Neighborbrite review: what Pro costs, what free allows, and where it stops

Neighborbrite is a photo-redesign tool for yards, sold as a monthly subscription with a limited free tier. You upload a photo, pick a style, confirm a few facts about the site, and it writes a short plan, picks a plant palette, and draws a planted version of your photo.

It runs in a browser and has apps on the App Store and Google Play. Its site claims 800K+ registered users, 20M+ designs, 170+ countries and 5,000+ plants; we have not verified those figures. It is the tool most homeowners try first, because it costs nothing to try.

The free tier allows four watermarked designs a day, enough to try it on your own yard. The full product is Pro at $24.99 a month or Business at $49.99 a month. The question is what you get, where it stops, and what to use when it does.

Signup is an email login code, no password; from entering the email to the first screen took about a minute. The photo step accepts JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC, lets you add an optional second angle, and offers two shortcuts: a Street View photo of your house by address, or a sample yard. We uploaded the front-walkway photo.

Next comes style. There are 18 of them, from Desert and Mediterranean to Modern and English, plus a Designer's choice option. We picked Cottage. Picking a style moves you straight to the next step, with no separate confirm button.

This is the step that impressed us most, and the one where it made its only real mistake. Before generating, Neighborbrite shows what it has inferred: location Raleigh, NC (from our connection), hardiness zone 8a, sunlight, and slope flat. Zone and location were right.

Sunlight was wrong: it guessed Full sun for a bed that sits under pine trees and reads as part shade in the photo. We changed it to Partial sun by hand. If you take one thing from this page, it is to check that screen before you click.

Then it writes a plan. About 60 seconds after we clicked "Looks right", a short text design plan appeared with a five-plant palette: Annabelle hydrangea, Concord Grape spiderwort, Northern Exposure Sienna coral bells, Evergold sedge and Big Daddy hosta. These are real cultivars, not generic "flowering shrub" placeholders, and a sensible part-shade palette for zone 8a. You can push back with "Want something different?" before any image is made.

We clicked "Generate my design" and the image was ready in about 33 seconds, with a progress strip that read "Reading your yard photo", "Matching plants to Zone 8a", "Choosing partial sun plants" and "Arranging the space". That is roughly a minute and a half of generation time from photo to picture, including the plan.

The front-yard result is a 1024 by 1024 PNG with Neighborbrite's watermark bottom right. The house, walkway, bird feeder and pine straw were all preserved, and the plants in the picture are recognisably the palette: hosta, coral bells, sedge, hydrangea and spiderwort along both sides of the walk. Placement is plausible and slightly dense. It is a convincing picture of what that bed could be.

The backyard was design two of four for the day; the confirm step remembered Partial sun. The plan took about 30 seconds and chose six plants (Incrediball hydrangea, summer phlox, thread-leaf blue star, First Frost hosta, Chocolate Shogun astilbe and EverColor Everglow sedge), with beds along the fence, the dirt path kept clear, and the open lawn preserved.

The image took about 30 seconds more and came back at 768 by 1344, keeping the portrait aspect; fence and both young trees preserved, new beds along the fence as planned.

One observation. Because the plan said to preserve the open lawn, the bare, patchy lawn was left exactly as it was, so the result reads as "beds added" rather than "yard fixed". Sow did the same on the same photo; it is how photo-redesign tools treat lawn unless you tell them otherwise.

Yes, on our first design, and it is the most complete plant list we have seen from a photo-redesign tool's first design. The "Plant palette for this design" button carries a Pro badge, but on our first free design it opened anyway. The header read "Raleigh, NC, Zone 8a, Partial sun".

The table listed 5 plant varieties and 41 plants in total, with botanical names, quantities and prices from Nature Hills, a nursery partner: Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle' x5 at $19.99, Tradescantia 'Concord Grape' x15 at $19.99, Heuchera 'Northern Exposure Sienna' x8 at $43.86, Carex hachijoensis 'Evergold' x10 at $19.99, and Hosta 'Big Daddy' x3 at $32.85.

That is about $1,049 of plants before shipping. Quantities are editable, there are cart buttons, and you can print or share the list.

Two caveats. First, because the button is badged Pro and the billing page lists "unlimited plant lists" under Pro, we could not confirm whether plant lists stay free after the first design. Second, the table shows no mature size and no spacing.

Without the eventual width of an Annabelle hydrangea next to the quantity, you cannot tell whether five is right or whether they will swallow the hostas in three years.

