The best landscape design apps for iPhone and iPad, tested on a real yard

Here is what the Sow iPhone app did with our front yard on October 13, 2026, on an iPhone 17 Pro development build with a Pro+ test account. The Create tab lists the tools: Auto Design, which makes up to 9 designs from one photo, Plant Designer, Editor, Maps, Planting Plans, Plant Doctor and Sunlight Meter.

Each space you design in carries its sun and zone, shown as "part sun, zone 8a" in our case, so the app knows your conditions before you choose a photo.

Auto Design asks for a style, a sunlight setting and must-haves. Sunlight was pre-filled from the space. You can pick one of nine styles or Surprise me for all nine, and the photo can come from the space, the camera or the library, with a crop step that says single planting beds or borders work best. We chose Cottage and part sun and submitted the front walkway photo.

A toast said the design was on its way and the gallery showed Creating. When we opened the result, both walkway borders were planted; from submitting to viewing took under three and a half minutes, including our own navigation.

The Plants list showed five species with botanical names and quantities: The Fairy Rose (Rosa x hybrida) x8, Foxglove Sugar Plum (Digitalis purpurea) x28, Hawera Daffodil x66, Anemone x14, and one more. Foxglove, anemone and daffodil suit part sun, which is the point of the sun chip.

Under the list: Before and After, Save all, Edit list, Edit design and Share.

Two photo redesign tools got the same front walkway: Neighborbrite and Sow. Neighborbrite has an iPhone app, but we ran it in a desktop browser on its free tier; the Sow web result shown here is from a fresh free account. Both images are shown at the size each tool produced them, 1024 by 1024.

Neighborbrite inferred Raleigh, NC and zone 8a, guessed full sun (we changed it to partial sun before generating), wrote a plan in about 60 seconds naming Annabelle hydrangea, Concord Grape spiderwort, Northern Exposure Sienna coral bells, Evergold sedge and Big Daddy hosta, and drew the image in about 33 seconds.

The house, walkway and bird feeder were kept, the planting was dense and plausible, and the free-tier watermark sits bottom right. The plant list that came with this first design had 41 plants across 5 varieties with nursery prices adding up to about $1,049, with no mature size or spacing.

Sow on the web, Style Design with Cottage for 5 credits, returned Romantic Cottage Walkway: Buff Beauty rose, Duchesse de Nemours peony, Camelot Lavender foxglove, Baltic parsley and Snowflake catmint, each linked to a catalog page. The render took under a minute; the gallery showed it 90 to 150 seconds after submit. The iPhone app, with the sun chip set, chose part-sun plants for the same photo.

So on the front yard. Neighborbrite for the priced list on its first design, Sow for plant choices that fit the light and a count per species you can change. On the backyard, both tools planted the fence line and left the patchy lawn exactly as photographed.

This is the question that separates an app you keep from an app you screenshot once. On an iPhone, Sow's Edit design sheet offers four routes. Change a plant, with a chip for each of the five species. A text box for an instruction such as "add a stone path".

Try a new look, which restyles the same design as Golden Hour, Volumetric, Winter, Nighttime or Future growth. And Edit by hand: the Plant Editor, where you drag plants, furniture, lighting and paving onto the design and place them yourself, and the Plant Designer, where you choose plants and let the app paint them in.

Tap a species chip and you get the per-plant controls: Remove, Fewer, More and Swap, with "x8 in this design" and the botanical name Rosa x hybrida 'The Fairy'.

So 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.

The other iPhone apps edit differently. iScape generates nothing; you place every plant and object yourself from its library, which is precise and slow, and is the right model for a patio mockup. DreamzAR advertises a drag-and-drop 2D editor on the photo and chat-based refinement.

Neighborbrite's edits are regenerations or, on Pro at $24.99 a month, text edits and element placement; the plants in its picture are not objects. Gardenly's editability we could not confirm.

For AR and 3D, yes, and we say that without having run it. iScape has been on the App Store since 2011 and is the app most people have heard of.

Its pricing page, captured October 13, 2026, lists a Free tier with a limited database, Pro at $29.99 a month or $299.99 a year, and Enterprise on request, and it marks "2D & 3D design (iOS only)" on every tier. AR mode is iOS.

On an iPhone or iPad that is the whole feature set; on Android it is not, which makes iScape a better buy for an Apple owner than for anyone else.

