The best garden design apps for planting beds and borders

A garden design app has one job that a general design tool does not: it has to know plants. A sofa in a floor-plan app is a sofa anywhere. A lavender is a different decision in Cornwall, in Perth and in Raleigh. So before we looked at render quality we wrote down what we would hold every app to, and it is the same list you should hold them to.

We weighted those six points above AR, 3D and hardscape tools because the "garden" searches that bring people to this page are mostly about planting. If you came here for patios, decking or retaining walls, skip to the section on what none of these apps can do, then read the iScape and Planner 5D entries, which are the honest picks for that work.

Three tools could be run on the same garden for nothing: Neighborbrite on its free tier, Klora without an account, and Sow on a fresh free web account, plus a Pro+ test account on iPhone for the plant-editing and planting-plan evidence. Those are the only three for which we show results, timings and plant lists.

The brief never changed. A brick ranch front walkway with bare pine-straw beds on both sides, under pines, in Raleigh, North Carolina, zone 8a, part sun; and a fenced backyard with a patchy lawn and two young trees. Cottage style, low maintenance, keep the walkway, keep the fence.

iScape, DreamzAR, Hadaa, Gardenly and Planner 5D are ranked from their official feature and pricing pages, captured the same day. Where a claim could not be checked, the comparison table shows "Unverified" instead of a tick.

Neighborbrite went first. It inferred Raleigh and zone 8a on its own, guessed full sun for a bed that sits under pines (we corrected it to partial sun), and wrote a short plan in about 60 seconds with a five-plant palette: Annabelle hydrangea, Concord Grape spiderwort, Northern Exposure Sienna coral bells, Evergold sedge and Big Daddy hosta.

All five are real cultivars and all five suit part shade in 8a. The image followed about 33 seconds later, 1024 by 1024, house and walkway intact, watermark bottom right.

Sow on the web took the same photo through Style Design with the Cottage style, at 5 of the 50 free credits. Signup to dashboard took about 10 seconds. The render itself finished in under a minute; the gallery showed it 90 to 150 seconds after submitting, because the gallery polls rather than showing progress.

The result, "Romantic Cottage Walkway", listed five named plants linked to their catalogue pages: Buff Beauty rose, Duchesse de Nemours peony, Camelot Lavender foxglove, Baltic parsley and Snowflake catmint. Same size, same preserved house and walkway, "Made with Sow" watermark.

On the iPhone app the Auto Design sheet pre-filled "Part sun" from the saved space, and the result was foxglove, anemone and daffodil, with quantities: The Fairy Rose x8, Foxglove Sugar Plum x28, Hawera Daffodil x66, Anemone x14, plus one more. Under three and a half minutes end to end.

On the backyard photo, both photo tools did the same thing: a new planted bed along the fence, trees kept, and the patchy lawn left exactly as photographed, because the brief said to preserve it. Neighborbrite's backyard plan arrived in about 30 seconds and the image in about 30 more; Sow's took about 90 seconds from submit.

Neither "fixed" the garden. That is worth knowing before you expect a redesign to solve a lawn problem.

Klora does not take a photo at all. You type an address, it pulls aerial imagery and parcel lines (about 30 seconds for our Raleigh address, locked to real scale at 5.5 inches per pixel), and you draw beds and paths over the top.

Plants come from a library of 1,422 real species with a photo, botanical name, and icons for sun, deer resistance and pollinators, plus generic "concept" shapes with mature footprints for when you have not chosen the species yet.

Nothing is generated for you. The editor has season views from spring to winter, growth stages from year one to mature, and a bloom timeline, and the output is a scaled plan plus a plant list, never a picture of your garden. One design is free with no account; a second design or a PDF export needs the $24 Project Pass (90 days) or the $69 a year subscription.

It is the best free "draw a real plan to scale" tool we tried, and it is not a photo redesign tool, so the two kinds should not be compared on the same axis. At our address it found no lidar coverage and no building outlines, so its sun and shade model was skipped; that will vary by location.

