does as well, but the plants in it are shapes. Rank it first for 3D and hardscape layout, last for planting.

Three keyword-named apps rank for these searches as App Store listings rather than as websites: Yard AI: Backyard Design, AI Garden Design: Landscape AI, and Garden AI: Landscape Design.

AI Garden Design: Landscape AI sat at positions 6 to 8 for "ai landscape design", "ai landscape design app" and "ai yard design free" when we pulled the results on October 12, 2026; Garden AI: Landscape Design was fourth for "landscape design ai free", and a Google Play listing for it appeared on the "ai landscape design app" page.

ScreensDesign, a third-party app-intelligence service, puts their monthly revenue at an estimated $15K, $70K and $30K (September 2026 estimates). Whether they name plants or check zone is not something a listing tells you. They get a fuller treatment, and a checklist for trying them, in our AI yard design apps review.

Three web generators also rank on these searches and are listed here without a rank. DreamYard holds first place for "ai landscape design app" and "ai yard design free" with a page titled "DreamYard: #1 Free AI Landscape Design, No Subscription", and also publishes its own "Top 12 Best Free AI Landscape Design App Options in 2026".

Gendo is first for "ai landscape design" with "Free AI Landscape Design Generator Online". Remodel AI ranks second and third with a roundup titled "Best AI landscape design apps in 2026" and another on free apps with no credit card. All three are cited by Google's AI Overview on these searches.

ChatGPT is the tool most people try first, so we gave it our front-yard photo too. It wrote a good plant list in 63 seconds: eleven real plants with spacing and a budget. Then we asked it to picture that list on the photo.

Drag the slider. The porch is gone, the walkway runs straight to a lawn, and none of the plants is named. Asked to move one camellia and change nothing else, it redrew the scene; sent the same request twice, it drew two different gardens.

There is no plant library behind it, nothing to drag, no top-down plan with real quantities, no live prices and no care after planting. Our ChatGPT page has every picture and the full list of gaps.

A regular landscape design app, iScape being the long-running example, gives you a library of objects and plants and you place each one over your photo or onto a plan by hand. An AI landscape design app reads the photo and composes the planting for you, then, in the better ones, tells you what it planted.

The first gives you control from the start and asks for hours; the second gives you a result in a minute and asks you to check it.

The apps worth paying for are converging. DreamzAR adds a manual editor after the generation. Sow adds per-species controls after it, and its Editor works with no generation at all: start from a plain photo and place every plant, bench and paver yourself.

If you want AR mock-ups built by hand, iScape is still the tool to look at: its pricing page lists Pro at $29.99 a month or $299.99 a year with 2D and 3D design marked iOS-only, and it has no generated redesign.

Pick by what you want to walk away with, not by the prettiest render on a marketing page.