The best planting plan software: real plans, priced schedules

Planting plan software is any tool that produces a planting plan: a drawing or a map of where each plant goes, with a plant schedule that says how many of each. The plan is what the installer follows and the schedule is what the nursery fills. In the trade the words are precise.

A landscape plan covers everything on the site, including paths, walls, drainage and lighting; a planting plan covers the plants, bed by bed. Searchers also call it planting design software or planting scheme software, and in the UK a planting scheme is simply the plan plus the schedule.

Three things get mixed up with it in search results. The first is industrial plant design, the software engineers use to model a process plant, pipework and equipment; nothing on this page does that.

The second is the vegetable bed planner: most of the page one results for this term are square-foot vegetable planners, which are good at crop rotation and sowing dates and useless for a mixed border. The third is the photo redesign tool.

Neighborbrite, for example, gave us a priced plant list on our first free design, with 41 plants across 5 varieties, but no plan showing where any of them go. A plant list is not a planting plan.

Planner 5D is in the table below for the same reason. It ranks first for most landscape search terms and it will draw a 2D outdoor layout, but its plant objects are generic furniture-style items with no species, zone or climate data, so it cannot produce a schedule. It is not ranked here because of that. It is a good 3D home planner; it is not planting plan software.

Extension services and design schools define a planting plan the same way, and no tool page shows it, so here it is. A planting plan has two parts. The drawing answers location: which bed each plant sits in and where in the bed. The schedule answers quantity: how many of each plant, so the order matches the drawing. The schedule is a table, and it needs six columns.

The Review Costs screen in Sow, shown in this section, is the closest thing to that table we saw in any tool we tested.

It lists each bed with its sun, square footage and plant count, then every species with its quantity, a unit price you can edit and the estimated line cost, with a subtotal per bed and a total for the plan: on our test property, 602 plants at an estimated $8,919.70. Two columns are not on that screen.

Size and mature spread live on each plant's record in the Sow catalog rather than as columns in the schedule, so if you want them on the printed page you add them. Every tool below is judged against the same six columns.

We scored each tool on whether it can produce the two parts of a plan and the six columns of the schedule, in that order of importance. A tool that places real species and tells you how many wins over a tool that draws a prettier picture.

After that we looked at whether the plants are checked against a hardiness zone and the bed's light, whether the plant records carry mature size, whether prices are attached, whether you can export a PDF, which platforms it runs on, and what the free tier actually gives you.

Two honest caveats. We only tested Sow and Klora hands-on, and we did not place a full plan in Klora on the test yard, so we could not confirm what its exported plan and plant list look like.

The pro CAD suites are judged from their official pages and they are plainly the right answer for a different job: construction documents, grading and 3D. If that is your job, skip to that section.

The rows are the ones a planting plan needs. Tap or hover any cell for the note behind it.

Works in a browser. Yes for Sow, whose web app holds the same project, but Planting Plans itself is in the iPhone and Android app.

Planting Plans is one of the tools on the Create tab of the Sow app, next to Auto Design, Plant Designer, Editor, Maps, Plant Doctor and the Sunlight Meter. Maps puts your yard on a satellite view where you place and drag plants yourself, and the Garden Planner lays out a grid bed with companion-planting suggestions.

It works from a saved address. It pulls the satellite view of the property, outlines the planting beds it finds, and fills each bed with species that suit that bed's light and the property's USDA zone. On our test account the plan ran to 17 beds across its spaces; one space alone read 12 beds and 490 plants.

Open a bed and you get its area, its sun, its plant count and four layout styles: Layered, Drifts, Rows and Edged. Bed 1 of 17 on our test was 819 square feet in full sun with 79 plants. Each species in the bed is a chip with its count.

Tap it to swap it for another plant or remove it; Reshuffle redraws the bed with the same palette, and New plants picks a fresh set. The editor shows the USDA zone and confirms that all the plants suit this light, so a swap stays within the bed's conditions rather than dropping a shade plant into full sun.

The schedule comes from Share, then Whole plan, then Save PDF, which opens Review Costs before it builds the document. That screen is the one in the section above: plant, quantity, editable unit price and estimated cost, per bed, with subtotals and a total.

Because the unit price is editable, you can overwrite the catalog price with your own supplier's quote and the total updates. Create PDF then produces the file.

Every plant in a Sow plan is a real species or cultivar from a catalog of 12,000+ outdoor plants, each with zone, sun, mature size, bloom and care data. Sow has 95,000+ designs made by 40,000+ gardeners,.

Sow is free to start; Pro, which includes Planting Plans, is from $39.99 a year on the web ($59.99 a year through the App Store), and Pro+ at $99.99 a year adds the client tools: boards, briefs, proposals with live pricing, presentations and approvals.

Three honest limits. The planting plan tool is in the phone app, so if you only work in a browser, the per-bed schedule with an editable unit price is not available to you there; the web design Shopping List PDF gives you one row per species with its quantity, the lowest listed nursery price (usually for the smallest pot) and a line total, plus an estimated total, without the bed breakdown, mature size or spacing.

There is no CAD drawing, no construction documents and no 3D. And the free tier does not include Planting Plans at all: free gets you 10 designs to start and more for taking part.

