Top 15 Best Barndominium Design Software: Free & Paid | BarndominiumZONE.com (2024)

If you’re designing a barndominium, you’ll have options to use the designer offered by your metal building kit provider. For example, major metal building manufacturers like Worldwide Steel and Rhino Steel Buildings both offer online designers you can use.

However, if you want to do the floor plans, layout, and 3D mockups yourself, you’ll either have to use your own software or hire an interior designer or architect to do the work for you.

The following list includes 15 of the best barndominium design software options including free and paid programs.

Most are ideal for prospective homeowners who want to design their own homes. However, some are also suitable for professionals, interior designers, and metal building erectors who want to offer design work to their clients.

*This list was correct when last updated in November 2023. Software, features, and pricing are subject to change. In addition, this list is in random order.

1. Planner 5D

Planner 5D is a free barndominium design app with a premium and paid option if you need it.

The planner offers both 2D layouts for floor plans and furniture schematics. You also get options for a full 3D design for rooms, room layout, and furniture.

The app comes with templates and ready-to-use designs. You can also start from scratch with a base layout, add objects, and more.

Planner 5D is a great option if you’re looking for a simple drag-and-drop interface. The library of 5,000+ objects also means you can generally find design elements without investing in finding your own.

The browser-based version of the app is free. However, you can also pay for app access to use the tool on your iPad or other iOS device.

Finally, Planner 5D incorporates mechanical design, which means you can add measurements, integrate things to scale, and get a workable blueprint for designing your home or taking it to a metal building manufacturer.

• Free
• Best suited for beginners
• Drag and drop interface
• iOS, Android, Mac

Website: https://planner5d.com/

2. Interior AI

Interior AI is an AI design tool to help you create mockups and design changes to your existing spaces and your plans. That can include taking photos of your existing rooms and using AI to generate design ideas and mockups.

It can also include uploading your floor plan and generating 3D renderings of your future home.

For example, you can upload your current layout, then choose a style such as Scandinavian or Country Chic, and then automatically get design ideas and images showing you what options you have.

That makes Interior AI a great fit if you want to quickly create mockups of your new barndo, figure out what styles will look best, and actually do interior planning before your building permit application.

• $29 per month
• Best suited for beginners
• AI interface
• Browser-based

Website: https://interiorai.com/

3. CADPro

CADPro is an architectural design application ideal for beginners and homeowners looking to have a professional blueprint and design.

CADPro is suitable for professional designers. Therefore, the learning curve may be too high if you just want a one-off design for your barndominium.

However, if you already know roughly how CAD interfaces work, it’s a great way to get a permit-ready plan that you can take directly to your architect for stamping.

The program is intended for general computer-aided design. However, it does have features specifically for metal building design and barndominium design.

It also includes pre-built assets for furniture and walls and doors, you also get tools to make design relatively easy. For example, you can turn on snap-to-fit, you can turn on scaling, and you can set measurements of everything so you can see exactly how it will look to scale.

• $99.95
• Best for intermediate/professional use
• Drag and drop/CAD interface
• Windows

Website: https://www.cadpro.com/easy-metal-building-design-software/

4. Sketchup Free

Sketchup Free is a 3D and 2D modeling program similar to Planner 5D. However, it is not specifically intended for homes, which means that it has fewer dedicated resources.

On the other hand, with a large library of drag-and-drop items, it’s still extremely easy to design your barndominium without any prior experience.

Sketchup also supports vertical spaces and multi-level plans – meaning you can create a 3D mockup and design of your home with multiple floors.

Sketchup is also suitable for floor plans, general layouts and mechanical plans. However, with no layouts or templates, you will have to start from scratch on every barndo plan you create. That can require extra time if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Otherwise, this is a great tool for building out ideas for your barndo and seeing how they look – or taking a plan to your metal building designer.

• $119+ per year
• Best suited for intermediate/professional users
• Drawing interface/drag-and-drop interface
• Browser-based

Website: https://www.sketchup.com/

5. Sweet Home 3D

Sweet Home 3D is a free 3D home planner you can use for your barndominium design. The software must be downloaded to use – however, there’s also an app.

In addition, you can create everything from general floor plans to full 3D mockups with virtual images of furniture, windows, and much more.

Here, you typically start with a floor plan and home layout, add your furniture with a drag-and-drop library, and then render it in 3D. A color and texture selector allow you to further customize the mockups.

This is a great way to get not only a floor plan to take to your metal building company but also to spec out the materials and style you want your new barndo in.

