IKEA Home Planner Review

IKEA Home Planner is a free interior design & home design software which allows you to redesign your home. In this Ikea Home Planner review we take a closer look at what it can do.

As you’d expect, IKEA Home Planner only works with IKEA furniture but if you plan on buying all of your home furnishings from IKEA, the home planner tool is ideal to sketch out your ideas before purchasing.

For creating 2D floor plans, we recommend using SmartDraw but if you’re planning on only using IKEA furniture and need 3D perspectives on your design, the IKEA Home Planner is a good alternative.

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What Is The IKEA Home Planner?

The IKEA Home Planner allows you to plan and design your kitchen or office in 2D and 3D.

IKEA Home Planner works in any browser including Chrome, Safari and Firefox and allows you to create 2D and 3D home design blueprints in your browser.

IKEA Home Planner allows you to place objects around a floor space to rearrange your home in 2D and 3D.

You can “look” around the room at ground level in 3D mode to see exactly how your new home design would look and feel in real life.

Although it’s nowhere near as advanced as the best home design software and floor planners the IKEA Home Planner is completely free to use and fine for creating simple mock-up plans.

IKEA Home Planner Review: Features

You can start designing with IKEA Home Planner immediately. There’s no need to sign-up for an IKEA account unless you want to save your designs.

The IKEA Home Planner is limited to generic room, lounge, dining, office and kitchen planning which means it’s too restrictive for those that want to design their entire home or office.

However, you can start by selecting basic room layouts and resize the rooms using the measurements tool on the right of the main editor.

You can choose materials such as the type of floor you want in wood, tile, stone, granite, carpet or laminate.

The same goes for the colors of doors, windows and even what you can see out of the windows such as city or countryside landscapes.

When it comes to getting creative with furniture, you can use the search bar to search for items by object name (such as sofa or bed) or by Ikea item name.

You can drag and drop the items wherever you want and the IKEA Home Planner warns you if an item doesn’t fit your plan or intersects with another item of furniture.

We like the fact that you can even open doors, wardrobes and cupboards to make sure there’s enough space to do so.

Because it’s made by IKEA, you can add almost any finishing touch from plants and ornaments to pictures on the wall and even the type of bedding you want to use.

There are also options to view essential base features such as radiators, ventilation and electrical items.

The useful thing is, because it’s an IKEA product, you can also view the pricing of all the furniture you’ve added so that you can order them in store or online where available.

Of course, you are limited to objects and furniture in the IKEA catalogue although as anyone that has been to an IKEA will know, that’s pretty extensive.

This makes the IKEA Home Planner better than many home design tools when it comes to costing. However, if you want a home design software that goes beyond IKEA furniture, you’re better off using Roomle.

The attention to detail in the IKEA Home Planner is impressive including thing such as colored skirting boards, office accessories and even wall clocks.

There’s a useful notes section where you can save thoughts and observations on designs and you can export to PDF, email or Print directly from the app.

IKEA Home Planner Downsides

The main limitation is that you can only design a few room types with the IKEA Home Planner.

According to the IKEA website there is now a separate bathroom and bedroom planner but neither app seemed to be working at the time of writing.

The other major drawback is that you’re limited to IKEA furniture. If you’re not a big fan of IKEA, you might find Roomle better which also supports IKEA furniture but many other brands too.