Foyr Neo vs Planner 5D: The Ultimate Showdown

Learn » Design Software & Tools » Foyr Neo vs Planner 5D: The Ultimate Showdown

It’s that time of the year, when you evaluate where your business is, what worked for you this year, and what to do to make the most of the new year. You want to start exploring options to start 2024 with a bang and crank up your business a notch. Your hand-drawn sketches and expensive design tools may have gotten you this far. But, they won’t get you any further, especially in 2024 amidst the cutthroat competition that exists in the interior design industry.

A lot of tools like Homestyler, Roomsketcher, Smartdraw, Sweet Home 3D, Sketchup, and Autodesk AutoCAD, promise to get your work cut out for you, but only the best of the best can put you on the front line, impress your clients, and get you the huge deals you desire.

In this blog, we have taken two close competitors and preferred choices in the market – Foyr Neo and Planner 5D to give you a candid review, show what users say, and help you decide on the tool that can catapult your business in 2024. Let’s go tool shopping. Hop on!

Foyr Neo – Elevating Interior Design Creativity

Having garnered 152 credible reviews on Trustpilot, Foyr Neo is one of the best, most comprehensive, state-of-the-art, smooth, and spectacular interior design tools you will ever come across. 

• For the pristine features it offers, the home design tool charges only a super nominal fee, with a commitment to making lives better for beginner designers who are striving to make their mark in a highly competitive field. 
• Foyr Neo’s feather on the cap features is its excellent render quality and photorealistic design elements. 
• With umpteen tutorials all over the internet, detailed documentation for every small step or tool in the design, and frequent masterclasses to clarify doubts of users in real time. 
• When compared to other home design apps, Foyr Neo is a class apart with its exemplary design and 3D models, excellent 3D rendering quality, affordable pricing, an abundance of renders, and yet a short learning curve. 
• Use Foyr Neo to win clients with your lifelike proposals and delight them with photorealistic designs at every stage of the project.

Read also – 9 Best 3D Floor Plan Software and Tools [Free + Paid]

Planner 5D – Designing Interior Spaces with Precision

A well-known architecture and home interior design software with good 3D and 3D designing tools. Planner 5D is known to have an easy user interface to work with, easy to get started, and take a whole lot of things off your plate as an interior designer by helping you with robust design features. 

• User reviews say it’s super easy for beginners, and even homeowners with almost zero knowledge or technical skills can create designs for their dream homes and watch their wishlists come true. 
• It’s great for anyone who is just starting out and doesn’t have huge projects in hand. 
• Does well with small-scale residential projects. The main issue is it doesn’t scale with you, as you grow. 
• Its capabilities don’t grow with you to support you in all projects you take up. When compared to complicated home design software that needs heavy system requirements and memory power, Planner 5D is a good tool to design on the fly.

Detailed Comparison for Interior Designers

Let’s go through a rundown of each tool to see if it’s a good fit for your needs. We’re covering a lot of detail, so stick with us.

Ease of Use

Foyr Neo

More than 10,000 pre-set design templates have been done for you so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and waste time. The simple, straightforward, and user-friendly interface is heartwarming, as it immediately familiarizes you with the tool, so you don’t get irritated, feel helpless, or lost when navigating through the tool. 

Regardless of whether you’re just stepping into interior design or a homeowner who just wants to visualize how your home will look, Neo cares about you and makes learning and designing easy for you every step of the way.

You can make iterations on the go, without having to rely on specific equipment or high bandwidth. The cloud-based engine makes it seamless for you to have multiple projects running at the same time, different tabs open, and working on other projects while you’re rendering, without glitching, lagging, or restarting. If you had used outdated, difficult tools to design, you’d know how much of a lifesaver this swift tool is. Neo is seamless even when working on low internet bandwidth. It has a 2x shorter project loading time and comes in handy for large projects with complex details.

Read also – Top 15 Latest Interior Design Trends in 2024

Planner 5D

Extremely easy for absolute beginners to take the first step from hand sketches to full-on design on software apps. You don’t need CAD or any technical skills to simply sign up, and choose what you want. The system is user-friendly that way. You can experiment with colors, textures, and materials to an extent. If you get stuck anywhere along the way, you can reach out to customer support at any part of the day and they answer your message. When you’re in a hurry and need to speed things up, Planner 5D will help you meet that deadline. 

