You can start with one of the many built-in floor plan templates that most closely match your project. SmartDraw has templates for both residential house plans and commercial spaces like retail, hospitals, and other facilities.
You'll get thousands of ready-made visuals for furniture, kitchen and bathroom fixtures, lighting fixtures, cabinets, office furniture, wiring, plumbing, HVAC, security systems, plants, landscape elements, and more! SmartDraw also includes many photo-realistic textures that can take your design to the next level.
Draw your house plan or office plan by easily dragging and dropping new elements like doors, windows, appliances, fixtures, and furniture.
SmartDraw works hand in glove with your existing AI workflow whether you prefer ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or something else. Use AI to generate ideas for layouts, provide inspiration for interior design styles, and create mood boards. Next, easily add any generated images to SmartDraw to enhance your floor plan design.
Export your floor plan and ask AI to offer suggestions for improved space utilization and flow you can easily implement in SmartDraw.
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!
Get instant feedback on any floor plan. Your team or clients can even join you in making edits in real time.
SmartDraw also works where you already communicate with your team. You can collaborate on floor plans in Microsoft Teams®, Slack or Confluence.
Use SmartDraw's floor plan designer to realize your vision and share the results.
SmartDraw comes with dozens of templates to help you create floor plans, house plans, office spaces, kitchens, bathrooms, decks, landscapes, facilities, and more.
Determine the area or building you want to design or document. If the building already exists, decide how much (a room, a floor, or the entire building) of it to draw. If the building does not yet exist, brainstorm designs based on the size and shape of the location on which to build.
If the building exists, measure the walls, doors, and pertinent furniture so that the floor plan will be accurate. If the layout is being created for an entirely new area, be sure that the total area will fit where it is to be built.
Choose a floor plan template that best fits your project. SmartDraw has basic floor plan templates for rooms, houses, offices, and more.
Create an outline by adding walls for each room of the building.
SmartDraw makes it easy to drag walls to adjust them or just type the length directly into walls to modify them. Once you've created an outline for your room or house, click on a wall and you'll see two types of growth handles appear. The handle with an up and down or right to left arrow will allow you to move your wall inward or outward vertically or horizontally. The handle at the corners where walls meet will help you adjust your wall diagonally by letting you move the placement of the corner.
Begin adding features to the space by including the unchangeable things, like the doors and windows, as well as the refrigerator, dishwasher, dryer, and other important appliances that must be placed in a specific location.
Add furniture like desks, equipment, chairs and so on.
Invite clients or team members to give you feedback and work on your floor plan in real-time. Make notes or even make changes on the fly as a group. SmartDraw is so easy to use, you can make changes in real-time.
Once your floor plan is complete you can insert it directly to any Microsoft Office app like Microsoft Word® or PowerPoint®, or add it to Google Docs™ or Google Slides™.
SmartDraw also has apps to integrate with Atlassian's Confluence and Jira. You can share your floor plan design in Microsoft Teams. You can also easily export your floor plan as a PDF or print it.
SmartDraw's floor plan software is used by millions of users. Why? Because it's easy to use and offers incredibly powerful scaled drawing features at a reasonable cost.
Designing floor plans doesn't have to be difficult. SmartDraw gives you powerful tools and a broad selection of templates and symbols that help jumpstart any project. You'll be able to adjust dimensions and angles by simply typing them in, drag and drop elements, easily add textures, and more.
A floor plan is a scaled diagram of a residential or commercial space viewed from above. The scope of a floor plan may vary. You can create a drawing of an entire building, a single floor, or a single room. Your floor plan may be of an office layout, a warehouse or factory space, or a home. You can even create a floor plan of event space and conventions.
A typical floor plan will include measurements as well as furniture, appliances, equipment or anything else necessary to the purpose of the plan.
You can use floor plans for
AI tools and LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are great for generating designs in the early stages of planning for inspiration. However, the images they produce are not editable and not to scale. We recommend using LLMs alongside a tool like SmartDraw's floor plan creator. This gives you the best of both worlds. You can translate a text prompt into an inspirational image and use SmartDraw to create a precise scaled drawing you can hand off to a contractor.
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.
SmartDraw lets you import a PDF and make it a background image you can sketch over. 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 easiest floor plan creator.