The result page also carries a clearly labelled lead-generation button, "Get a quote from a top-rated landscaper", which is part of how its free tier pays for itself.

Neighborbrite Pro costs $24.99 a month. Business costs $49.99 a month. Free is $0. These are from the in-app billing page, which we opened on October 13, 2026; the screenshot in this section is that page. No annual price was shown.

What each tier lists. Free: limited design creations, multiple styles, transformation strength, more-like-this, download images, personal license. Pro: unlimited designs, text style customization, unlimited plant lists, thousands of elements, exact placement of elements, add elements by text, and magic edit. Business: commercial license, watermark removal, unlimited elements, high-res downloads, auto-enhance and a virtual staging label.

Read that Business line again, because it is the thing most people miss. Watermark removal is a Business feature at $49.99 a month, not a Pro one; a homeowner who pays $24.99 a month for Pro still gets a watermarked image.

We want to be generous here, because it earned it.

Now the other column, with the same precision.

Same photo, same style, same correction to partial sun wherever the tool asked. Neighborbrite's free result is on the left, Sow's free web result on the right.

Neighborbrite planted hostas, coral bells and sedges. Sow planted catmint along the walk, white peonies, foxglove spires and roses toward the house. Both preserved the house, walkway, bird feeder and pine straw, and both are watermarked on the free tier. Sow's came with five named plants linked to catalog pages: Buff Beauty rose, Duchesse de Nemours peony, Camelot Lavender foxglove, Baltic parsley and Snowflake catmint.

On light, Neighborbrite asked, guessed wrong, and let us fix it. Sow's iPhone app takes the light from the saved space before it draws, and its picks for the same photo were part-shade appropriate: The Fairy Rose, Foxglove Sugar Plum, Hawera daffodil and anemone. On the web, Design Studio's Help Me Choose panel recommends plants from a zip code and a sunlight preference.

On the backyard, the two tools behaved almost identically: a new planted border along the fence, the trees kept, and the patchy lawn left as photographed. Sow's "Romantic Cottage Haven" used Silas Marner rose, common foxglove, checker mallow and two more; Neighborbrite used hydrangea, phlox, hosta, astilbe and sedge.

This is where the two part company, and it is the reason Sow exists. Neighborbrite gives you an image and a list. Sow treats the image as the start of a project.

Every plant in a Sow design is a real species from a catalog of 12,000+ plants with zone, sun, mature size, bloom and care data behind it.

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.

On the iPhone test, the front-yard design came with quantities per species (The Fairy Rose x8, Foxglove Sugar Plum x28, Hawera Daffodil x66, Anemone x14, plus one more), and tapping a species gave us Remove, Fewer, More and Swap. Neighborbrite's edits, by contrast, are regenerations on Free and image edits on Pro.

Then the design can carry on. Planting Plans found beds on the satellite view of a saved address and filled them: 17 beds across its spaces in the plan we captured, and a Review Costs screen listing every species per bed with a quantity, an editable unit price and an estimated total of $8,919.70 for 602 plants, before the PDF export.

Care after planting is weather-aware in the US, live nursery prices sit on the plant pages, plant identification and Plant Doctor work from the camera, a grid bed planner sits alongside, and the same project is on iPhone, Android and the web.

And what Sow does not have, so the table is read fairly: no AR, no 3D walkthrough, no hardscape CAD or construction documents. Weather-aware care is US-only. Outdoor plants only.

The web design Shopping List PDF prices each species at the lowest listed nursery price (often the smallest pot) and does not show mature size or spacing; the per-bed schedule with an editable unit price is in Planting Plans on mobile, Pro.

iScape is in the table for scale; its cells come from its official pages.

• NE

  Neighborbrite

  Pro $24.99 a month, with a limited free tier of 4 watermarked designs a day; Business $49.99 a month, the only tier without the watermark; no annual price shown. Sow: 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. The table shows the web prices for Sow.

• Put plainly

  Neighborbrite is a monthly subscription with a small daily free allowance, and Sow gives the most free design work you can plant and keep editing. Sow is also the cheaper paid tool, at $39.99 a year on the web against $24.99 a month, and the Sow paid tiers buy a different category of thing: editable plants, planting plans with quantities and prices, and care.

A sensible path for most homeowners is both: a Neighborbrite free-tier design to see whether a style is right, then Sow when you want to know exactly what to buy and where it goes.