Can I Draw House Plans on My Ipad
- Introduction
- Definition and use cases
- Top 12 best floor plan apps
- Conclusion
Table of Contents
Introduction
When it comes to floor plans, you'd think that it's easy enough to do – all you need is a pen, a ruler, and a piece of paper. However, the entire subject is far more complex than that – if you want a floor plan that can actually work, that is.
The subject of floor plans is surprisingly deep and complex; it involves a lot of planning and meticulous measurement to get the best result possible. Even the most experienced professional might take hours, or even days, for just a single floor plan to be drawn by hand. The same can be applied to floor plans created by various iterations of CAD software.
However, all of that changed with the recent boom of popularity regarding floor plan apps for various mobile devices – Androids, iPhones, and iPads, for the most part. Since it's hard to picture a person without some sort of portable device with them nowadays, the floor plan app market has grown substantially in recent years and shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
At the same time, nothing is perfect, including these apps – with most of them having various limitations. And some of the limitations are just odd, to say the least. For example, the ability to create your geometrical shapes should be evident for any CAD app from the get-go. And yet, this option is surprisingly rare, even among the most premium apps on the market.
Definition and use cases
The actual definition of a floor plan app implies a standalone application for either Android or iOS devices that offers floor plan creation/modification capabilities for those mobile devices. Floor plan apps also cover additional designs (aside from the original floor plan design inside a house), such as foundation, landscaping, interior design, and more.
There are four primary purposes that the floor plan app can be used for, and we'll go over every one of them in the list below.
- Drawing. The most apparent purpose on the list is to use a floor plan app to do exactly what it's supposed to do – draw a floor plan. It is worth mentioning that these apps vary heavily when it comes to the precision and accuracy of your drawings, so it is better not to jump to the first app that you see in this category and evaluate your choices.
- Sales process. Another exciting use case for these apps is mainly for salespeople and contractors, and it revolves around various industries that take part in the residential sales process. Waterproofing, HVAC, foundation repairs, and many other services can give much more accurate estimates if they have an accurate floor plan to work with.
- Inspection. One more construction-related matter that benefits heavily from the addition of floor plan apps is inspection. Both site inspectors and field auditors need to have some variation of a floor plan to have on hand to add comments and mark necessary things. The accuracy of these inspections is extremely important for the safety of the building, and the overall safety on the construction site, so having these apps in your portable device is as useful as ever.
- Landscaping. Although "floor plan" usually implies only indoor schematics, modern floor plan apps can also be a helpful tool for landscapers – helping with various external parts of a house, including flowerbed placements, tree placements, and many more possibilities.
Top 12 best floor plan apps
The overall scope of the floor plan app market right now makes it somewhat tough to figure out the exact app that you want to get. Luckily enough, we've created a list that includes the 12 best floor plan apps for both Android and iOS. Next, we're going to go over those apps, one by one.
- Planner 5D
Planner 5D is a widely-known design app that can work with structures of various scales, from a single room to an entire house. It offers a robust set of features that help design all of the essential structural parts of a house, from walls and windows to stairs and additional floors. There are also landscaping capabilities, pool plans, and strong rendering capability for both 2d and 3d graphics.
The app itself is available for all platforms that can be seen in the picture: Mac, Android, iOS.
- Floor Plan Creator
Another exciting find for architects is an app called Floor Plan Creator, which offers an extensive set of floor plan generation capabilities, as well as several other features, such as perimeter calculation, floor measurements in different units, unique markings for windows, doors, electricity, and fire, and more.
The app itself is only available for Android devices with a one-time purchase to activate premium features, and there's also an alternative in the form of an HTML5 web application that runs from almost any browser in the first place but is distributed via a paid subscription plan.
- Home Design 3D
Attention to detail is the cornerstone of Home Design 3D, offering a massive amount of tools for interior design, with various colors, sizes, angles, textures, and so on. It can be used to draw entire floor plans, add and delete walls, change wall thickness, add windows, and furnish the plan with simple drag-and-drop features. It's also possible to use 3D visualization for your entire project to see how it'll look in reality, with the ability to import the whole project to Dropbox or email.
This is one of the best floor plan apps for Android, and it's also available for iOS devices.
