Sweet Home 3D
Description
My wife and I bought a condo in 2021 and for the first two weeks we did what every new homeowner does – we stood in empty rooms with a tape measure, argued over where the couch should go, and made at least three trips to IKEA where we bought things that turned out to be too big for the space. The third IKEA return is what killed me. I sat down that evening, googled “free room planner software” and found Sweet Home 3D. By midnight I had a scale model of our entire 75 square meter apartment complete with walls, doors, windows and that couch that definitely was not going to fit in the living room, which I could now prove visually as opposed to losing another argument about it. We have not returned a single piece of furniture since.
Sweet Home 3D is a free and open source interior design application that was initially created by a French programmer named Emmanuel Puybaret. It has been around since 2006, it runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and it is distributed under the GNU General Public License, so it means that you can download and use the full version of the desktop without paying for anything. There is also a mobile version for iOS and Android and a browser-based version which you do not have to install anything. The desktop application includes over 10,000 3D furniture models and 400 textures and there are thousands more available for free download from the community. For a program that costs nothing, the scope of what you get is simply ridiculous.
The way it works is intuitive enough that I was productive in under an hour from my first launch, despite having zero CAD experience. The screen divides into four panels — a furniture catalog on the left, a 2D floor plan editor on the top right, a 3D view on the bottom right and a list of objects you have placed. You draw walls by clicking points and software snaps to grid and displays dimensions in real-time. Then you drag furniture from the catalog onto the plan, resize it, rotate it, change its color or texture and watch the 3D view update at the same time. That simultaneous 2D and 3D updating is the feature that hooked me. You move a bookshelf two inches to the left in the plan view, and you suddenly see what that looks like in 3D from any angle. It eliminates the mental translation process that makes most floor planning seem like guesswork.
The furniture library is both a strength and a limitation. The included catalog does a good job covering the basics — beds, sofas, tables, chairs, kitchen appliances, bathroom fixtures, doors, windows, stairs, shelving. But if you want something specific — say, a particular IKEA shelf unit or a modern sectional with chaise — then you either have to find a community-made 3D model, or build your own using the furniture library editor. Building custom objects is possible but not really beginner-friendly. I spent about an hour trying to recreate our particular kitchen island and gave up eventually finding a close enough model on a community forum. For the sort of fine work where each centimeter counts, the library can be limiting. For general planning — “will a dining table for six fit in this room without blocking the hallway?” — it is more than sufficient.
Importing a scanned floor plan as a background image is a feature that I wish I found out on day one instead of day five. You get your apartment’s blueprint, drop it in Sweet Home 3D, mark a known distance on the scale, and then go right out and trace the walls directly on top of it. This is massively faster than measuring every wall by hand and drawing from scratch. For our condo renovation, I scanned the blueprint that the realtor had given us, traced it out in about twenty minutes and had an accurate base plan that I built on for the next three months while we argued about whether or not to move the kitchen wall. We did move the kitchen wall. Sweet Home 3D helped us realize we could.
The 3D rendering is where you see the difference between free software and professional tools. In normal preview mode, the 3D view looks clean and functional — good enough to understand the space but not something you would show to a client. The photorealistic rendering mode (ray tracing) creates truly amazing images with real light, shadows and reflections. The catch is that it takes time to render. I rigged up a 4K walkthrough video of our apartment – about 40 seconds long – and let it render overnight. This took about 8 hours on a mid-range i5 with integrated graphics. The result looked great, better than I expected from free software, but the rendering time means this is not something you do casually. A user on SourceForge described the same experience — Started a render before bed, had results in the morning. If you need quick photorealistic output you need a faster GPU or a different tool.
Performance on complex projects is the primary technical weakness. Once your plan gets beyond a certain size — multiple rooms, hundreds of furniture objects, custom textures — the 3D view starts to lag. The software is Java based, which accounts for some of the overhead. On my desktop with 16 GB of RAM, the big projects were manageable but noticeably slower than the small ones. On my wife’s older laptop the 3D view got choppy enough that she gave up and just worked in the 2D plan, just switching to 3D to check the overall look. If you are planning a single room or a small apartment, then performance is fine. If you are modeling a multi-level house with landscaping, get ready for some waiting.
The interface looks dated. There is no way around it. The icons, the panel layout, the general aesthetic — it all has a mid-2000s Java application feel that has not kept up with modern design conventions. Functionally, all is where you would expect it to be and the tooltips and guides are helpful. But if you are coming from something like Planner 5D or SketchUp, the visual presentation will be like taking a step backward. One reviewer on SourceForge said that the functionality is astonishing but the UI is old-looking and non-intuitive. I would push back a bit — I found it intuitive enough for basic tasks — but the “old-looking” part is fair.
One of its best kept secrets is the community surrounding Sweet Home 3D. The forums are active, the developer is responsive to bug reports and feature requests and there are user-contributed libraries of furniture, textures and plugins that go a long way to extending what the base software can do. Someone made a library of certain IKEA products with correct dimensions. Another person developed elaborate bathroom tile patterns. A theater director on SourceForge uses it to design stage sets. An ex-software engineer used it to plan three Scandinavian style buildings, before handing the plans over to an architect. The variety of creative uses people have found for this thing is far beyond what I would have guessed from taking a look at the homepage.
Should you download it? If you are planning a renovation, or moving to a new place, rearranging furniture, or just want to visualize what your room would look like with different layouts, Sweet Home 3D is one of the best free tools available for the job. It will not replace AutoCAD or Revit for professional architectural work, and from time to time the furniture library will frustrate you because you cannot find the exact thing you need. But for the price of absolutely nothing, from a single developer who has maintained and improved this project for nearly twenty years, it does a remarkable amount of work. I have since tried Planner 5D, RoomSketcher and SketchUp. I keep coming back to Sweet Home 3D because it does not get in my way, it does not want me to subscribe to a subscription, and it has never once tried to upsell me. In 2026, that alone seems like a feature.
