Which floor plan tool should I choose for a home, a listing or a building project?
Start with the output you need to hand to someone. For a plan you will show to a family member or a contractor in a conversation, Floorplanner, Planner 5D and Sweet Home 3D are enough: you draw walls, drop in doors and windows, furnish the rooms and check the 3D view.
Floorplanner works in the browser, Planner 5D adds apps for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and visionOS, and Sweet Home 3D is a desktop program that saves to your own disk.
For a plan that sells something, such as a listing or a renovation quote, RoomSketcher and Cedreo are built for the job. RoomSketcher produces 3D photos and 360 views from the same plan and prints to scale on its Pro plan. Cedreo adds elevations, roof plans and a table of surface areas and positions itself for home builders and remodelers.
For a plan that goes into a permit file or a tender, none of those apply. Archicad and Allplan are BIM programs where sections and schedules come from the model, and both state that they target professionals. If you are unsure which camp you are in, try a free tier first: Floorplanner, Planner 5D, HomeByMe, Roomstyler and Cedreo (one project) all let you draw before you pay.
How do the pricing models of European floor planners differ?
There are four models in this category, and mixing them up causes most budget surprises. Floorplanner sells credits: 5 credits for $8.15, 10 for $16.30, 30 for $48.90 and 100 for $163.00, spent on higher-resolution exports, 3D tours and renders. RoomSketcher is a subscription with credits inside it, with Pro at $24 a month (or $12 a month billed $144 a year) giving 5 credits monthly and Team at $70 (or $35 billed $420 a year) giving 20.
Planner 5D uses ordinary tiers in euros: Free, Premium at 19.99 euro monthly or 59.99 euro annually, and Professional at 49.99 euro monthly or 399.99 euro annually. Allplan charges per user per month, billed yearly, from EUR 123 for Basic to EUR 353 for Ultimate, excluding VAT.
Then there are the tools where the price is not readable or not published: Cedreo's Personal, Pro and Enterprise plans, HomeByMe's paid options and Archicad's Studio and Collaborate plans all send you to the website or a quote. Sweet Home 3D, Roomstyler and Blender are free, though Roomstyler's free terms give the vendor a perpetual licence to use designs made under the free subscription.
Does choosing a European floor plan tool settle where my project data lives?
No, and the pages we read are candid about it. Most vendors here are established in the EU or EEA, so the contract, the register entry and the supervisory authority are European: Dutch law and KVK for Floorplanner, a Nantes register entry for Cedreo, an RCS Versailles entry for HomeByMe. That is the part a European procurement officer usually asks about first.
Where the files sit is a separate question. Floorplanner, Cedreo, Planner 5D and Roomstyler do not state a data location on the pages we checked, RoomSketcher says information may be stored in Norway, the United States or other countries where it has facilities, and Cedreo has an office in Atlanta alongside its French entity. HomeByMe's privacy policy covers Dassault Systèmes and its affiliates, which maintain offices outside Europe.
The cleanest arrangements are Sweet Home 3D, where the desktop app stores files locally and the website is hosted by OVH in Roubaix, France, and Archicad Studio, where BIMcloud Basic can run on a server you host. Note that the Archicad imprint lists a US web hosting provider for its website, which concerns the site rather than your models.
How do I move from SketchUp to a European floor plan tool?
Decide first whether you are replacing the modelling or the planning. SketchUp is a general 3D modeller sold by Trimble Inc. of Westminster, Colorado, and its plans are billed in US dollars. If most of your SketchUp time went into rooms, walls and furniture, a purpose-built planner such as Floorplanner or RoomSketcher is faster, and our SketchUp alternatives page compares all ten tools against it.
If you modelled objects of your own, keep the geometry. Planner 5D's Professional plan accepts .obj, .fbx, .blend and .stl uploads, and Blender is a free general 3D suite that can open and rework models, although the pages we read describe its video editing rather than any architectural tooling.
None of the tool pages we checked promises direct import of SketchUp files, so plan to redraw the floor plan from your measurements. Sweet Home 3D lets you import a blueprint to trace walls over, which is often the quickest way to start. Finish a live project before you cancel the SketchUp subscription.
When should I not switch to one of these tools?
Do not switch when your work product is a construction drawing and you are looking at a consumer planner. Floorplanner is described on its own page as a lightweight planner, not a CAD or BIM tool, and the same limit is stated for RoomSketcher, Planner 5D, HomeByMe and Sweet Home 3D. For drawings that carry legal weight, use Archicad or Allplan, or a CAD product from the CAD category.
Stay put, too, when your team depends on a deep extension ecosystem or on custom components that no planner imports. A move costs a week of retraining, and the benefit is mostly jurisdiction and price, so it only pays if you open the tool often enough to feel either.
Be careful with the free options when your plans are confidential. Roomstyler's free terms grant FLOORPLANNER.COM B.V. a perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable licence to publish, amend and use designs, and Floorplanner's free exports carry a watermark at 960 by 540 pixels.
Can these tools work together in one workflow?
Some pairings are natural. Floorplanner and Roomstyler share a vendor, and the Roomstyler page points to Floorplanner for scaled plans and higher-quality exports, so a hobby designer can style a room in one and draw the whole home in the other. Planner 5D's CAD export on Professional, and its model upload, give a path in and out of other software.
At the professional end, Allplan's BIMPLUS is described as an open BIM collaboration platform for sharing models between disciplines, and Archicad offers openBIM workflows and BIMcloud for teamwork. Archicad's page also says teamwork runs on a BIMcloud you host or on a cloud plan, which fits offices with a server of their own.
For visuals, a team might model in Blender, which is free and states that all output is your sole property, and use a planner only for the plan itself. That is two tools to learn, so it suits someone who already knows 3D.