- MagicPlan
MagicPlan is another example of well-known home design applications, but this one's approach is somewhat different – in addition to the traditional way of designing floor plans by hand, it also has an option to scan the rooms in question using your device's camera to build entire floor plans in minutes. It's also possible to use a laser meter in combination with the app to measure your space's dimensions, and you can also add furniture, calculate cost estimates, and more.
Both 2D and 3D models are available with the virtual tour capability, and the app is available for both Android and iOS devices.
- Room Planner
Another take at the best floor plan app for iPad and other devices is Room Planner, offering your standard package of floor plan app capabilities, such as designing floor plans, performing interior decoration, modifying wall colors, and so on. Additionally, Room Planner offers several different layouts and presets for different room types, like bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, etc. There are also capabilities to work both online and offline and 3D virtual reality capabilities for your projects.
This app is available for download in both Google Play Store and AppStore for respective devices.
- AR Plan 3D
AR Plan 3D is, as the name suggests, a floor plan app that focuses mainly on its AR-related capabilities. A virtual tape measurer is the main feature of this app, allowing for quick and accurate room measurements. This allows for fast floor plan generation and instant measurements of everything that was visualized in either Imperial or Metrical units. This app also includes a 2D floor plan application called Floorplanner, which offers classic floor plan generation in 2D with a side view.
This application can be used by both Android and iOS devices.
- RoomSketcher
RoomSketcher is a perfect floor plan app for a beginner architect, offering extensive design and drawing capabilities, as well as the ability to create entire rooms – all of that in a user-friendly interface. Additionally, you can also furnish your interior, experiment with different styles, choose different materials and wall colors, and more.
This app is available in both Google Play Store and an App Store.
- Grapholite Floor Plans
Grapholite is a multifunctional business graphics app that positions itself as an alternative to Visio. It offers compatibility with many different business graphic types, including flowcharts, office layouts, organizational charts, venn charts, wireframes, network layouts, and, of course, floor plans. Grapholite's floor plan capabilities include the ability to generate floor plans in a short time span and furnish it with an extensive library of elements, from windows and doors to furniture, accessories, appliances, and so on.
The mobile version of Grapholite is only available in AppStore, and its desktop version only supports Windows-based systems.
- Homify
Homify is an app that combines your standard set of floor plan app features with a variation of a social media application, which allows you to both design specific rooms for yourself and browse through other people's creations. It can also serve as a third party between a customer and an architect or a designer.
Homify is a great example on the list of the best floor plan app for iPad and Android devices.
- CubiCasa
CubiCasa combines fast indoor scanning with the ability to turn scan results into an accurate floor plan that includes various dimensions of the structure. There are many languages that the room can be labeled with. The entire app focuses on 2D plans, allowing for the automatic generation of home reports with room highlightsand several other features.
Both Android and iOS devices can download CubiCasa from a respective app store.
- SmartPlan
SmartPlan is the floor plan app that represents simplicity at its peak, offering the bare minimum of using AR technology to measure different parts of your room, including walls, floors, windows, doors, and such. This allows the app to generate floor plans in both 2D and 3D automatically. It is quite straightforward, but the downside is that there's not that much else to it. The only thing you can tweak in the app is the measurement system used, from Metric to Imperial and back, and that's about it.
The app itself is only available for Android devices, is free, and contains no ads whatsoever.
-
- Revizto
In contrast with the majority of the applications on this list, Revizto is less of a floor plan app and more of a mobile version of a full-fledged BIM app that can also perform floor plan-related activities. Revizto is a comprehensive visual collaboration tool that can be helpful to everyone who works o the same building project, from engineers and architects to contractors and owners. It offers many different features for different use cases, including issue tracking, camera sharing, visibility control, 2D and 3D maps and levels, and so on.
The Revizto app can be downloaded using both Google Play Store and AppStore.
Conclusion
The abundance of floor plan apps leads to many choices when it comes to picking one app that suits your specific goal. With this article, we've attempted to summarize the point of floor plan apps and present a list of the best floor plan apps for Android and iOS devices.
Can I Draw House Plans on My Ipad
Source: https://revizto.com/en/best-floor-plan-app-iphone-ipad-android/