If you’ve been here a while, you know this channel has been about one thing: modeling and rendering in SketchUp and V-Ray. But here’s the truth: SketchUp can’t run your whole interior design business on its own, which is why I rely on five free tools for interior designers that pick up everywhere SketchUp leaves off. Somewhere between landing a client and handing over a finished space, these tools are doing just as much work as any 3D model, and every one of them is free.
Ravenor’s has spent 12 years adapting to what you actually need as a designer. This is that same instinct: not a break from the modeling and rendering content, but a widening of the lens to cover your whole project, not just the render.
5 Free Tools for Interior Designers, In Order
Here are the five free tools for interior designers I lean on, in the order they actually show up in a real project, from landing your client to walking the finished space.
1. Canva
To be honest, Canva does more work in my business than SketchUp does. If the only thing you’ve ever used it for is a quick social graphic, you are massively underselling this thing.
It’s your one-stop shop for marketing, branding, and presentation: branded proposal documents, portfolios, social posts, invoices, all built with your actual brand colors and fonts locked in, so you’re not reinventing the look every single time. The free version alone covers most of what you’ll need day to day, and the paid tier is a fraction of the cost of the alternatives.
The feature you’ll want to know about is Live Embed: embed a Canva document or graphic anywhere with a link, and it updates automatically whenever you edit the source (multi-page designs included). That’s what lets you embed a Canva doc straight into your project dashboard in Notion and never have to re-upload it.
Speaking of Notion, that’s tool number two.
2. Notion
Notion is what let me build a fully custom project management dashboard, for free, that I can use from my laptop or my phone on-site. You can do the same.
A few of the features doing the heavy lifting:
- Pages: a dedicated section for your scope and deliverables, with your contracted scope written out in text blocks and a Table tracking each deliverable’s status, due date, category, and linked meetings.
- Budget tracking: every line item logged with quantity, estimated vs. actual cost, delivery date, category, status, supplier, image, link, and notes.
- Meeting notes: each meeting gets its own page: date, meeting type, stakeholders present, summary, and action items linked directly to the relevant deliverables.
- Calendar: a separate, equally intuitive calendar app tied to your dashboard, so you can create tasks and track status in a couple of clicks.
The dashboard I’m showing you is a template built from a real project, and I’ve tried to cover every aspect of running an interior design project in it (FF&E, a risk tracker, and a database for files and revisions), whether you offer design-only services or design-and-build like I do. It’s free to use, and you can duplicate it into your own account in one click.
Next up is a tool I use mainly on my tablet: Planner 5D.
3. Planner 5D
Planner 5D is a genuinely solid drafting app; it supports project documents like photos and mood boards, and it lets you knock out 2D floor plans in literal minutes.
Case in point: I helped my mother brainstorm three possible layouts for her kitchen addition, live, over a 40-minute video call. That’s what real brainstorming actually looks like: you throw out several fast, disposable versions instead of spending an hour in SketchUp on every idea.
It’s intuitive on a touch screen: you draw fast in 2D, flip to 3D to see if the space actually reads, and switch straight back if it doesn’t work. If you’re on desktop, the browser version unlocks a few extras: you can upload DWG files, images, or plan screenshots directly, switch to 3D, add floors, and export straight to your computer. The controls feel close to SketchUp’s, right down to right-clicking an object to bring up an edit menu.
One premium feature I find worth the money: exporting a 2D plan or 3D model to bring straight into SketchUp.
From here, you can import your Planner 5D layout straight into SketchUp (check it against your original wall thickness for scale), and it’s ready to become your final design. Which is exactly where LayOut comes in.
4. LayOut
LayOut is the documentation half of SketchUp Pro that most designers never open, and trust me, it deserves its own spot on this list.
Import anything into a LayOut page, even a DWG file, and it stays fully editable: you can pan, zoom, orbit, and adjust it without ever leaving the app. If you’re importing from SketchUp, build Scenes first: set them up once, and switching between views becomes instant.
Here’s the real selling point: the link stays live. Edit your source DWG or SKP file, and LayOut updates on its own: no rebuilding your document, no version confusion about which PDF is the current one.
One bonus feature worth knowing: Generate Report. You can pull a component list straight out of your model and turn it into an FF&E schedule or an MEP table without retyping a single row (this only works cleanly if you’ve named and organized your components and textures). Export that report as an Excel sheet, customize what it contains, and import it directly into LayOut as an editable table.
One caveat: the more items you add into LayOut, the bigger your exported PDF gets, which is exactly why the next tool matters.
5. Google Drive
Yes, a cloud storage app makes the list, but stay with me, it’s not for the reason you’d expect.
Beyond the basics you already know (device backup, folder organization, 15GB free storage), the feature I love most is Projects: a smarter file management layer where you assign files to a project regardless of which folder they actually live in, and then “talk” to that project directly with Gemini, including searching inside the contents of those files, so you’re not manually digging through blocks of text or a pile of images to find one thing. You can link Gmail and other Google products in too, and go through your project’s full history.
The obvious bonus: you can access your files anywhere, on any device, and you can embed files straight from Drive into your Notion dashboard just by pasting or browsing for the link.
Bonus: Trimble Connect
Five tools is the ecosystem, but there’s one bonus tool that completes it for me: Trimble Connect, provided by SketchUp and criminally underused.
You can organize your models into folders and access them through the free Trimble Connect app on your phone or tablet, perfect for pulling up a model on-site or in a client meeting. Rotate, pan, zoom, and move around your model freely, with access to a full range of model info and settings. You can also attach To Dos directly to the model, pre-save 2D/3D views, and invite collaborators as either a viewer or an admin.
The Full Stack: Free Tools for Interior Designers
That’s five tools, plus a bonus, no subscriptions, no exorbitant fees, and every one of them compatible enough to work together across your laptop, tablet, and phone, whether you’re on iOS, macOS, Windows, or Android.
Quick recap of these free tools for interior designers:
- Canva: branding, marketing, and presentation
- Notion: your full project management dashboard
- Planner 5D: fast 2D/3D drafting and brainstorming
- LayOut: live-linked documentation and deliverables
- Google Drive: file delivery and searchable project storage
- Trimble Connect (bonus): model access and AR on-site
If any of this sounds like something you’d want to build for yourself, I go deeper into free tools for interior designers on the channel and the site, and if you’ve already got a system that works for you, I’d genuinely love to hear about it.
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