The best landscape design apps, tested on one real yard

"Landscape design app" covers several different jobs, and most one-star reviews in this category come from buying a tool for the wrong one. The grid above shows who does what; below is the short version by what you are trying to do.

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The fairest test of a photo redesign app is one photo in every app. Ours is a brick ranch with a concrete and brick walkway between two bare pine-straw beds, under pine trees, in Raleigh, zone 8a. The brief was cottage style, part sun, low maintenance, keep the walkway.

Here are Neighborbrite's result on the left and Sow's on the right, both from free accounts on the web, both at 1024 by 1024 pixels, both watermarked.

Neighborbrite wrote a short text 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 zone 8a. The image followed about 33 seconds later, house and walkway kept, watermark bottom right.

The planting is a little dense, but it is the palette it promised, and the plan step let us change the palette before the picture was drawn.

Sow on the web returned a design called Romantic Cottage Walkway with five named plants linked to catalog pages: Buff Beauty rose, Duchesse de Nemours peony, Camelot Lavender foxglove, Baltic parsley and Snowflake catmint. House, walkway, bird feeder and pine straw were kept, with a Made with Sow watermark on the free tier.

On the phone, where the sun chip was pre-filled from the saved space, the same photo came back with foxglove, anemone and daffodil, which fit the light.

One more thing both photo apps did the same way: neither touched the backyard's patchy lawn. Both added a planted border along the fence and left the turf exactly as photographed, because the brief said to keep the yard open. If your real problem is the lawn, say so in the brief.

Yes, from seven of the ten apps here. Sow, Neighborbrite, DreamzAR, Hadaa, Gardenly, OutdoorBrite and the App Store generators all start from a photo and return a redrawn version of it. iScape and Planner 5D start from a photo or a plan, and you place every object yourself; Sow's Editor works that way too, on a plain photo. Klora starts from an aerial of your address and you draw.

The upload step is where an app quietly decides how good the result will be. Neighborbrite accepts a photo, an optional second angle, a Street View pull from an address, or a sample yard, then infers your location, zone, light and slope and lets you correct them before it draws.

Sow's web flow asks for a direction (Classic, Style Design or Goal Design), a style, and the photo. Sow's iPhone flow starts from a saved space that already carries its sun and zone, so style, sunlight and must-haves are set before you pick the photo, and the crop step tells you that single beds or borders work best.

What a vendor's gallery will not tell you is how much of your original the app keeps. In our test both Neighborbrite and Sow preserved the house, the walkway, the bird feeder and the pine straw, and both kept the backyard fence and both young trees. For DreamzAR, Hadaa, Gardenly and OutdoorBrite, look for a before-and-after of a real yard, not a showroom, before you pay.

Some do, and this is the row to care about if you intend to buy the plants. A picture of lavender in a shady bed is a picture, not a design.

• SO

  Sow

  Every plant in a design is a catalog entry with zone, sun, mature size, bloom and care data, drawn from a 12,000+ plant catalog, and each space you create carries its own sun and zone. Zone matching covers the US, Canada, the UK and Australia.

• NE

  Neighborbrite

  It inferred Raleigh, zone 8a and a flat slope correctly, guessed full sun for a bed under pines (we changed it to partial), and its palette fit the corrected light. Its site says climate-specific plant recommendations, and the plant list shows zone 8a and partial sun in the header, but no mature size or spacing, and we could not confirm the depth of data behind each plant.

Hadaa says every plant is verified against your USDA zone and delivers a plant list with quantities. Gardenly says its plant list is picked for your climate zone. DreamzAR says each plant includes care information, growth data and regional compatibility. All three are the vendors' statements.

iScape has a named plant library but no zone or climate check. Planner 5D's outdoor catalog has no species, zone or climate data at all; its plants are furniture. Klora is the exception among the drawing tools: its 1,422 species carry sun, deer-resistance and pollinator icons, and the library filters by sun and zone.

This is where the field splits, and where the word editable gets stretched furthest. On mobile, every generated species in a Sow design 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.

Tapping The Fairy Rose in our iPhone result showed Remove, Fewer, More and Swap, with the count of eight in this design and the botanical name. The Edit design sheet also offers a text instruction box, restyles (Golden Hour, Volumetric, Winter, Nighttime, Future growth) and a Plant Designer that paints plants you choose into the scene.

Neighborbrite's result page puts Add elements, Magic edit, Erase elements and text changes behind a Pro badge, and those tools edit the image rather than a plant object. On the free tier your options are Generate again or Choose another style, plus a Want something different box at the plan step before the image exists.

OutdoorBrite describes changing plants, paving and layout by regeneration. Hadaa's renders are one-shot. Gardenly's pages do not describe per-plant editing, and we could not confirm it.

iScape, Planner 5D and Klora are editable in the older sense: you placed every object, so you can move every object. Sow's Editor works the same way from a plain photo: drag in plants, a bench, lighting or a gravel path, then resize, rotate or duplicate them. DreamzAR advertises a drag-and-drop 2D editor on top of the photo and chat-based refinement.

A picture you can't shop from is a mood board. What matters is what you're handed once the design is done.

Neighborbrite gave us the best list from a single free design. It came back with five varieties and 41 plants, each with its botanical name, a quantity and a Nature Hills price, about $1,049 before shipping. The header noted zone 8a and partial sun, and there were buttons to order, print and share. Mature size and spacing weren't included.