Klora is the tool to pick if you want to draw the plan yourself. You type an address, with no account, and it pulls aerial imagery with parcel lines and contours.

On our Raleigh address the import took about 30 seconds and locked the image to real scale at 5.5 inches per pixel, using state imagery; it looked for lidar heights and building outlines for its sun model and found none at this address, so the sun and shade step was skipped.

The editor gives you beds, paths, structures, a lot boundary, a measure tool and notes, a season view from spring to winter, a growth view at year 1, 5, 10 and mature, and a bloom timeline.

The plant library has two tabs. Concepts are generic shapes with mature footprints, a shade tree at roughly 30 by 40 feet, an evergreen shrub at about 4 by 4, with bloom colour swatches, so you can block a bed out before you commit to species.

Species lists 1,422 real plants with a photo, botanical name and icons for sun, deer resistance, pollinators and bloom colour, filtered by trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers, ground covers, vines and ferns, with search and a filter button. Tap a plant to arm placement or drag it onto the plan.

Nothing is generated for you and there is no photo render; the output is a scaled plan plus a plant list. One complete design is free with no account. PDF export and a second design need Plus: a $24 pass for 90 days and one project, or $69 a year (also sold at $8 a month).

There are no prices in the library and no care reminders after planting. We did not place a complete plan on the test yard, so the look of the exported plan and plant list is the one thing about Klora we could not confirm.

For a homeowner who wants to draw a real plan to scale for free, Klora was the best tool we tested. Its weak spots against a planting plan are spread and price: the concept footprints are helpful, but the plan does not cost itself, and 1,422 species is a smaller catalog than Sow's 12,000+.

It sells designs one at a time with no subscription: $12 for a single render, or $9 each for three or more. Its site says every plant is verified against your USDA zone, and that each design comes with a plant list with quantities and a contractor blueprint showing plant placement, path widths and material volumes, exported as a PDF.

That is a fuller bill of quantities than any other tool here claims, and it is the reason Hadaa ranks third.

The things we could not confirm are the things that matter most for a plan you intend to revise. Hadaa's own description is of one-shot renders rather than a plan you edit plant by plant, so changing one species means another render and another $9 or $12. Mature size data is unverified.

It runs in a browser only; there is no iPhone app, and its site mentions a Play listing. Its claim of 250,000+ users is its own and unverified.

If the planting plan is one sheet in a set of construction documents, none of the tools above will do, and these three will. All three are judged from their official pages, and their prices come from search snippets rather than a published pricing page, so treat every number in this section as approximate.

PRO Landscape (Drafix) is a Windows desktop suite covering photo imaging, CAD, 3D and proposals, with a companion app on iPad and a Home app for consumers. It is the established trade tool, and it produces a planting plan and a plant list from a real species database.

Its zone and mature size data are listed as partial because we could not confirm their depth. The price we found is about $90 a month, unverified; the learning curve is the usual one for a CAD product.

Realtime Landscaping (Idea Spectrum) is Windows only, with deep 3D, terrain and hardscape tools and a planting plan and plant list from named species. It is sold as a one-time purchase, which search snippets put at roughly $149 to $599 depending on the edition; we did not verify those figures. A separate Photo product overlays objects on a photograph. There is no mobile version.

SketchUp is general 3D modelling with a free browser tier and an iPad app. It has no plant intelligence at all: no species, no zone, no mature size, no schedule.

People do produce planting plans in it, with extensions and skill, which is why it is here, but out of the box it is a modelling tool rather than planting plan software. Paid tiers reportedly start at about $129 a year and run to about $399; unverified.

Planner 5D sits in the pricing table for completeness. It is free with half the catalog, and Premium is $59.99 a year, checked October 2026. It has no plant species and so it is not ranked.

Five more names come up for this search, mostly from landscape architects. If you already draft in CAD, start with the first three.

Yes, with limits, and the limits are the whole story. Klora is the most generous: one complete property design, the full 1,422-species library, no account, no card. You pay only when you want a PDF or a second design. SketchUp Free runs in the browser and costs nothing, but you bring your own plant knowledge, because it has none.

Planner 5D has a free tier with half its catalog and no species data.

Sow is free to start, but Planting Plans is a Pro feature. The free plan gives you 10 designs to start and more for taking part. That is enough to see whether the species it picks for your zone and light are ones you would plant; it is not enough to produce the plan. Hadaa has no free tier.

Only one of the tools we tested makes the plan on a phone. Sow runs on iPhone and Android, and Planting Plans lives in the app; the same project is also in the web app in a browser, where the design studio and the catalog are.

Klora and Hadaa are browser tools; we ran Klora in a desktop browser. PRO Landscape has a companion app on iPad alongside its Windows desktop core. SketchUp has an iPad app. Realtime Landscaping is Windows only.

Match the tool to the job, not to the ranking.

Whatever tool you use, the schedule is the document that leaves your hands and goes to a nursery, so it is worth getting the columns right once and reusing them.

The template we recommend is the six columns above, with a bed column in front so the schedule can be sorted by where the plants go: bed, common name, botanical name, quantity, size, spread, unit price, line total, with a subtotal per bed and a total at the bottom.