Site Plan Software
Search "site plan software" and you'll get everything from $10 drawing apps to full CAD suites. Most of them can't produce the document your permit office actually wants. Here's how the options really compare — and how to tell before you pay for the wrong one.
Every tool that ranks for "site plan software" or "site plan drawing software" falls into one of three buckets. They're all sold with similar screenshots of tidy little lots, but they work in completely different ways — and only one of them knows anything about your actual property.
These are template libraries with drag-and-drop shapes. You pick a "site plan" template, drop in rectangles for the house and the shed, and draw lines where you think the property boundaries run. Some people screenshot a satellite photo and trace over it.
The problem: none of these tools contain any property data. They don't know where your lot lines are, how long they are, or what's already built on the parcel. Everything on the page is your best guess, drawn freehand. That's fine for a landscaping mood board or a backyard sketch to show your spouse. At the permit counter it's a coin flip — and usually a losing one.
These are serious tools, and in trained hands they produce excellent drawings. Cedreo runs about $129/month and is aimed at home builders doing 3D renderings and floor plans. Chief Architect and AutoCAD go deeper still, with price tags and learning curves to match.
Two catches for anyone who just needs a site plan. First, the learning curve is real — CAD is a skill you build over weeks and months, not an afternoon, and even Cedreo's friendlier workflow takes onboarding before you're producing anything usable. Second, they all start from a blank lot. You enter the parcel dimensions manually — off a deed, an old survey, or the county website — and if you key them in wrong, the whole drawing is wrong. These suites are built for design presentation, selling a client on a house. They were never built for permit paperwork.
The third kind skips the drawing problem entirely. You type the property address, and the software pulls the parcel geometry from the county's own GIS records — the same records your permit office sits on top of. The lot lines, their lengths, the existing buildings: loaded automatically, to scale, in seconds. Then you place the new fence, deck, pool, or shed on top and export.
That's the category PlotForge is in, and it's why this comparison isn't really about drawing features. A site plan is a data document. The tool either has your property's data or it doesn't.
Here's how the tools people actually shop for stack up on the things a permit reviewer cares about. We've included human drafting services too, because for a lot of contractors the real alternative isn't another app — it's emailing a drafter and waiting a day.
| Tool | Real county parcel data | Address lookup | To-scale output | Auto setbacks | DXF/CAD export | Permit-focused output | Time to plan | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PlotForge | ✓ County GIS | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓* | ✓ Title block, north arrow, scale | Minutes | $149 one-off or from $199/mo |
| Canva | — | — | — | — | — | — | Hours of tracing | Free–$10/mo |
| SmartDraw | — | — | Manual scale setup | — | Limited | — | Hours of tracing | ~$10/mo |
| RoomSketcher | — | — | Interiors only | — | — | — | Hours of tracing | Free–$10/mo |
| Cedreo | Manual lot entry | — | If you enter it right | — | ✓ | Design presentation focus | 20+ min drawing, after you learn it | ~$129/mo |
| Human drafting service | ✓ They look it up | You email it | ✓ | Drawn by hand | Sometimes, often extra | ✓ | 24h+ wait | $89–$279 per plan |
* DXF included on every PlotForge subscription plan; $20 add-on on Pay-As-You-Go orders. Competitor pricing is published rates as of mid-2026 — check each vendor for current terms.
Two honest notes on that table. Human drafting services do produce accepted plans — PlotForge's own $149 done-for-you service is exactly that, delivered in 48–72 hours with the software doing the heavy lifting. And Cedreo is genuinely good software; it's just solving a different problem (selling a design) than the one the permit clerk is grading (documenting a lot). By the way, if your city's checklist says "plot plan" instead of "site plan," it's the same document — our plot plan generator guide covers the terminology. And for a head-to-head of the done-for-you drafting services themselves — pricing, turnaround, CAD files, and refund fine print — see the site plan creator comparison.
Permit reviewers look at site plans all day, and they check the same handful of things on every submission. Drawings made in generic software fail predictably, on four points:
They're not to scale. A stated scale — 1" = 20', for example — is a hard requirement almost everywhere, and reviewers will literally put a scale ruler on your drawing. A Canva canvas has no units. Unless you've done the math on every single line yourself, the drawing can't survive that check.
