Best Landscape Design Software

Specifically designed for the landscape industry, landscape design software eases the process of creating the design drafts necessary for contractors and landscape architects to finish a contracted landscape project. Landscape design solutions digitize a historically manual process and significantly decrease the amount of time and resources designers spend drafting visualizations and blueprints. Additionally, with landscape design software, firms can better manage client relationships, identify any productivity deficiencies, and analyze project and team performance.

With the software, designers can avoid the painstaking process of erasing and drawing over existing plans. The software allows designers to create a base layout—as well as templates, if you know you’ll be working on similar landscaping projects in the future—on which you can experiment with the addition and placement of landscape accessories. That means that details such as plant types, reflective water surfaces, type of walkway material, the fall of a shadow, and colors of plants, objects, and accessories can be specified and displayed right in the draft. Additionally, many landscape design software provides estimating functionality: You can pull a specific plant, tree, or material from the in-platform image database or encyclopedia, and that design element will have the current market price attached to the image. That estimating functionality assists designers and contractors in determining where your client can splurge and where your client needs to save.

The most helpful landscape design software will facilitate the surveying of property, map the landscape area that your client wants to focus on, and offer templates and drawing functionality. Today’s landscape design software leverages both 2D and 3D technology to further simplify the design process. Pre-software, designers would spend countless hours taking thorough measurements of existing elements in a landscape, before painstakingly drawing and revising designs. Then they would inevitably repeat the whole process after presenting a draft to your client. With software, designers and architects can automate and replicate renderings and templates.Efficiency is the name of the landscape design software game.

Like any other kind of technical software, landscape design software requires the user to overcome a learning curve. This is even more true with this type of software, as it calls for landscape designers to move away from hand drawings to computer-aided technology. You and your design firm will absolutely need to dedicate time and resources to ensure your designers can properly and effectively use the solution.

Landscape design software is used by both professional designers and architects, as well as DIY-ers who want to supplement the designer and contractor’s visions with their own.

The primary reason for a landscape designer or architect to use landscape design software is the overall savings in landscaping costs and resources. While software inevitably costs more than pencils and graph paper, it nevertheless automates much of the time-consuming aspects of landscape design. (While the former requires skill, in this day and age, timeliness of finishing projects and hitting deadlines is much more important. Additionally, just because you turn to software doesn’t mean that you’re doing away with craft or creativity.)

A few of the benefits of utilizing landscape design software include:

• Cost-effectiveness
• Efficiency
• Accuracy
• The ability to work remotely
• Improved productivity
• Better control over complicated projects
• Simplified revision process
• Creation and reuse of design templates, features, and details
• Digitization of the entire landscape project
• Overview of all costs associated with a project

In a nutshell: The less time you spend designing, estimating, and redesigning and re-estimating after your client’s input, the better. Landscape design software facilitates that.

• Landscape architects
• Landscape designers
• Garden designers
• DIY homeowners
• Landscape architecture students