The home design tool is highly compatible with all devices, especially laptops, and Android, and iOS mobile phones. You can take the phone to the site for space planning, and jot down important design elements right away.

Your laptop or desktop is likely to lag a lot unable to bear the weight of the app. Even though it’s cloud-based, recurrent speed, performance, and delivery issues keep coming up, which is frustrating for anyone using the tool. Another concerning feature is how it doesn’t save your progress when you upgrade and you’ll lose all your projects just because you paid to get a few better designs. 

Design Capabilities

Foyr Neo

Exemplary design capabilities that let your design ideas take shape. You don’t need any external software or plug-ins. It saves several hours of time wasted on drawing floor plans, bringing elements to scale, losing progress, and starting from scratch.

• You can upload floor plans you created previously and make crisp changes instantly, or draw your own custom 3D floor plan from scratch in a few minutes. 
• Moving, transposing, deleting, zooming, replacing, or experimenting with various design elements happens seamlessly with zero glitches. 
• Any changes you make while viewing in 3D will automatically and appropriately be reflected in the 2D design. 
• If you find a texture you love, you can copy and paste it on any element you want and replicate the texture on that element without disrupting the flow of the design. 
• The push-pull feature helps you create depth, height, and cavities anywhere appropriate in the design. 
• There are cameras all over the design, all set to capture views of the design from all possible angles. You can edit and customize design viewing angles, walk through the entire design, view tile by tile, and assess its efficacy. 
• Neo auto-adjusts lighting depending on the settings and elements you’ve incorporated and gets you crystal-clear renders in a few minutes, while you can simultaneously work on other projects or surf the web. 

Crisp, high-quality 3D rendering in 4K quality with completely customizable, 360-degree walkthroughs and unbelievably real visualization features.

Read also – How to Create the Best Architect Portfolio in 2024 

Planner 5D

The design elements look promising on Planner 5D, and the visuals it generates are reasonably realistic. However, if you’re looking for advanced photorealistic quality, it’s not the tool for you.

• It’s super easy to add multiple stairs and levels without waiting for the system to cooperate with you. You can simply switch to 3D, design, model, and take classy renders even in a low-spec PC or laptop. The cloud engine stores your progress so you can keep adding to your design. That’s a good quality. 
• Good rendering quality with the ability to switch from 2D to 3D seamlessly and without the system grinding to a halt, unlike most dated interior design software apps.
• You get only 60 renders a year, which boils down to 5 renders a month, even for advanced plans. If you want to scale up your design business before a year and witness some solid growth, Planner 5D is not for you. 
• The company has fairly recently introduced a 360-degree panorama feature to get a holistic view of your design. You can position yourself in the design and look different ways without being able to move. You won’t be able to assess the design from different angles, evaluate your precision, and sort out errors before they hinder your design quality. 
• Rendering takes a long time, which is surprising given that Planner 5D has a cloud-based engine. When you move any element across the design or modify minute furniture details, the bugs stall the software. 

In 3D view, if you try to zoom into any furniture piece, you might intrude on the design process as a particular portion of the design might get cut off. 

Lighting and weather conditions

Foyr Neo

One of the best things about Foyr Neo is that the lighting is simply unparalleled. You can enable ample natural lighting and see how the design looks in the morning, afternoon, evening, and night, and observe changes in the design with changes in sun position. You can also change the environmental conditions outside (winter, summer, rainy, fall seasons, etc), add different natural lighting styles, and observe how the elements look and feel with changes in the undertones of the light that is coming in.

It’s with this level of precision the lighting feature is enabled on Foyr Neo, and also handheld by a super-intelligent AI, so your design is flawless and wins your client’s trust instantly.

Read also –Best Kitchen Lighting Ideas and Trends to Style Your Kitchen

Planner 5D

One of the biggest setbacks of the tool is that it doesn’t have the feature to show natural light anywhere in the design. You can use twilight or artificial lighting, but you cannot see or show how the design will look in different sun angles, light, shadows, and exposure to direct sunlight. This can become a big disappointment for your clients who have sustainability targets or want to see their house get ample sunshine and air circulation. You won’t be able to see how different climatic conditions affect the look and feel of the materials used in the house. 