The property lines are guesses. Tracing a satellite photo feels accurate, but your fence is not your property line, and aerial imagery can sit several feet off the legal boundary. Reviewers trust one source for boundaries: the county's parcel records. If your lines didn't come from those records or from a survey, the reviewer has no reason to believe any measurement on the sheet.
The setbacks are guesses too. A setback is the measured distance from your structure to the property line. If the line is wrong, every setback dimension is wrong with it — and verifying setbacks is the single biggest reason residential site plan review exists.
Required elements are missing. North arrow. Stated scale. A title block with the address and parcel number. Labeled structures with dimensions and distances to the lot lines. Generic templates skip most of these because the tool doesn't know they're required. The reviewer's checklist does.
None of this makes Canva or SmartDraw bad software — they're excellent at what they were built for. It just isn't this. Asking a slide-deck tool to produce a legal-boundary drawing is like asking a tape measure to pour the footing: wrong instrument, no matter how carefully you use it.
Every rejection costs you a resubmission cycle — often a week or two of dead time on a job that was ready to start. For the full checklist of what reviewers look for, see our guide to site plans for permits.
The quick test: if the software never asks for your address, it has no idea where your property lines are — and neither will your drawing. That one question separates drawing tools from real site plan software.
PlotForge starts where the other tools stop: with the county's data.
Your plan is drawn from your county's own parcel records. Type the address and the parcel loads straight from county GIS — real boundary geometry with real dimensions, not a traced photo. That provenance is exactly what makes a reviewer comfortable with the sheet in front of them.
Setbacks are computed for you. Enter the setback distances from your permit checklist and PlotForge draws and dimensions the setback lines automatically, measured from the actual property lines — no protractor, no math errors.
Existing buildings place themselves. PlotForge auto-places existing building footprints on the parcel, and every footprint stays fully editable — move it, rotate it, adjust corners, relabel it — so the plan matches what's really on the ground.
You can trace over your own plans. Import a house plan, plat, or old site plan (PDF, PNG, JPG or SVG) as a see-through underlay pinned under the drawing, set its true scale by clicking two points you know the distance between, and draw right over it. Until it's calibrated the image is marked NOT TO SCALE and stays off printed sheets — a wrong-scale image can never reach a permit package.
Topo, slope, roads, and measurements are built in. One click adds USGS elevation contour lines — from Auto down to 1-foot intervals, generated from 1-meter LiDAR terrain data — plus real road centerlines with automatic distance-to-road setback dimensions. Another click shades the whole site by ground slope (green under 8% up to red over 25%, with a printed legend) so buildable ground is obvious at a glance. A feet-and-inches measure tool, printable length labels, and curved-line tracing round out the drafting kit.
Quantities total themselves. A live takeoff panel on the sheet adds up structures and pads in square feet, driveways and patios in square feet, fences and walls in linear feet, and approximate impervious coverage as a percent of the lot — updating as you draw and resize, printable on the PDF. Concept building pads take stories and units per floor, print their own footprint/gross/unit math, and roll into the totals — enough to sketch a multi-building site concept on real parcel data in minutes.
The output looks like a permit document. Professional title block, north arrow, stated scale, labeled structures with dimensions. Save your company info once and the title block fills itself on every sheet. There's even a one-click cover sheet — parcel map, vicinity map, sheet index — for jurisdictions that want a full submittal package.
You get the files you need. PDF on everything. DXF/CAD export is included on every subscription plan, so a drafter or engineer can pull your plan straight into AutoCAD. Subscriptions include PNG export too.
It works nationwide. Deep county GIS integrations in a growing list of counties, backed by a national parcel database that covers most US addresses everywhere else — and coverage is now expanding into Canada, starting with Ontario.
Pricing is volume-based, and every tier gets every feature. Just need a few? One-time packs cover one-off jobs — $29 for 1 plan, $49 for 3, or $144 for 12. The Contractor subscription is $199/month for 20 plans — about $9.95 a plan, and higher-volume plans are available by contacting us — with the full breakdown on the pricing page. And if you'd rather not touch software at all, order a $149 done-for-you plan and it lands in your inbox within 48–72 hours.