Yes, two of them. On Neighborbrite's free plan you get 4 designs a day, a before and after toggle, downloads, and a watermark on every image. Our first free design also opened a plant list with botanical names, quantities and nursery prices (5 varieties, 41 plants, about $1,049 at the partner nursery's prices).

That list carries a Pro badge, and we could not confirm whether it stays free after the first design.

Klora gives one complete property design free, with the full library and no account, then $24 or $69 a year. A second design or a PDF export needs the $24 Project Pass or the $69 a year subscription.

Sow gives everyone 10 free designs to start and more free designs for taking part: posting a design earns 25 credits, a referral 100, and challenges and helpful answers earn credits too. Pro is from $39.99 a year on the web ($59.99 a year through the App Store); Pro+ is $99.99 a year.

Planner 5D has a free tier with unlimited projects and half its catalogue, but its outdoor catalogue is generic objects with no species, zone or climate data, so it is for drawing, not for planting. iScape publishes a free tier with a limited database and reduced access to plants, hardscapes and products. Gardena myGarden is a free browser planner.

DreamzAR, Hadaa and Gardenly publish no free tier. Hadaa is the cheapest way to pay once instead of subscribing: $12 for a single render, $9 each for three or more.

"Garden planner" means two different things, and Google mixes them. If you mean a vegetable bed planner with sowing dates, the established names are GrowVeg and Garden Planner by Artifact Interactive. Prices are on their sites. Gardena myGarden is a free browser planner in the same family.

If you mean a planner for ornamental beds and borders, the choice is between drawing it yourself and having beds found for you. Klora is the drawing option, with one free design: a scaled plan over aerial imagery, season views, growth stages and a bloom timeline. It gives you the plan and the plant list; it does not give you a picture.

Sow's Planting Plans start from the satellite view of a saved address, outline the beds, and fill each bed from the catalogue by sun and zone. Our test property came back with 17 beds across its spaces, one space alone showing 12 beds and 490 plants.

One bed read 819 square feet, full sun, 79 plants, with four layout styles (Layered, Drifts, Rows and Edged) and a chip for every species with its count, swap and remove. Review Costs then lists quantity and an editable unit price per species, per bed, with a total (602 plants, $8,919.70 estimated on our plan) before the PDF is created.

That per-bed schedule with an editable unit price lives in Planting Plans on mobile. The web design "Shopping List" PDF is a simpler thing: one row per species with its quantity, a unit price and a line total, plus an estimated total, the unit price being the lowest listed across the online nurseries Sow tracks (shown as "from", and Sow is not paid by the sellers) or, where nothing is listed, a typical price for that plant type marked "est.".

Neighborbrite's free list has quantities and prices from the one nursery partner it sells through; neither list shows mature size or spacing, and the lowest listed price is usually for the smallest pot.

The walkway beds in our front-garden photo are the flower-bed test: two bare strips, part sun, under pines. A flower bed is where plant knowledge shows or does not, so here is what each tested tool did with them.

Neighborbrite planted both strips densely with the five cultivars from its plan. The plant list gave quantities (41 plants) and prices but no mature size or spacing, so you would have to check spread yourself before ordering 15 spiderworts.

Sow on iPhone, with the part sun chip set, planted both borders and listed five species with botanical names and counts: Rosa x hybrida The Fairy x8, Digitalis purpurea Sugar Plum x28, Hawera daffodil x66, anemone x14, plus one more. Every species in the catalogue carries zone, sun, mature size, bloom and care data. Tapping a species shows Remove, Fewer, More and Swap, with its count in this design.

On mobile, every generated species can be removed, counted up or down, or swapped, and the Plant Editor lets you drag in plants, furniture, lighting and paving by hand, on a generated design or a plain photo; on the web, Design Studio places plants and objects over the render. Neighborbrite's edits are regenerations or Pro text edits, not plant-by-plant objects.

