Floor Plan Creator

Review by eFreeware

The most distinctive thing about Floor Plan Creator is that it treats a floor plan as a measuring document rather than a drawing. Walls have real lengths that you enter the way you would measure them in a room, and interactive dimension lines let you reposition a wall, door or window by typing a new value instead of dragging it around. That is a different starting point from sketch apps where the picture comes first and the numbers come later.

The app comes from developer Marcin Lewandowski and sits in the Art & Design category, which undersells how workmanlike it is. It has been free to download, ad-supported and offers in-app purchases, and it has built a large audience over the years: more than 10 million installs and a 4.0 average across 132,557 ratings. Those numbers suggest a tool that people keep coming back to rather than one they try once.

It suits anyone who needs dimensions they can trust: someone planning a renovation, a tenant working out whether a sofa fits, an electrician marking sockets, or a surveyor jotting down a building's layout. If you want a quick, pretty sketch with no numbers attached, the measuring-first approach here is more effort than the task needs.

Drawing rooms the way they are actually measured

Rooms are editable at any time, so nothing is fixed once drawn. You can move and reshape them as your understanding of a space improves, and because interior wall lengths are defined the way you would measure them on site, the plan tends to match the building rather than an idealized version of it. Rooms can take any shape as long as the walls are straight, which covers most apartments and houses without pretending to handle curves.

Plans can span multiple floors, with each level holding its own set of rooms. The app calculates area, perimeter and symbol counts automatically for rooms, walls and levels, so you are not adding up figures by hand as the layout changes. Dimension lines work interactively: type a new distance and the associated wall, door or window moves to match, which is much closer to how a tape measure and a pencil work together than freehand dragging.

There is also a locking option for wall lengths and positions. Once a section of the plan is settled, locking it prevents the accidental nudges that can quietly ruin a set of measurements. For anyone who has watched a carefully drawn layout drift out of true, that is a small feature with a large effect.

Symbols, calculations and the 3D tour

A symbol library covers the usual furniture and fixtures plus electrical and fire survey symbols, which points at professional use as much as domestic planning. Math expressions can be attached to room and object properties, so quantities such as paint coverage, material amounts and costs can be worked out on the plan itself rather than in a separate spreadsheet. The developer pitches this as a way to keep estimates and drawings in one place, and the logic holds up.

The 3D tour mode lets you move through the finished plan in three dimensions. It is the kind of feature that helps when you are trying to judge whether a hallway feels cramped or whether a door swing collides with a cabinet, because a top-down view hides exactly those problems. It is not a rendering tool for selling a design to a client, but as a sanity check on your own layout it does a useful job.

Input is handled with a stylus or a mouse as well as touch, and the app works in metric or imperial units, which matters if you are measuring an older building in feet and inches while ordering materials in millimeters. Bluetooth laser distance meters from Bosch, Leica Disto, Hilti, Stabila and others can send readings straight into the plan, removing the step where a measurement gets written down and then mistyped.

What the free download covers and what it does not

The app is free to install and supported by ads, and it offers in-app purchases. The developer marks three things as paid: cloud synchronization for automatic backup and sharing between devices, editing plans on a computer through floorplancreator.net, and exporting to image, PDF, DXF, SVG or CSV, along with printing to scale.

That split is worth thinking through before you commit to the app for a serious project. Someone who only needs a plan on their own phone, with measurements taken on site, can work within the free download. Anyone who wants a scaled PDF for a contractor, a DXF for a CAD program, a CSV of quantities, or the same plan open on a laptop and a tablet is looking at the paid side of the app.

I would treat the free version as a way to find out whether the measuring workflow suits you, and the paid features as the point at which the app becomes a working tool rather than a trial.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious comparison is with general-purpose drawing apps. A vector or sketching app can produce a tidier-looking plan and gives you far more freedom over line weights and presentation, but it has no concept of a wall length, an automatic area or a dimension line that moves geometry when you change a number. Choosing between them comes down to whether the numbers or the picture matter more to you.

Dedicated CAD software sits at the other end. It handles curves, layers and standards that this app does not attempt, and it is built for people who draw professionally. Floor Plan Creator occupies the space in between: structured enough that the output can be trusted for measurements and quantities, simple enough that you can learn it without a CAD course.

There are also simple room-layout apps aimed at furniture arrangement, where you drag sofas onto a grid and the result is decorative rather than dimensional. Those are quicker for imagining a room, and this app is the better choice when the question is whether something will physically fit or how much material a job will take. The laser meter support and the electrical and fire symbols push it further toward site work than any of these alternatives.

A measuring tool for people who need real numbers

Floor Plan Creator is worth installing if your interest in a floor plan is dimensional. Renovators, tradespeople, surveyors and tenants with a tape measure and a decision to make will get the most from the editable rooms, the automatic area and perimeter figures, and the ability to type a distance and have the plan respond. The 3D tour and the symbol library round out a tool that has clearly been shaped by years of use.

The trade-offs are straightforward. The free download carries ads, the exports and cross-device work sit behind in-app purchases, and rooms are limited to straight walls. None of that undermines the core job, but it does mean the app is at its best on the phone where the measurements were taken, and the paid features are what turn it into something you can hand to a builder.

For a free download with a 4.0 average across a very large number of ratings, the risk is low. I would start with a single room, check that the measuring workflow matches how you think about a space, and decide about the paid features once you know you will keep using it.

What's new in version 3.7.3.571

* Configurable open box object added. * Default sizes are now saved per plan and per floor. * Bugs fixed.