In addition, you can go through different types of layouts and see how your barndo might look with different room setups, furniture, and styles.

• Free
• Best for beginner to intermediate users
• Drawing interface/Drag-and-drop
• Windows, Mac, Linux

Website: https://www.sweethome3d.com/

6. RoomSketcher

RoomSketcher is a 2D and 3D floor planner app designed to offer a drag-and-drop interface for home and floor play design. That makes it ideal as a barndominium planner as it offers everything from 2D layouts for floor plans and exterior building design to 3D rendering.

This means you can create the flat 2D floor plan and then add objects, walls, doors, and windows – and then render them in 3D to get a good idea of how it will all look when you bring it together.

The app also offers design services. That’s good if, for example, you want to make your current mockup more professional.

If you’d like to use your floor plan and mockups to take to housing permission, for example, you can simply pay to have Roomsketcher do everything professionally, with mechanical dimensions and other requirements included.

• $49
• Best for intermediate users
• Drag-and-drop/drawing interface
• Cloud

Website: https://www.roomsketcher.com/

7. SmartDraw

SmartDraw is a home design program with everything you need to put together your building permit application documentation. That includes floor plans, diagrams, home mockups, and more.

The app also includes a large library of basic layouts including room shapes and more for your floor plan. This means you can start from templates and customize to meet your needs, rather than drawing everything from scratch.

You can also start from full plans and examples, get templates and mockups, and drag and drop from thousands of icons and furniture items to fill out your floor plan.

In addition, the basic home designer is free. However, if you want to add mechanical planning, CAD drafting, or other features, you’ll have to pay from $9.95 per month to use the premium version of the app.

On the other hand, the free version of the app is more than enough for most users.

• $0-$9.95 per month
• Best for beginning to intermediate users
• Drag and drop interface, CAD
• Browser

Website: https://www.smartdraw.com/floor-plan/home-design-software.htm

8. DraftSight

DraftSight is a professional tool that you can use to draw out your home plans with 3D and 2D effects and tooling. It’s primarily intended for professional use.

However, it’s also relatively affordable compared to many other professional tools at $249 per year – making it an accessible option if you simply want to do all of the drafting and home design for your barndo yourself.

It’s also an excellent option for building erectors who want a more permanent solution.

DraftSight also offers tools to streamline how you create and build floor plans. That includes palettes, colors, frequently used markups, etc.

You can also add measurements, items to scale, and user layers to work on each part of your floor plan separately. That makes it extremely easy to add mechanical, utility, and floor plan layouts to the same drawing, each with its own color and its own layer for individual editing.

• $249/year
• Intermediate/professional
• Drafting interface
• Windows, Mac

Website: https://www.draftsight.com/

9. Cedreo

Cedreo is a complete solution for barndominium design, with everything you need for design from start to finish. That includes floor plans, 3D mockups for interior and exterior, color and texture selection, and a large library of objects and drag-and-drop features and fixtures.

It’s primarily designed for home builders who want to be able to sell concepts and make larger numbers of mockups. However, the base version is free for up to 5 renderings of the same project.

You’ll also have a smaller library of drag-and-drop objects. And, for $119 per project, you can create up to 20 renders of the same project.

That makes this ideal for prospective homeowners looking to create mockups of a single project complete with floor plans, mechanical drawings, and mockups of layout, floor plans, and other details. You can also take these to your architect or building manufacturer.

• Free-$124 per month
• Best for beginner/intermediate
• Drag-and-drop interface/drawing interface
• Cloud

Website: https://cedreo.com/

10. PlanningWiz

PlanningWiz is a 2D and 3D home planner perfect for designing the floor play and interior of your barndominium. Here, you start out with a drag-and-drop interface to put together the exterior layout – with templates and designed rooms to work with.

You can also use a drawing interface with a tablet to simply sketch out your ideas. Then, you can drag and drop objects from a large catalog to fill out your floorplan.

From there, you can create 3D mockups of the interior and exterior. That includes full landscaping and yard planning as well – which is an extra that most barndominium design options on this list do not have.

In addition, you can use colors, textures, and other selections to get a good feel for how your finished barndominium will look.

• $49 for the first 1,000 square feet, then $18 per 1,000 square feet or $10.90 per month
• Best for beginner-intermediate
• Drag-and-drop interface/drawing interface
• Cloud

Website: https://planningwiz.com/

11. Home Designer by Chief Architect Solutions

Home Designer is a suite of tools intended for personal use to design the interior and exterior of your home. This includes 3D modeling, 2D layouts and floor plans, and 3D mockups of the interior and exterior.

