Free Floor Plan Software for Mac: What You Actually Get

Last updated: 13 September 2026

Six floor plan tools run on macOS and cost nothing to start, but "free" means five different things among them. Sweet Home 3D and Arti are free outright with no account. RoomSketcher, Planner 5D and Coohom are free tiers that hold back the export, the furniture catalogue or the 3D render. Live Home 3D is a paid app with a trial. The question worth asking is not what costs nothing — it is where the wall is, and whether you hit it before you finish.

Every comparison below was checked on 23 August 2026. Prices move; re-check before you buy anything.

The short answer

The most important factor is what "free" is protecting. Free tiers exist to create a moment where you have done the work and cannot get it out. That moment is usually the export — you draw the whole flat, then find the PDF is watermarked or the resolution is unusable.

Tool	Free how?	Account?	Offline?	Where the wall is
Sweet Home 3D	Genuinely free, open source (GPL)	No	Yes	None. It is a 2006-era Java interface.
Arti	Free tier, no account	No	Yes	macOS only. No mobile, no cloud, no CAD export.
RoomSketcher	Free tier	Required	No	Export quality and 3D renders sit behind Pro
Planner 5D	Free tier	Required	No	Half the furniture catalogue is Premium
Coohom	Free tier	Required	No	Render credits, then it stops
Live Home 3D	Trial only	Apple ID	Yes	It is paid software — $29.99 one-off and up

In short: if you want to draw a plan tonight without giving anyone an email address, the list is two items long — Sweet Home 3D and Arti. Everything else in this category is a web app that wants an account first.

What "free" really costs on each one

The key difference between these tools is not features. It is the shape of the bargain.

Free tiers on subscription products are marketing surfaces, and they are tuned. RoomSketcher's Pro plan runs $12 per user per month billed annually, with a Team plan at $35 per month (Capterra, 2026). Planner 5D's Premium is $19.99 monthly or $59.99 annually, and its free plan explicitly includes only 50% of the furniture catalogue (Planner 5D pricing page, 2026). Neither is a bad deal for a professional. Both are designed so that the free version gets you invested and then stops.

Paid desktop apps are honest in a different way. Live Home 3D is $29.99 for Standard and $49.99 for Pro as a one-off purchase, with subscription tiers from $5.99 per month (App Store listings, August 2026). You know the price before you start. Note that Live Home 3D's tier structure is unusually tangled — sources disagree on what Pro Lifetime costs — so check the App Store page itself rather than a review site.

Genuinely free software has a different cost, and it is your time. Sweet Home 3D asks for nothing and gives you everything, and its interface is recognisably a Java application from the mid-2000s. For a lot of people that is a completely acceptable trade. For others it is the reason they close it within five minutes.

Sweet Home 3D: still the benchmark

Sweet Home 3D is free, open source under the GPL, runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and has no account, no tier and no watermark. It has been maintained since 2006, has a large furniture library, imports and exports more formats than anything else on this list, and has twenty years of community plugins behind it.

It is the honest benchmark, and any tool that claims to beat it should say what it gives up. Sweet Home 3D runs on three operating systems; a Mac-only app does not. Sweet Home 3D reads and writes formats that a newer tool will not have implemented. Sweet Home 3D has documentation written by people who have used it for a decade.

What people bounce off is the interface. It is dense, it is Java, and it does not behave like a 2026 Mac application — no unified toolbar, no native inspector, no gestures you would expect on a trackpad. If that does not bother you, you can stop reading and go download it; it is a genuinely good piece of software and it costs nothing forever.

Arti: the same freedom, in a native Mac app

Arti is the tool we make, so treat this section accordingly — the rest of the page is written to be useful whichever way you go.

Arti is a native macOS app. It opens on an empty plan, with no account, no sign-up and no network connection required. You draw rooms in 2D, place doors and windows, furnish from a catalogue of 244 pieces, apply floor and wall materials, then switch to 3D and walk through the result at eye level. Plans live in one SQLite file inside the app's own sandbox on your disk. It ships in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

What it does not do, stated plainly:

macOS only. No Windows, no Linux, no iPad, no phone.
No cloud, no collaboration, no shared links — not yet.
No CAD export. You get a PNG image, not a DWG or an SVG.
No import of an existing plan or a scanned drawing.

And what it is not, which matters more: it is a drawing tool, not a measuring instrument. It does not check building regulations, it does not compute a legally valid surface area, and its dimensions are arithmetic on what you typed. Do not send an Arti plan to a planning authority.

You can run the whole thing in your browser without downloading anything — it is the same app, not a cut-down demo.

The web apps: RoomSketcher, Planner 5D, Coohom

These three are the same shape: a browser app, an account, a free tier, and a subscription. They are also, to be fair, the most capable tools on this list — RoomSketcher's 3D output is better than anything a small native app produces, and Planner 5D's catalogue is enormous.

Choose one of them if you need to work from more than one machine, you want photorealistic renders, you need to hand a project to a colleague, or you are doing this professionally and $12 a month is not a consideration.

Do not choose one if the point is that your floor plan is nobody's business but yours. Everything you draw is on their servers, under their terms, and subject to whatever their plan structure looks like in two years.

In short: the web apps trade privacy and permanence for capability and convenience. That is a real trade with a real winner depending on who you are, and anyone who tells you it only goes one way is selling something.

Which one to choose

The bottom line, by what you are actually doing:

Planning your own home, once, on a Mac → Arti or Sweet Home 3D. Both free, both offline, neither wants an account.
You bounced off Sweet Home 3D's interface → Arti. That is precisely the gap it exists in.
You need Windows or Linux too → Sweet Home 3D. Nothing else here is cross-platform and free.
You want photorealistic renders to show a client → RoomSketcher or Coohom. The free desktop tools will not get you there.
You are doing this professionally, every week → pay for something. RoomSketcher Pro or Live Home 3D Pro will cost less than the time you lose fighting a free tool.
You need it on a phone, on site → none of these. Look at MagicPlan or a LiDAR-based capture app instead.

Frequently asked questions

Is there floor plan software for Mac that is free with no account? Yes — two. Sweet Home 3D is free and open source with no account, and Arti is a free native Mac app that requires no account or sign-up. Every other major option (RoomSketcher, Planner 5D, Coohom, Floorplanner) is a web app that requires you to register before you can draw anything.

Can I use a free floor plan for a building permit? No. None of the tools on this page produce a document a planning authority will accept, and none of them claim to. A permit submission needs drawings from an architect or a qualified draughtsperson. Free floor plan software is for planning, communicating and deciding — not for certifying.

Will a free floor plan be accurate enough for a builder? It is accurate enough to discuss with a builder, and not accurate enough to order materials from. The software draws exactly the dimensions you enter, so its accuracy is your tape measure's accuracy. Any professional will re-measure before quoting, and should.

Does free floor plan software put a watermark on exports? It depends entirely on the tool. Sweet Home 3D does not. Arti puts a small mark in the corner and nothing else — no resolution cap, no expiry. Free tiers of subscription products often do, or they cap the export resolution instead — and this is the most common place people discover their free tier has ended, after the work is done. Check the export before you invest an evening.

What is the easiest floor plan software for a complete beginner? For a first-time user on a Mac, a tool where you drag a rectangle to make a room will get you further than one built around precise CAD input. Arti, RoomSketcher and Planner 5D all work that way. Sweet Home 3D is more capable but expects more of you up front.