What iScape does is manual placement. You drag plants, hardscape and objects from an established library onto your photo, and Pro includes a proposal tool for landscapers. There is no generated redesign, no care after the design, no live prices and no plant ID. Its plant library is made of named plants, but we could not confirm the depth of its zone or mature-size data, its free-tier limits, or whether free output is watermarked. Paying monthly comes to $359.88 a year.

Pick iScape if you want to walk a patio design in AR or see it in 3D on an iPhone. Pick Sow if you want the plants chosen for your zone and light and want to change them one by one afterwards. Pick Neighborbrite if you want a quick picture today on its limited free tier.

Pick DreamzAR if you want AR plus a generated redesign and will pay $199 a year.

Yes, in two shapes. A pro suite with an iPad companion, and a mobile app with client tools. Sow is an iPhone app that also installs on iPad, where it opens in iPhone layout rather than a tablet layout, and its web studio and Pro dashboard open in the iPad's browser. The Sow screenshots here are from an iPhone 17 Pro.

The professional tools in Sow are in Pro+ ($99.99 a year or $29.99 a month, 3-day trial): client boards, briefs, proposals with live nursery pricing, presentations and version-bound approvals. Underneath them is Planting Plans, which is where the plant schedule lives. On our test property it found 17 beds across its spaces on the satellite view.

Each bed opens in an editor showing its area, sun and plant count (Bed 1 was 819 square feet, full sun, 79 plants), four layout modes (Layered, Drifts, Rows, Edged), and a chip per species with its count, swap and remove, plus Reshuffle and New plants.

Share, then Whole plan, then Save PDF opens Review Costs: per bed, each species with its quantity, an editable unit price and an estimated cost, a bed subtotal, and a total. Ours read 602 plants at $8,919.70 before Create PDF. This is the priced, quantified plant schedule.

The web design Shopping List PDF is a simpler one: a quantity, a unit price and a line total per species with an estimated total, where the unit price is the lowest listed across the online nurseries Sow tracks, usually for the smallest pot, with no bed breakdown, no editable price and no mature size or spacing, which matters if you were planning to design on the web and hand a client that export.

PRO Landscape is the trade incumbent. A Windows desktop suite for photo imaging, CAD, 3D and proposals, with a companion app on iPad and a Home app for consumers. Its price appears in search listings as about $90 a month, which we have not verified, and it advertises a feature called PRO Landscape+ with AI that we could not confirm. The learning curve is the known cost. iScape Pro's proposal tool and SketchUp's iPad app (a free web tier, maximum modeling control, no plant intelligence at all) round out the pro options. By our reading of their pages, none of them carry live nursery prices per species on the device.

What Sow does not have for a pro on an iPad Pro: AR, a 3D walkthrough, hardscape CAD or construction documents. If a client needs permit drawings you need PRO Landscape or a CAD tool, and Sow is the planting, pricing and presentation layer next to it rather than a replacement for it.

Tap or hover any cell for the note behind it. iScape and DreamzAR win the AR and 3D rows. The second table shows what each library holds and what each plant carries.

Prices on this page were checked October 2026. Rows for iScape, DreamzAR, Planner 5D, PRO Landscape and Gardenly come from their official pages, and anything they do not state is marked unverified rather than guessed.

Vendor prices as published in October 2026. Two things to know before the table. Sow Pro is $39.99 a year on the web with a 7-day trial, or $9.99 a month, but $59.99 a year as an in-app purchase through the App Store, so on an iPhone it is cheaper to subscribe in a browser.

And iScape is the only tool here priced first by the month, at $29.99, which is $359.88 a year unless you take the $299.99 annual plan.

Free tiers on iPhone. Neighborbrite (4 designs a day, watermarked), Sow (10 free designs to start and more for taking part), Planner 5D (unlimited projects, half the catalog) and iScape (a limited database, limits unconfirmed). DreamzAR and Gardenly have no free tier; PRO Landscape's we could not confirm.

Sow, for free designs you can actually plant and edit: 10 free designs to start and more for taking part (posting a design earns 25 credits, a referral 100).

Neighborbrite, for a fresh allowance every day. Free is 4 designs a day with a watermark on every image, downloads allowed, and our first free design came with a full plant list and prices. The watermark stays on Pro at $24.99 a month; only Business at $49.99 a month removes it. Edits on free mean generating again.

Planner 5D has a free tier for 3D layout without plant data. iScape's free tier has a limited database with reduced access to plants, hardscapes and products, and we could not confirm what it lets you finish or whether it watermarks.