The landscape design app that plants your real yard

Everything starts from the Create tab. You pick a space first, and each space carries its own sun and zone, for example "part sun, zone 8a", so every tool knows the conditions before you touch a photo. From there: Auto Design, Plant Designer, Editor, Maps, Planting Plans, Plant Doctor and the Sunlight Meter.

Auto Design is the fastest route to a result. Make it yours chips set Style, sunlight (pre-filled from the space) and Must-haves; the style sheet offers Surprise me for all 9 styles or any one of them; the photo can come from the space, the camera or your library, with a crop step that works best on single beds or borders.

A toast says your design is on its way and the gallery shows it as Creating.

Our front-yard result listed The Fairy Rose x8, Foxglove Sugar Plum x28, Hawera daffodil x66 and anemone x14, with a Before and After toggle, Save all, Edit list, Edit design and Share. Because the sunlight chip was set to part sun, the picks suited a bed under pines.

Edit design is where the phone earns its place. Tap a species chip for Remove, Fewer, More and Swap. Type a change. Try a new look for Golden Hour, Volumetric, Winter, Nighttime or Future growth. Or edit by hand in the Plant Editor, dragging plants, furniture and paving where you want them: manual control a professional can work in, and a homeowner can actually understand.

The same things. Sow ships one shared design on iPhone and Android, so the Create tab, Auto Design, the Edit design sheet, Planting Plans, care reminders and the plant library are the same on both. Sign in on an Android phone and the design you made on an iPhone is there.

The screenshots on this page come from an iPhone and a browser, where we ran our October 2026 bake-off; the Android app is the same product. Our Android roundup, linked below, covers the rest of the field.

Open usesow.com in a browser and sign in. There is nothing to install, which is why "landscape design app for Mac" and "for iPad" both resolve here. Signup is an email and a password, and in our test the dashboard opened in about 10 seconds.

Auto Designs on the web offers three directions: Classic (all 9 styles, 25 credits), Style Design (pick styles, 5 credits per design) and Goal Design (describe the outcome). Our Cottage run on the front yard came back as "Romantic Cottage Walkway" with five linked plants, 90 to 150 seconds after submitting.

Continue editing opens the design in Design Studio: the render becomes the canvas, and you place plants and objects over it from a library with Objects and Furniture and quick filters for Native, Full Sun, Shade, Deer, Drought and Pollinators. Help Me Choose asks for style, zip code, plant roles and a sunlight preference and recommends plants to match. Part of the library carries a Pro badge.

Use the phone for anything that happens in the yard: photographing a bed, measuring how much direct sun a spot really gets with the Sunlight Meter, checking a sick leaf with Plant Doctor, ticking off care tasks. Use the browser for Design Studio with a mouse, catalog pages and the gallery.

The per-bed plant schedule with an editable unit price is a mobile feature today. Planting Plans on the phone lays out beds on a satellite view, and Review Costs lists quantity, unit price and estimated cost per species, with a total (602 plants at $8,919.70 on our test plan).

The web design Shopping List PDF gives each species a quantity, a unit price and a line total with an estimated total, the unit price being the lowest listed across the online nurseries Sow tracks (usually the smallest pot), without mature size or spacing, so if you need the bed-by-bed numbers or want to set your own prices, finish on the phone.