The Best Home Renovation Apps of 2020

 

• Best Overall: Houzz - Home Design & Remodel
• Best for Contractors: magicplan
• Best for Interior Design: Home Design 3D
• Best for Landscaping: iScape
• Best for Painting: ProjectColor by The Home Depot
• Best for Furnishing: Wayfair - Shop All Things Home

Home renovation apps can help make the process of managing, planning, designing, and visualizing your next improvement project easier. And with some, you can even buy everything you need to make your ideas a reality.

Whether you are a DIYer, a construction professional, or you just want to have fun and get more involved with the design of your property, this lineup of the best home improvement apps available across Android, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft devices will help you get the job done.

 

Best Overall: Houzz - Home Design & Remodel

Why We Chose it: Houzz - Home Design & Remodel app offers an all-in-one experience where you can get ideas, design your projects, shop for products, and even hire a contractor.

 

Launched by Houzz Inc. in 2010, the Houzz - Home Design & Remodel app is one of the most versatile home renovation apps on the market. With this app, you can do basically anything. Need inspiration? Get ideas from the more than 20 million pictures of indoor and outdoor home designs. Ready to shop? Not a problem, you can purchase more than 10 million items for any part of the house and see how a product would fit your place with the "My Room 3D" feature, all within the app. And if you need professional help during your home renovation, you can hire one of the 2.5 million professionals in the app's network. Plus, you can connect with millions of Houzz users to share ideas and get advice.

The Houzz - Home Design & Remodel app is highly rated, free to use, is supported by all major operating systems, and has tens of millions of downloads.

 

Best for Contractors: magicplan

Why We Chose It: The magicplan app makes it easy for contractors to generate reports, floor plans, and estimates all in one place.

 

If you are in the home renovation business or if you are looking to start one, the magicplan app will make your work easier. Launched in 2011 by Sensopia Inc., the app allows you to create designs, reports, and estimates on the spot. The measuring and sketching feature makes it more convenient to design interior footprints in 2D and 3D. When it comes to creating reports, you can add pictures, 360-degree images, and forms, and convert them to a PDF file right away with your own logo.

The estimate feature means there are no manual calculations to do. In addition, the magic app comes with augmented reality (AR) and LiDAR scanning features that make visualization and measurements easier.

The magicplan app is free to download and you'll get full access to all of its features for your first two projects at no cost. After that, you have the option to choose one of the several plans offered to upgrade to access more features. The price starts at $9.99 and goes up to $199.99 a month.

 

Best for Interior Design: Home Design 3D

Why We Chose It: The Home Design 3D app is the perfect tool to help you design your entire home and it's compatible with mobile phones, tablets, Macs, and PCs.

Designed by Anuman Interactive, Home Design 3D was released to the public in 2011 with the company's first iOS version. Today, the Home Design 3D app is available in most app stores and is compatible with all mobile devices and laptops.

You can design any part of your home using the app. It allows you to create multiple floor plans in 2D and 3D, add furniture and decorative items to your designs, and experience your own home design using the 3D real-time visualizer. There's also a feature that allows users to share their designs outside the app.

Home Design 3D is free to download and you can use a few basic features at no cost. For more features, you'll have to upgrade to one of three plans that range in price from $6.99 to $19.99.

 

Best for Landscaping: iScape

Why We Chose it: iScape helps you bring your home landscaping vision to life with easy-to-use design tools and a large inventory of products available to buy.

Launched in 2018, the iScape app has become one of the most used landscaping apps on the market.

With iScape's design tools, you can visualize and plan your next project and buy the items you need, making landscaping work easier to bring to life. There's an option to use AR or your own pictures to create your design. You can add thousands of trees, plants, and landscaping products to your mockup, and then purchase those products from within the app.

In addition, you can learn about plants and get professional advice about planting and maintenance. iScape is available in Apple's App Store and is free with select features. For $29.99 per month, you get full access. Enterprise accounts are also available.

 

Best for Painting: ProjectColor by The Home Depot

Why We Chose it: The ProjectColor app by The Home Depot lets you choose and visualize the perfect paint color for any of your projects around the house.

ProjectColor by The Home Depot makes painting jobs easier and more fun. The app allows you to browse thousands of colors, match existing colors in your place by simply snapping a picture, and get inspiration from hundreds of projects and designs. You can also check out which paint colors are popular and trending, visualize how a paint will look in any part of your home, and save your favorite paints or buy them.

When you use the color visualizer feature, you can select your preferred color and see how it will look in any part of the house, inside and out. If you're still not ready to commit to a full can of paint, paint samples are available for purchase within the app.

ProjectColor by The Home Depot is free and is compatible with iOS and Android devices.

 

Best for Furnishing: Wayfair - Shop All Things Home

Why We Chose it: The Wayfair - Shop All Things Home app lets you see how an actual piece of furniture will look in your home before you commit to buying it, thanks to the "3D View in Room" feature.

The Wayfair - Shop All Things Home app is a great tool when you're furniture shopping during a home renovation. In the app, you'll find one of the largest collections of furniture for every room of the house. Plan and visualize how a piece of furniture will look by using the "3D View in Room" feature. And if you want to design a complete area of the house with brand new furniture, you can use the "Room Planner" tool that lets you create a 3D design of your place with the products you want until you find the perfect setup.

In addition, with The Wayfair - Shop All Things Home app you can track your deliveries, save your favorite items, and organize your saved furniture by room. The app is free to use and is compatible with most mobile devices.

 

Final Verdict

While there are hundreds of home renovation apps on the market, the good news is that there is an app for everyone, regardless of what you need it for and what type of device you have.

All of the apps on our list are top-notch; if we had to choose one, however, we recommend the Houzz - Home Design & Remodel app for a complete home renovation. And if you love designing your own projects, you have plenty of choices: Use the Home Design 3D for interiors, iScape for outdoor landscaping, and Wayfair - Shop All Things Home to furnish the interior.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

What Can You Do with a Home Renovation App?

Home renovation apps offer a variety of different functions, but in general, they are intended to help you stay organized, create and design projects, shop for products, and even hire contractors. For businesses, they do all that plus generate project reports, estimates, proposals, and more.

 

Should I Use a Home Renovation App?

As a homeowner or construction professional, you don’t have to use a home renovation app because there's always the old-fashioned way of doing things. But in reality, these apps are super helpful and make things easier. They are fun to play around with and you can design a room, your home, and even your landscaping, and then purchase what you need from within the app. Home renovation professionals can use these apps to keep their businesses organized.

 

How Much Do Home Renovation Apps Usually Cost?

All the apps here are free to download for iOS and Android devices, but most of them have in-app purchase plans, which means you have the option to upgrade to get access to different features. The in-app purchases included here start at $6.99 and can go as high as $199.99 per month. The higher-end price is intended for businesses, not personal use. 

 

How We Chose the Best Home Renovation Apps 

We looked at dozens of home renovation apps and selected the top ones based on services provided, mobile device compatibility, user ratings (ensuring each meets a minimum of 4-star ratings or higher on at least one app platform), features, and costs.

For example, we went with the Houzz - Home Design & Remodel app as the best overall choice for offering an all-inclusive home renovation experience, with an average rating of 4.75 stars in the App Store and Google Play, and for featuring the My Room 3D tool. We selected magicplan for the best for contractors for offering designing, planning, and estimating features, for having a 4.5-star rating among iOS and Android users, and for its 2D and 3D floor sketching tools. We picked the Home Design 3D app as the best for interior design for having more than 50 million downloads worldwide, being available for computers and mobile devices across multiple operating systems, and for not requiring an internet connection to operate.