TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro is an easy-to-learn yet feature-rich tool that includes both landscape design and home design functionality. There is also a cheaper version, TurboFloorPlan Deluxe, with a significantly reduced feature set – although both enable you to design a floor plan with ease, using professionally designed templates as a starting point. We've updated this review to reflect the improvements made in the 2020 version. It's still part of our guide to the best home design software packages right now.
There's a decent-sized plant library – although not the largest in its class – and some smart time-saving tools that will prove particularly useful when designing complex decking ideas, or placing a large number of plants in formation. If you want to know what's new for the 2020 version, we'll give you a quick summary here. 2D plans have been a big focus this year, with detailing significantly improved in 2D views. You can annotate and apply styles to 2D plans, and include way more detail in them. Similarly, 2D object detailing has improved too, to keep up with this.
Also new are plan labels and labelling for windows and doors, allowing you to annotate specific areas of the house. There have also been minor improvements to things like line styles and line levelling, which really allows you to get your angles perfect. The remainder of the review follows.
TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro 2020 review: Price
TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro retails for $99.99 for PC, which puts it on a par with Realtime Landscaping Pro, our overall pick for best landscape design tool. The Mac version is significantly more expensive at $149.99.
For half the price at $49.99 ($99.99 for Mac) TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Deluxe has a simpler feature set that's ideal for beginners, and is more straightforward to master using a drag-and-drop design process.
TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro 2020 review: Design features
TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro gives you the capacity to design your home interior in detail – even including foundations, HVAC, electrical and plumbing, as well as storing mood boards for different aspects of the project.
Here, however, we're assuming that landscape design is your primary goal. TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro has the power to create custom topography, add outdoor lighting, and design bespoke boundary walls and fences.
Decking design is a particular strength. A range of template designs can be customized to suit your personal style, while the unique IntelliDeck functionality enables you to design complex decking layouts quickly and accurately, by intuitively following the shapes of your house as you draw.
Plants can easily be dragged and dropped into zone-specific groupings, fitting a variety of pre-determined shapes – or aligned to a path with custom spacing using the Visual Array tool.
The Growth tool will help you predict how your plants will look in years to come. You can also use the precision Global Sun Positioning tool to explore how the light falls at different times of day, and in different seasons - you can even calculate how this will affect your plants' growth.
Price: $99.99 (PC), $149.99 (Mac)
Other versions: Deluxe
Plant library: 3,800
Total objects: 4,700
House exterior: Yes
House interior: Yes
Sample designs: Yes
Cost estimates: Yes
Tutorial videos: Yes
TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro 2020 review: Object library
TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro boasts an extensive object library, with 4,700 items to bring your home and garden designs to life. These include appliances, flooring, light fixtures and more.
3,800 of these objects are plants, which makes TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro particularly well-suited to landscape design projects. Using the PlantFinder, you can search the available trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetation to find the perfect match for your needs, based on factors such as growing parameters, climate, sunlight, water and soil conditions.
By way of comparison, Realtime Landscaping Pro – our overall pick for best landscape design tool has a substantially larger library of 5,700 plants.
Another neat feature in TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro, however, is the ability to supplement the supplied library by importing photography of any of your favourite plants using the Plant Importer tool. It's also possible to import one of the millions of models available free in the SketchUp 3D Warehouse.
Should you buy TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro?
It depends on your requirements. The fact that TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro is priced on a par with Realtime Landscaping Pro, our overall pick for best landscape design software, makes direct comparison inevitable.
If landscape design is your focus, Realtime Landscaping Pro's functionality and object library are superior – although TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro has useful time-savers, such as its IntelliDeck and Visual Array tools.
There's no Mac version of Realtime Landscaping Pro, however. And if you also plan to make use of the home design tools to plan your interior, there is no comparison: Realtime Landscaping Pro can only render the exterior of your home to provide context for your garden. In this case, or if you own a Mac, TurboFloorPlan Home & Landscape Pro is a better choice.
