Bring your architectural design to life by dragging and dropping doors, windows, staircases, fixtures, and even complete rooms into your floor plan.
You'll get thousands of ready-made elements for architectural drawing including building outlines, room outlines, ceilings, stairs, countertops, and hundreds of furniture pieces from chairs to beds. SmartDraw also includes many photo-realistic textures that can take your design to the next level.
SmartDraw also has built-in templates to help you visualize the outside of your home. Create an elevation plan of your home to visualize color, siding type, roofing material, trim, and other finishes and textures. Make sure the outside of your home matches your vision in style and proportion.
SmartDraw works hand in glove with your existing AI workflow whether you prefer ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or something else. Use AI to generate preliminary layouts, get ideas for designs with furniture and lighting, and create mood boards. Next, easily add any generated images to SmartDraw to enhance your architectural drawing.
Export your floor plan and ask AI to flag possible code violations or overlapping systems.
Click. Drag. Done. That's how easy it is to add walls with SmartDraw's floor plan designer. Want exact dimensions? Type them directly into the wall or shape label. Get your layout right the first time without guesswork. Adjust lengths, measure spaces, and fine-tune every detail without breaking your flow.
Layers let you separate your floor plan into distinct views and focus on the system you're working on. You can manage complex electrical, plumbing, HVAC information easily and make edits without affecting other parts of your plan. Use a scale-independent annotation layer to keep track of information like the floor plan's author and other settings.
SmartDraw lets you draw to scale easily. Choose a common standard architectural scale, a metric scale, and more. You can easily change the scale at any time, even after you've started drawing. You can print to scale just as easily. And your printed scale doesn't have to match your drawing's scale.
Add model numbers, costs, descriptions, and other important manufacturing information to elements in your floor plan to display as a tool tip.
You can also export any data as a manifest. You can export the number of chairs of a certain model or get a list of equipment based on purchase date.
SmartDraw is easy to work with no matter what other apps you use. You can add floor plans to:
SmartDraw works hand in glove with most file storage systems. You can save your floor plan designs directly to:
There is no need to create a parallel set of common folders and permissions, SmartDraw can just save files directly into your existing set up. You can spend less time managing software and more time on making floor plans.
Share your floor plan or blueprint with anyone, even if they don't own a copy of SmartDraw, with a link.
Whether you're sharing using a link or a shared folder, you can control who can view or edit your files when it comes to sensitive designs.
You can also easily export any diagram as a PDF or common image formats like PNG or SVG.
Have a question? Chat or email us. SmartDraw support is in-house and free!
Share your architectural design with your team for feedback and collaboration. Your team can edit designs in real time or add comments.
Need to get feedback from a client? No problem, just email them a link to see what they think.
SmartDraw also works where you already communicate with others. You can collaborate on a design in Microsoft Teams®, Slack or Confluence.
SmartDraw comes with dozens of templates to help you create architectural designs, drawings, floor plans, house plans, office spaces, facilities, and more.
Gather requirements for your design. Are you designing from scratch or renovating an existing building? What are the key requirements or specific features that must be included?
Measure the space you're designing for and review any existing blueprints. Measure walls, doors, windows, and any wall openings.
Choose a template that best fits your architectural project. SmartDraw has both residential and commercial floor plan templates.
Create an outline by adding walls for each room of the building.
Type directly into your dimension labels to enter exact measurements. You can easily adjust wall thickness, length, and angles for precise architectural design.
Begin adding features to the space like the doors and windows. Enhance your design by adding staircases, fireplaces, columns, and built-in features. Then layer in symbols for furniture, kitchens, bathrooms, lighting, electrical, plumbing, or HVAC systems.
Keep your drawing clear by separating architectural, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC details into different layers.
Invite clients or team members to give you feedback and work on your architectural design in real-time. Check measurements, experiment with different layouts, and generate quick area calculations. Make notes or even make changes on the fly as a group.
Start with the exact architectural design template you need—not just a blank screen. Then easily customize to fit your needs with thousands of ready-made symbols you can stamp directly onto your plan.
SmartDraw comes with dozens of templates to help you create:
While many might call AutoCAD the king of floor plan software, it may not be the ideal tool for everyone. There's no reason to shell out a ton of money for AutoCAD when a software like SmartDraw has almost all the same CAD power for a fraction of the cost. Learn more about our AutoCAD alternative.
Most free design tools come with limits. With SmartDraw, you can try the full architectural design software free, and if you decide to keep using it, you'll still pay only a fraction of what AutoCAD costs.
You can import a PDF as a background image you can trace or add other information to. Add evacuation routes, notes, and more to an existing design.
With SmartDraw, you can change the scale of any drawing at any time. You can flip between standard and metric scales at will. You can also define your own scale if it is not among the standard scales offered.
Using layers in SmartDraw allows you to group and separate items like electrical symbols or HVAC information so you can show and hide details or prevent editing of specific layers as needed. Learn more.
You can easily import photos to create texture or add more detail to any design. You can even import an image of an existing floor plan if you want to draw over it in more detail or make notes to share with your team.
Discover why SmartDraw is the best architectural drawing software today.