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March 27, 2009

Floorplanner – You Are The Designer

ss-floorplanner

Floorplanner allows you to design your own home without the expense of hiring an architect or interior designer. Founded by an architect, the online design program replicates what an architect or interior designer would do, allowing you to plan and layout your home and office spaces. You can experiment with different layouts until you find the one you want.

The beauty of Floorplanner is that it’s simple enough for anyone to use it. You can make a 2D scale model of your home and also decorate it with a range of hundreds of furniture and design items. Then use the 3D rendering to see how it will really look when completed. The site uses a speedy drag and drop interface to make designing painless.

In addition, Floorplanner has a strong social element, allowing you to share your floor plans through links and widgets. This also makes it easy for users to find public floor plans to use as starting points for their own designs. Floorplanner does a great job of delivering the functionality that you could previously only get through costly software or an expensive architect. For most home users, the free version is more than adequate – and you can’t get much better value than that.

Practical Uses:

  • Import the plans you have found on other sites and customize them to design your dream home
  • Plan the design for your new kitchen
  • Layout your new offices to ensure everything you need will fit
  • Discover whether that new sofa will work with your living space

Insider Tips:

  • Get started more quickly by importing an existing drawing
  • Use Google Friend Connect or the active forums to connect with the Floorplanner community
  • Draw your plan in 2D before looking at the 3D view
  • Use the gallery to find floor plan ideas to get you started

What we liked:

  • Floorplanner supports the emerging OpenID login process
  • There’s an online tutorial to help you get started with your first drawing
  • The 3D view is surprisingly good
  • Floorplanner works with any modern browser

What we didn’t like:

  • The ads before every action were annoying; but at least there’s a cost effective upgrade option to remove them
  • 3D rendering can take a while

Alternatives:

Company Info:

Costs:

  • Free with advertising, paid accounts starting at $27.50 per year

Comments

  1. March 30, 2009

    Reply
    John DeLuca

    I use floorplanner as well and am very impressed with it. It’s intuitive and straightforward. It gives you a great deal of control over the plan and furniture. One of the competing products that I like is http://www.planningwiz.com. While I prefer floorplanner, there are attributes of planningwiz I like better. Particularly, planningwiz is much faster than floorplanner (changes are more instantaneous) and no ads but it doesn’t create as compelling drawings. In the end, I like floorplanner better but it’s a matter of preference. Planningwiz also has no limit on the number of drawings and floors and you can export to image without paying like with floorplanner.

  2. July 13, 2010

    Reply
    Dori

    Hello,

    I would like to present our websites galleries and products

    http://www.2dplan.com/gallery.html

    http://www.2d-landscapearchitecture.com/gallery.html

    These websites present a colorful graphic tools for architectural presentations.

    Thanks

    Dori

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