For a bed you want to draw rather than see, Klora is the pick again: footprints for each species at year one, five, ten and maturity, which is the honest way to find out whether three Big Daddy hostas will fill a strip in the first season.

Most of the apps on this page are American, and the word "zone" means USDA hardiness zone to all of them. Sow's zone matching covers the US, Canada, the UK (RHS ratings) and Australia, so a plant search in Surrey or Sydney filters on the right scale.

Its weather-aware care, which adjusts tasks to forecasts, uses US forecasts only; outside the US you get the zone match and the plant data, not the forecast-driven tasks.

Neighborbrite says it gives climate-specific plant recommendations and claims users in 170+ countries. It inferred our US location from the IP address. Hadaa verifies every plant against your USDA zone, which says nothing about the UK. Gardenly says climate zone without saying which system. DreamzAR says regional compatibility.

Klora pulled US state aerial imagery and USGS contours for our US address. Planner 5D has no climate data to localise. iScape does not check plants against your zone or climate.

If you garden outside North America, the practical test is simple: enter your real location before the first design and see whether the plant list changes. If it does not, the app is not checking.

Tap or hover any cell for the note behind it. Sow is first because we make it; read its column with that in mind. Its gaps are AR, 3D and hardscape CAD.

• Zone for Neighborbrite

  Partly, because the site claims climate-specific picks and we saw zone 8a, but we could not confirm the depth.

• Editing for iScape, DreamzAR and Planner 5D

  Yes, because you place every object by hand, which is a different thing from editing a generated design.

Prices were checked October 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page or in-app billing screen, and the table shows the date beside each. The spread is wide: from nothing, to $12 a render, to $54 a year, to $299.99 a year. A human design service such as Yardzen sits above all of them at $995 and up per package; it is not an app, so it is not ranked here.

A few things the table cannot show. iScape's $29.99 a month is $359.88 a year if you never switch to the $299.99 annual plan. Neighborbrite's watermark survives the $24.99 a month Pro tier and goes only at $49.99 a month. DreamzAR's $199 a year works out at $16.60 a month and has no free tier.

Gardenly's $54 a year is the cheapest subscription photo redesign here after Sow's $39.99 web price, with a 7-day money-back period rather than a free tier, and no Android app. Sow's App Store annual price ($59.99) is higher than its web price ($39.99); if you sign up on the web, the apps use the same account.

Both kinds exist and they suit different people. Photo redesign tools (Sow, Neighborbrite, DreamzAR, Hadaa, Gardenly) read a photo of your own garden and return a planted version of it. You get a convincing picture quickly and, in the better ones, a named plant list. What you do not get is a measured plan, unless the tool adds one.

Drawing tools (Klora, iScape, Planner 5D) start from a blank plan, an aerial, or your photo as a backdrop, and you place everything yourself. Slower, more precise, and the only route to a scaled plan or a 3D model.

Sow sits in both camps. Auto Design draws the first version, the Editor lets you place every plant and paver yourself on a plain photo, and Planting Plans lays beds out on the satellite view with quantities and prices. It does not do 3D or AR, and its paving and structures are placed on the photo, not drawn as CAD.

None of the photo tools we ran changed the lawn when the brief said to keep it; a redesign is a planting overlay, not a renovation. None of them produced construction documents. Sow has no AR, no 3D walkthrough and no hardscape CAD; its paving, mulch, gravel, fences, structures and water features are design elements on the photo, not drawings a builder can price from.

Sunlight is the weak point across the category. Neighborbrite guessed full sun for a bed under pines. Klora skipped its sun model at our address because no lidar coverage was available. Sow's iPhone app took the light from the saved space and got it right. Either way, tell the tool the light yourself before you generate.

And none of the free tiers is a complete product. Neighborbrite's watermarks every image, even on Pro. Ours gives 10 designs to start and more for taking part, also watermarked. If a page tells you a garden design app is completely free with no limits, it is not describing one of these.