Your house was drawn once already.

The difference in one line

Planner 5D asks what your home looks like. Poché asks whether the sofa fits. They are not the same question, and the tools are shaped by which one they answer.

Planner 5D is a home design app in the broad sense: you build a model of a space and then dress it — furniture, finishes, lighting, renders, an AI studio, a walkthrough. It runs on the web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and visionOS, and its pricing page says it is trusted by 120 million-plus people. That is a real product with a decade and a half behind it.

Poché is narrower on purpose. It is a drafting overlay: upload the plan you were handed, and it reads the drawing scale off the sheet, recovers every room's outline and floor area from the wall mass, and lets you drag real furniture footprints — measured in inches, with clearance rules attached — around on the architect's own linework. There is no blank canvas, because the whole premise is that you should not have to draw your house a second time.

What Planner 5D is genuinely good at

This has to be said plainly, because a comparison that only flatters the author is worth nothing to a reader.

• The catalogue is enormous. Planner 5D advertises 10,000-plus premium furniture items, with half the catalogue open on the free tier. Poché's library is 280 pieces. If you want to see a specific style of chair in a specific fabric, this is not close.
• It is a real 3D product. Renders, 360° panoramas and walkthroughs, an AI Studio, materials and finishes. Poché has none of this and is not trying to.
• The free tier is unusually generous on volume. Unlimited projects at $0, across web and mobile, is more than most of this category offers.
• It does accept a plan. Their AI Floor Plan Converter takes PNG, JPG, PDF, TIFF, DXF and DWG among others, recognises the plan automatically and emails you when it is ready. Anyone who tells you Planner 5D can only start from scratch has not looked.

So what is left for Poché?

The word in Planner 5D's own description of the converter is convert. Their page says the recognised plan is something you then "work with … as you would with a regular project" — the drawing has become the seed of a Planner 5D model, and from that point on you are editing the model, not the drawing.

Poché never leaves the drawing. The builder's sheet stays underneath at its own printed scale, with its own dimension strings, its own wall hatching, its own sheet number. What Poché adds is measurement and furniture on top of it:

• The scale comes off the sheet, not off you. A CAD-printed PDF calibrates from its wall thicknesses. A photograph of a paper plan calibrates from the dimension strings printed on the drawing — measured in pixels, cross-checked, and settled on the value the most strings agree about.
• Rooms are recovered, not entered. Poché renders the sheet, finds the wall mass, and derives each room's outline and floor area from the walls themselves. The areas come out as odd numbers because they are the space inside the studs, not the round number printed on the marketing brochure.
• Every piece is a true dimension with a clearance rule. 280 researched footprints across 17 categories — 18 inches of walking room round a sofa, 36 inches behind a dining chair so it can pull out, 30 down the side of a king. Redline when two things overlap, amber when a clearance gets tight.
• Shopping is sized, not styled. Select a footprint and Poché searches 40-plus live stores for products that actually fit it, ranked by fit and never by payout.
• Free, with no tier above it. There is no Premium version of Poché withholding the plan upload.

Side by side

Planner 5D figures read from planner5d.com/pricing and planner5d.com/ai/floor-plan-to-3d-model on 2026-08-21. Prices change; check theirs before you decide anything on ours.

The free tiers, honestly

"Free" is doing different work in each product, and the difference is worth ten minutes before you commit a weekend.

Planner 5D's free tier is generous about quantity and specific about what it withholds. Unlimited projects, web and mobile, half the furniture catalogue. The two things a plan-first user wants most — uploading a floor plan and converting it, and the full catalogue — sit behind Premium. That is a legitimate business model and they are clear about it on the page.

Poché has no tier above free. That is not generosity either; it is the business model. Poché makes money on affiliate commissions when a shopping link you followed ends in a purchase, which is disclosed in the footer of every page and in the editor. The rule that keeps that honest is written into the product: results are ranked by fit, never by payout. If it does not fit your room, it does not appear, whoever is paying.

One thing to be square about: uploading your own plan to Poché requires an account, because a plan is private by default and there has to be a "you" for it to be private to. Sign-in is Google or Apple — Poché never holds a password. The demo plan needs no account at all, and it opens in the identical editor, so you can judge the tool before you give it anything.

When to pick Planner 5D instead

The reverse is just as clear. If you are holding a builder's plan set for a house that is not finished yet, if your question is "will a 96-inch sectional leave a walkway", or if you want to shop by the footprint you just settled on, Poché is aimed exactly at that and Planner 5D is not.

What Poché does not have, stated once and plainly

• No 3D. It was built and then deliberately removed, because it took effort away from the question the tool exists to answer. Poché is a top-down drafting view and nothing else.
• No renders, no materials, no lighting design beyond placing fixtures as footprints on the ceiling plan.
• No native apps. Web only, though it works on a phone browser.
• A small library. 280 pieces chosen for dimensional truth, not for visual variety.
• It launched this month. Planner 5D has been shipping since 2011. Judge the tool on the demo rather than on a track record it does not have yet.

Common questions

Is Planner 5D free?

There is a genuinely free tier. Planner 5D's pricing page lists Free at $0 with an unlimited number of projects, use across web and mobile, and access to 50% of the furniture catalogue. Premium is $4.99 a month if you pay $59.99 for the year, or $19.99 month to month; Professional is $33.33 a month billed at $399.99 a year, or $49.99 month to month. The floor plan upload is on the paid side: turning an uploaded plan into a 3D project is listed under Premium, not Free.

Can Planner 5D open a builder's floor plan PDF?

Yes. Planner 5D's AI Floor Plan Converter accepts PNG, JPG, PDF, TIFF, DXF and DWG among other formats, recognises the plan automatically and emails you when it is done. What comes back is a Planner 5D project — their own page says you then work with the recognised plan as you would with a regular project. So the drawing becomes the seed for a model you edit in their editor, and the recognition step is a Premium feature.

What is the actual difference between Poché and Planner 5D?

What you end up working on. Planner 5D gives you a 3D model of a home you assembled, and the strength of the product is what that model can then look like. Poché keeps the original sheet — your builder's PDF or a photo of a printed plan — as the drawing underneath, reads the drawing scale off it, recovers each room from the wall mass, and lets you push true-scale furniture footprints around on the architect's own linework. It is a drafting overlay rather than a modelling tool.

Does Poché have 3D?

No. A 3D view was built and then deliberately removed, because it pulled effort away from the thing the tool is for: whether the piece fits, and where it goes. Poché is a top-down drafting view only. If you want to see the room rendered, walk through it, or show a client a photorealistic image, Planner 5D is straightforwardly the better tool and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Which one is better for a new-construction home I have not moved into?

Poché, because the only artefact that exists at that stage is the drawing. You cannot measure a house that is still a slab, so a builder's plan set is the whole source of truth, and Poché is built to read it: it takes the scale off the sheet and the rooms off the walls rather than asking you to re-enter numbers you would have to guess. Planner 5D becomes the more interesting tool later, when you want to see finishes and colours in three dimensions.

How big is each furniture library?

Not comparable, and Planner 5D's is far larger. Their pricing page advertises 10,000-plus premium furniture items with half the catalogue open on the free tier. Poché ships 280 pieces across 17 categories — every one a researched real-world size in inches with a clearance rule attached, drawn as a top-down symbol rather than a 3D model. One library is for making a room look a particular way; the other is for finding out whether the room can hold the thing at all.