Like PlanningWiz, it offers landscape planning as well. In addition, it costs from $129 with no limits on size, number of plans, or mockups. However, you’ll have to install it on your device to use it.

Home Designer also offers a large library of floor plans, room shapes, and wall sizes. Integrated tools like snap-to-fit, auto-scale, and auto-add make it easy for beginners to use.

And, you can pull from a large catalog of 2D and 3D objects for the home interior and exterior.

• $129+
• Beginners/intermediate
• Drag and drop interface
• Windows

Website: https://www.homedesignersoftware.com

12. Virtual Architect

Virtual Architect 3D Home Design Software offers barndominium design software for prospective homeowners looking to do 3D mockups, floor plans, and exterior layout mockups.

The software starts from just $39.99 with no limits on the number of designs or renders. In addition, it comes with a library of home and landscape layouts, objects, and options, which you can then render in 3D.

Virtual Architect also does 3D walkthrough renders, 3D photos, and more. That makes it extremely easy to get an idea of how a design option will look – so you can more easily make decisions for your new barndominium.

In addition, you’ll get snap-to-fit, the option to automatically add doors and windows, auto-connecting walls, and other features. That makes it extremely beginner-friendly, even if you’re trying home design and floor plan design for the first time.

• $39.99+
• For beginners
• Drag-and-drop interface
• Windows, Mac

Website: https://www.homedesignsoftware.tv/

13. Floor Plan Creator

Floor Plan Creator is a 2D planner offering options to build floor plans and layouts. The app starts free and offers drag and drop, CAD design, and much more.

In addition, you can export to PDF, Word document, and with the premium version, CAD, so you can send it to your architect for improvements.

That makes this a great tool to do semi-professional mockups for your floor plan, which you can then take and use for barndo design, for your metal building designer, or even for your building permit application.

The app starts out free. However, you can add more projects from $9 per pack of 10 renders.

In addition, you can pay for the premium version to get a larger drag-and-drop library of furniture, walls, and pre-made floor plan layouts, as well as export to CAD options.

• $0-$9 per month
• Best for beginners
• Drag -and-drop interface/ drawing interface
• Browser/Android

Website: https://floorplancreator.net/

14. Live Home 3D

Live Home 3D is an extremely popular 3D mockup program that you can use to design your barndominium.

The software primarily focuses on home design of all kinds, with 2D and 3D options. That means you can create a floor plan and layout.

The app also offers 3D design, where you can use objects to popular your home interior and interior to create walk-throughs, photos, and other 3D renders of your prospective home design.

Live Home 3D is primarily drag and drop. It offers a large catalog of basic pieces to work through, like 12 customizable roof templates, 16 dormers, and thousands of furniture options.

You can also add multi-story homes, customize options that are there, and even import objects from either the Trimble 3D Warehouse or your own objects in the compatible formats.

This makes this app a great fit if you want to do anything from a simple floor plan and layout to a complex 3D mockup with everything you intend to have in your final home design.

• Free/$49.99
• Best suited for beginners/intermediate users
• Drawing/drag-and-drop interface
• Mac, iOS, Android, Windows

Website: https://www.livehome3d.com/

15. Floorplanner

Floorplanner offers 3D and 3D home planning complete with dimensioning, measurements, and mechanical plans. That makes it ideal for designing a barndominium with every aspect of the home designs and documentation taken into account.

For example, you can create a simple floor plan and layout, with color-coded floors. Here, you’ll get simple sketch layouts and box furniture to ensure that you can easily add whatever you want.

However, you can also pull from 150,000+ objects in the library – although you may need credits to use everything.

In addition, you’ll have access to a library of templates and options, which means you can easily get started based on a similar home idea and simply tweak what’s there to match your needs.

This makes Floorplanner an ideal option if you’re just getting started and don’t know what you want.

Finally, you can create 3D renders and mockups of your floor plan – although this will cost credits.

• Free/$5 per month
• Best for intermediate to professional users
• Drawing /Drag-and-Drop Interface
• Browser-based

Website: https://floorplanner.com/

Conclusion

There are dozens of barndominium design software options out there. Most are intended as generic home designers. However, that’s more than enough to create your floor plan, exterior mockup, and a 3D mockup of the interior.

These programs can help you visualize what your design choices will look like so you can make better decisions. They can also help you to put your floor plan and layout together, so you can have your builder bring it to life. And, often, they will fill the needs of your building permit application.

Hopefully, one of them meets your needs.

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