The button that opens the list carries a Pro badge, and we couldn't tell whether later lists stay free.

Sow's web result names each plant, links it to its catalog page and has a Shopping List button. That button gives you a PDF plant schedule: one row per species with how many you need, a unit price and a line total, then an estimated total for the whole design.

Prices come from the lowest listing Sow found across the online nurseries it tracks, marked 'from', and Sow doesn't take a cut from the sellers. If a plant has no current listing, the PDF uses a typical price for that type of plant and marks it 'est.'

For our backyard design, Romantic Cottage Haven, that came to five species, 39 plants and an estimated $644.74. Three species were priced from live listings, such as October Skies aster from $11.99 and Dwarf Lady's Mantle from $10.80, and two were estimates.

Mature size and spacing are on each plant's page rather than in the PDF, and the cheapest listing is usually the smallest pot, so check sizes before you order.

On the phone, Planting Plans takes this further. It breaks the schedule out bed by bed, with each species' quantity, a unit price you can edit and its estimated cost, then subtotals and a grand total. Our test plan came to 602 plants and $8,919.70 across 17 beds.

The iPhone design result also shows a count next to each plant: The Fairy Rose x8, Foxglove Sugar Plum x28, Hawera Daffodil x66 and Anemone x14.

Sow also checks 18 online nurseries every day for prices and deals, and each plant in a design links straight to the cheapest place it found to buy it.

Among the tools we didn't run, Hadaa's site says each render comes with a plant list with quantities and a contractor blueprint showing plant placement, path widths and material volumes.

Gardenly includes a shopping list, and OutdoorBrite includes a plant list on its Plus and Pro plans. iScape and Klora list whatever you placed yourself; iScape adds a proposal tool on Pro, and Klora's PDF export is a paid feature. Planner 5D has no plant list, because its plants are generic objects.

Sow is the only one that keeps tracking nursery prices after the list is made, which is one reason it ranks first.

From nothing to $149 a month, and the shape of the price matters as much as the number. Prices checked October 2026; the table carries the date each one was verified and a link to the source page.

Sow has no AR view and no 3D walkthrough, and its hardscape is paving, mulch, gravel, fences, structures and water features placed as design elements on the photo, with no CAD and no construction documents. If those are your priority, the honest picks are below.

iScape has AR on iOS and an established object and hardscape library, and it has been in the App Store since 2011. Its own pricing page marks 2D and 3D design as iOS only on every tier, so Android users get a narrower app for the same $29.99 a month.

DreamzAR advertises an AR walkthrough on iPhone, Android and the web. Planner 5D is real 3D with walkthroughs, floor plans and hardscape layout on web, iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows; its photo generator is built for interiors, and we could not confirm landscape output from a yard photo.

Hadaa's blueprint includes path widths and material volumes, but it is a document, not a model.

For desktop CAD, terrain, grading and permit-ready drawings, none of these ten apps is the answer. Our landscape design software guide covers PRO Landscape and Realtime Landscaping for that job.

Search any of these terms on a phone and the listings that rank carry the keyword in the app name: Yard AI: Backyard Design, AI Garden Design: Landscape AI App, and Landscape Design - AI Garden on Google Play.

What the listings tell you is that they are photo generators: upload a picture, pick a style, get a picture. What they do not tell you is whether the plants are named, whether anything checks your zone, and what the subscription costs once the trial ends. Treat the listing images as marketing.

If you try one, do the test we did: count the named plants, look up whether each one takes your light, and try to change one plant without regenerating the whole image.

They sit last in our ranking because their listings confirm none of the three things this page scores: real species, a climate check, and editability.

We ran ChatGPT on the same front-yard photo as every app here. It wrote eleven real plants with sizes, spacing and a budget, for a 36-foot bed it had to assume. Then it drew the design: the porch and the bird feeders are gone, the walkway runs straight to a lawn, and none of the plants is named.

It also fails the editing test this page cares about. Asked to move one camellia and change nothing else, it redrew the walkway, the lamp post and most of the plants, and its top-down plan had no quantities, no scale and three misspelled names. Use it for a shortlist; our ChatGPT page has every picture.

Designers presenting to clients use a different mix from homeowners. iScape's Pro tier includes a proposal tool and the app has been in the trade since 2011. Sow's Pro+ tier ($99.99 a year, or $29.99 a month) adds client boards, briefs, proposals with live pricing, presentations and approvals, on top of planting plans and the priced schedule. Neither is CAD.

For construction documents the trade uses desktop suites such as PRO Landscape and Realtime Landscaping, which our software guide covers.

The honest reading of Sow's weaknesses for a professional: if you need AR on site, a 3D fly-through for a client, or a stamped drawing, you will need a second tool. If you need a plant schedule a client can approve, with quantities and prices, and a design you can revise species by species after the client meeting, you will not.

Sow runs the same project on iPhone, Android and the web. Neighborbrite and DreamzAR also cover all three. iScape is on both app stores, but 2D, 3D and AR are iOS only. Gardenly is web plus iPhone with no Android app. Hadaa, Klora and OutdoorBrite are browser tools, and Hadaa mentions a Play listing. Planner 5D is everywhere, including Mac and Windows.

If you are choosing by platform first, we keep a separate page for Android and one for iPhone and iPad, linked at the end of this page.