You can also prove all of this to yourself before spending a dime. Every new account starts with a free 30-day trial — no credit card, no sales call. Type your own address, watch the parcel load, place a structure, and export the full PDF, PNG, and DXF. If it isn't what your permit office needs, you've lost ten minutes, not a license fee.
If you pull permits every week, a subscription covers 18–100 plans a month, every plan is instant, and the per-plan cost drops to around $8 at volume — versus $100+ and a day's wait per plan from a drafting service. The plan stops being the bottleneck between signed contract and shovel.
Use PlotForge as the starting point, not the whole workflow. The DXF export drops straight into AutoCAD or Revit with the boundary, setbacks, and building footprints already in place — your team starts from live county data instead of redrawing it from a deed.
No subscription needed. Order it done-for-you for $149, or make it yourself — free for 30 days, no credit card required. Our free site plan maker guide explains exactly how the free trial works.
The best site plan software for a contractor is whatever gets an approvable plan out the door fastest. Generic drawing tools make you trace everything by hand, and CAD suites take weeks to learn. PlotForge is built for exactly this job: type the property address, it pulls the county's own parcel records, and you have a to-scale plan with setbacks and a title block in minutes. One-time packs start at $29 per plan, and subscriptions start at $199/month for 20 plans.
There are free drawing tools — Canva has a free tier and several floor-plan apps have free versions — but none of them can produce a permit-ready site plan, because they have no property data and no real-world scale. PlotForge gives you 30 days free: create a free account (no credit card required) and export full PDF, PNG, and DXF plans of actual properties.
Usually not. Permit reviewers reject plans that aren't drawn to scale, don't show property lines from parcel records, or are missing required elements like setback dimensions, a north arrow, and a stated scale. A Canva or SmartDraw drawing is a freehand sketch as far as a reviewer is concerned — some rural jurisdictions accept hand sketches, but most cities and counties won't.
For CAD suites like AutoCAD or Chief Architect, yes — plan on weeks of learning before you're productive. For PlotForge, no. You type an address, the parcel and existing buildings load automatically, and you place new structures by dragging them on the screen. Most first-time users finish their first plan in minutes, not days.
PlotForge exports PDF on every plan. DXF (CAD) export is included on all subscription plans and available as a $20 add-on on Pay-As-You-Go orders. Subscriptions also include PNG drawing export.
PlotForge works for most US addresses. It has deep integrations with many county GIS systems where it reads the county's own parcel layer directly, plus a national parcel database that covers the rest of the country. The free 30-day trial is the easiest way to check your exact address — if the parcel loads, you're covered.
No — PlotForge plans are non-certified. They're drawn from county parcel records, not a field survey, and they are not a legal survey document. Most residential permits (fences, decks, sheds, pools) don't require a stamped or certified plan, but requirements vary by jurisdiction, so check with your local permit office. If your project requires a certified survey, you'll need a licensed surveyor.
Yes. PlotForge adds elevation contour lines from USGS terrain data — including 1-meter LiDAR where available — at Auto, 10, 5, 2, or 1-foot intervals, labeled and exported to both PDF and DXF. Contours are reference topography, not a field survey.
Yes to both. One click shades the site by ground slope from USGS 1-meter LiDAR (green under 8%, yellow 8–15%, orange 15–25%, red over 25%) with a legend that prints on the sheet. A live takeoff panel totals structures and pads in square feet, hardscape in square feet, fences and walls in linear feet, pad unit counts, and approximate impervious coverage as a percent of the lot — updating as you draw.
Yes. Import it (PDF, PNG, JPG or SVG) and it pins under the drawing as a see-through underlay with transparency, rotation, and scale control. Click two points you know the distance between and type the number — the image locks to true scale, anchored on those points. Until it's calibrated it's marked NOT TO SCALE and stays off printed sheets. The CAD export carries only your drawn geometry, never the image.
The fastest way to evaluate any site plan software: type your address in and see what comes back. If nothing loads, you're holding a drawing tool. PlotForge loads your parcel.
Free for 30 days · No credit card · Full PDF, PNG + DXF exports