Catalog and Objects

Foyr Neo

Brace yourself, as you take a trip through 50,000+ stunning 3D elements with major brands, elements, and specifications across all product categories so you and your clients are better able to visualize how the elements come together. You can play around with colors, materials, shades, textures, finishes, and shapes across products and hyper-personalize your designs without having to face glitches at any point. This frees up your time and helps you create efficient designs in a few minutes. Even if your client wants a super-specific element, you can simply raise a request, and add specifications and your custom 3D element will be created in no time.

To help you fish the elements you’re looking for, there’s an active search option in the toolbar.

Read also – Top 5 DIY Interior Design Software to Design Your Next Design Project

Planner 5D

Outdoor designing can be a hassle as there aren’t as many choices to incorporate in your home exterior or backyard. Only 5,000 elements in the design library regardless of what plan you’re in. If you don’t see a particular furniture fixture or element your client wants, you need to forego them and convince your client to choose an alternative. The furniture catalog especially, is severely dated and limited. Importing unique 3D objects is impossibly hard. 

Learning and support

Foyr Neo

One tool with a remarkably short learning curve. Use it for one day and you’ll know it in and out. That’s how intuitive and simple the tool has been designed to make learning less painful and designing more enjoyable. What’s more? If you’re designing in the middle of the night in a remote corner of the world and want a helping hand, all you need to do is reach out to the website’s live chat and our customer care executive will come to your help. Doesn’t make you wait, no matter where you are.

There are plenty of materials available on the internet on specific features, operations, and processes of designing on Foyr Neo, to make learning easy for you. You can also find user guides and manuals on the website and in the tool as well.

When you sign up for Foyr Neo, you immediately get access to a warm and fuzzy community of 50,000+ interior designers who lift each other up, answer questions, and share interesting insights, inspiration, and interior design news to keep you updated all the way through. 

Planner 5D

Planner 5D has a design library that allows you to see what other designers have created along the same lines using the same design tool. Don’t worry, it also gives project protection so no one can steal your IP. 

• If you’re a homeowner who has saved up to build your dream home or remodel or renovate your existing home but can’t quite visualize where you’d like to place which objects, you can take up the basic design courses in Planner 5D’s Design School at $25/month. 
• A noteworthy feature of the tool is that it helps you learn the fundamentals of design through a Design Battle where designers all over the world compete with you to give the best creative, aesthetic, and functional solutions to design problems and the winner wins a few free renders and can create custom elements for their own library. 
• That said, the design tool doesn’t have many helpful actual product tutorials to guide you through the design process. 
• Customer support is deemed to be good, but customers across the internet frequently complain about the hassles involved in getting a refund. 
• There’s poor documentation about features, which is difficult for an absolute beginner who needs to know which tool can perform what function.

Read also – How Interior Designers Choose Flooring for Interiors

Collaboration and Sharing

Foyr Neo

You can easily find and access saved projects within your profile. When the render is ready, you can choose to share it as a link via email, on Facebook, or Twitter, or get a shareable link to send over WhatsApp, for your client and their contractors to see and share feedback on. Alternatively, you can also download the renders as image files and share them with your clients. The images take up minimum space, so they can be uploaded as attachments quickly and sent instantly. 

Planner 5D

The projects folder is concerning, as you will have a hard time managing or accessing your own past projects quickly. Users have also frequently reported that it’s difficult to share projects amongst team members. 

Pricing and Plans

Making the Informed Decision

We’ve analyzed every aspect of the two closely competing tools in the interior design software market. If you want a long-term tool that grows with you, adapts to your flow, gives you unbelievably clear designs, and helps you impress your clients with mindblowing presentations, you should sign up for Foyr Neo’s 14-day free trial and make 2024 your best business year yet.

However, if you want a tool that only does the work partly, is slightly on the higher end, and requires you to purchase add-ons frequently, you may want to look at Planner 5D. The choice is yours. Choose wisely now, so you can up your design efficiency and move up swiftly, without letting your competitors bag those blue-chip, big-ticket clients.

Make the most of the rest of 2024 by signing up for our 14-day free trial (no credit card information required), a game-changing tool made just for you. Witness its features, and you’ll naturally sign up for a longer period and enjoy the boost it gives your design business.