Best Dyi Garden Design App

Home & Landscape Design Essentials

What it's good for: Garden design, with a side of home design.
Requirements: Windows 7 or higher.
Pro tip: A QuickStart feature allows you to upload your house's dimensions and design around the home's shape.

This less expensive version of the Home & Landscape Design Premium has all the design tools you need to layout a basic landscape, but fewer tools for designing a house. It has the same 4,000-plant library as the pricier version, but fewer nonplant images, such as fences and trellises. You can upload photos of your home and yard and place plants into it.

Landscape Deck & Patio

What it's good for: Designing a pool.
Requirements: Windows 7 or higher.
Pro tip: A cost estimator helps you put a price tag on your dream project.

This has all the usual features, including a plant and object library, 2-D and 3-D views, and templates for gardens, decks, and patios. But it also has a Pool Designer tool that lets you place a pool in any shape and depth you like. You can plan a backyard dreamscape, choosing everything from the deck material to the palm trees you'll put near that fabulous freeform pool.

TurboFloorPlan 3-D Home & Landscape Pro

TurboFloorPlan Home and Landscape Pro \20\17 is \$99.99. — Above: TurboFloorPlan Home and Landscape Pro 2017 is $99.99.

What it's good for: Designing a deck.
Requirements: Windows 7, 8, 10, or Vista.
Pro tip: Use the free trial period to see if you like it.

The IntelliDeck tool is the star of this show. While other software makes you manually fit a deck image to your house, IntelliDeck automatically follows the shape of your house, so the deck is in front of doorways. You choose the material and dimensions, and the tool does the rest. Use the 3,800-image plant library to place flowers around it, the object library to place a dining set on it, and see a preview of your future outdoor space faster than you can say, "We're eating dinner on the deck all summer long."

Garden Planner

What it's good for: Planning the simplest garden possible.
Requirements: Download to Windows.
Pro tip: This one has a free trial too. Give it a spin.

If you think of sophisticated graphics, gigantic plant databases, and global sun-positioning tools as distractions that keep you from mapping out your garden, this is the software for you. It's barebones, giving you simple, 2-D overhead views of your plan. You can click, drag, and drop objects into it without busting brain cells poring through a manual. Instead of a library and plant finder of specific species, you get options including "dense shrub," "simple shrub," or "flowers." The graphics are "cartoonish," according to one reviewer, but we're gardeners, not gamers, so that's fine with us.

Get more help laying out and designing a garden with our Garden Design 101 guides. Read more: