Planner 5D for landscape design: strong 3D, no plant data

Planner 5D is a 2D and 3D home design tool. You draw a floor plan, furnish it from a catalog, and view the result in 3D, including walkthroughs. It runs in a browser and as apps for iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows, and its free tier allows unlimited projects with 50% of the catalog.

ScreensDesign estimated its revenue at about $750,000 a month in September 2026, so it is a large, established product, built for interiors first and extended outdoors with an outdoor catalog.

On Google it is the strongest SEO competitor in this category. When we pulled the live results on October 12, 2026, Planner 5D ranked first for "landscape design app free" with a listicle, held the top five results for "planner 5d landscape" with its own landing pages, and its image generator page ranked second for "ai garden design".

If you searched for landscape design software and landed on Planner 5D, that is why.

None of that is a criticism. Ranking well and designing yards well are different skills, and this page is about the second one. Everything about Planner 5D here comes from its official pricing and feature pages as of October 12, 2026.

Yes, as a layout. Planner 5D lets you draw an outdoor area in 2D, lay out hardscape such as patios, paths and structures, drop in objects from its outdoor catalog, and view the whole thing in 3D with a walkthrough.

For deciding where the patio goes, how wide the path should be, and whether the pergola blocks the view from the kitchen, it is a capable tool, and it exports to PDF. Objects stay individually movable, so a layout is never a one-shot image.

Two things we could not confirm from its pages. Planner 5D has an image generator for interiors; whether it produces a landscape design from a photo of your yard is unverified, so the feature table marks photo redesign as "Partly". Its pages also mention AR, but we could not establish the scope, so that is "Partly" as well.

Whether free exports carry a watermark is not stated in a way we could verify, so the table shows it as unverified rather than guessing.

What it does not do is the subject of the next section, and it is the part that matters once the patio is placed and the question becomes what to plant around it.

We found none. Planner 5D's catalog items are generic furniture and plant objects: a tree, a shrub, a flower bed, sized and styled to look right in a render. We found no plant species, no hardiness zone data, no climate data, and no mature size or spacing data on its site.

You can draw a bed, but nothing in the tool knows whether what you put in it will live where you live.

Here is what that means in practice, using our own test yard. A brick ranch in Raleigh, NC sits in USDA zone 8a, and its front beds are in part sun under pine trees. A plant that thrives there is a different plant from one that thrives in full sun in the desert or in a cold northern zone.

The three facts that decide whether a planting works are hardiness zone, light, and mature size, and a design tool without them can only draw shapes. A green object labeled "shrub" in a 3D render might stand for a four-foot boxwood or a fifteen-foot viburnum; the render looks the same either way, and the yard does not.

The planting-first tools handle this in different ways. Neighborbrite inferred our location, set zone 8a, and guessed full sun for the pine-shaded bed, which we corrected to partial sun before it generated; its plan then named five real cultivars sensible for part shade in 8a.

Sow's iPhone app carries sun and zone on each saved space ("part sun, zone 8a") and pre-fills them before you pick a photo, and every plant it places is a catalog species with zone, sun, mature size, bloom and care data.

Klora, a free browser planting-plan tool, lists 1,422 species with sun, deer and pollinator icons and shows the plan at year 1, 5, 10 and mature, so you can see what the shrub becomes.

None of those three is a 3D modeler. That is the trade: Planner 5D gives you the walkthrough and skips the plants; the plant tools give you the plants and skip the walkthrough. The screenshots in this section show what plant data looks like when a tool has it.

Planner 5D has a free tier with unlimited projects and 50% of the catalog. Premium is $19.99 a month or $59.99 a year and includes credits for its image generator (its pricing page lists 100 or 1,200 credits, depending on the plan). Professional is $49.99 a month or $399.99 a year and adds 4K renders. Prices checked October 2026 on planner5d.com.

For comparison, Sow is free to start and Pro is $39.99 a year on the web ($59.99 a year through the App Store), with Pro+ at $99.99 a year.

A year of Planner 5D Premium is $20.00 more than a year of Sow Pro on the web, and the two buy different things: Premium buys more catalog and generator credits, Pro buys planting plans, the satellite map editor, and the priced plant schedule.

Planner 5D's free tier gives unlimited projects that you draw yourself; Sow's gives 10 generated designs to start and more for taking part.

If you only need a layout, Planner 5D's free tier may be all you ever pay. If you need plants, no Planner 5D tier adds them, so the money would go to a different tool regardless.

Sow starts from a photo and is built around plants. Upload a photo of your yard and it returns a design with real, named species that suit your zone and light, from a catalog of 12,000+ plants.

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.

Its Editor lets you lay out plants, furniture and paving by hand on a plain photo, Garden Planner lays out a grid bed, and Pro adds planting plans on a satellite view, with quantities and prices per bed, and care after planting. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web, with the same project on all three.

What Sow does not do, and Planner 5D does: no 3D model or walkthrough, no AR, no floor plans, no hardscape CAD or construction documents, and no Mac or Windows desktop app. Sow places paving, mulch, gravel, fences, structures and water features as design elements on the photo, which is a picture, not a drawing.

Other Sow limits worth knowing: outdoor plants only; weather-aware care is US-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 feature table is lopsided in both directions, which is the honest picture. If your question is "where does the patio go", Planner 5D. If your question is "what do I plant, and will it live", Sow.

It depends on which half of the job you mean. For 3D modeling, nothing on this page beats Planner 5D except SketchUp, which gives more control at the cost of a much steeper learning curve and no plant intelligence of any kind.

For hardscape mockups on a photo with AR, iScape is the long-running choice on iOS, though Pro is $29.99 a month or $299.99 a year and its 2D and 3D design is iOS only. For plants, the answer is one of the planting-first tools below.

We can show the difference rather than describe it. The same front-yard photo went through Neighborbrite and Sow on their free tiers on October 13, 2026.

Neighborbrite produced a plan with five named cultivars in about 60 seconds and the image in about 33; Sow's web render took under a minute and appeared in the gallery 90 to 150 seconds after submitting. Both kept the house and walkway, and both watermarked the free image.

Neither is a 3D model, and Planner 5D could not have told us the plant names.

On Sow's iPhone app the same yard came back with five species carrying botanical names and quantities (The Fairy Rose x8, Foxglove Sugar Plum x28, Hawera Daffodil x66, Anemone x14, plus one more), and tapping any species offers Remove, Fewer, More, or Swap. That is the thing a generic "shrub" object cannot give you: a name you can take to a nursery and a count to buy.

Yes, and for a project with both a patio and planting it is a sensible split. Use Planner 5D for the structure: where the hard surfaces go, how the levels work, what the view looks like from the house in 3D. Then take the bed shapes to a tool that knows plants. Expect to redraw the beds in the plant tool rather than import them.

Two ways to do the planting half. Klora lets you draw the beds to scale over aerial imagery of your address and place real species by hand; for our test address it imported state aerial imagery at 5.5 inches per pixel with parcel lines in about 30 seconds, free, with no account, though PDF export and a second design need the $24 pass or $69 a year.

Sow's Planting Plans finds beds on the satellite view and fills them with species for the zone and light, with four layout styles per bed (Layered, Drifts, Rows, Edged) and a priced schedule; our test plan ran to 17 beds across its spaces, and the cost review listed 602 plants at an estimated $8,919.70, every unit price editable.