Three tools, one name, and only one of them measures anything
Generating a plan, recognising one you already have, and scanning a room are three different operations sold under one phrase. Two of them never touch your walls.
Which matters because of what a floor plan is for. If it is a picture, approximate is fine. If a sofa has to fit through a door, the numbers have to be true, and it is worth knowing where yours came from.
“Plans must include dimensions; without them, we cannot reproduce the plan while maintaining the desired dimensions.”
Planner 5D, on its own floor plan recognition. Read plainly: it reads the numbers printed on your drawing, it does not discover them.
Checked August 2026
Which of the three you are actually buying
The column that matters is the third one. It is the question nobody asks of a floor plan until something does not fit.
Generate a layout from a description
You type the room count, the footprint and the constraints, and the model returns plausible arrangements, trained on thousands of existing homes, so it knows kitchens sit near dining rooms and bedrooms want privacy from the front door.
Early options for a house not yet built, and for arguing about a brief before anyone draws properly. Genuinely useful at that, and useless for a room you already live in.
None. The plan is invented. It is a proposal about a building that does not exist yet, and its dimensions are whatever the model chose.
Maket, Finch3D, TestFit
Recognise a plan you already have
You upload the estate agent’s drawing or a builder’s PDF and the tool converts it into something editable in 2D and 3D. This is what most people arriving on this query actually want.
Skipping the redraw when you already hold a properly dimensioned plan. If the drawing has no numbers on it, this step cannot invent them and you are back to a tape measure.
Borrowed. It reads the dimensions printed on your drawing. It does not derive them. Planner 5D says so in its own help centre: plans "must include dimensions; without them, we cannot reproduce the plan while maintaining the desired dimensions".
Planner 5D, HomeDesigns AI, Maket
Scan the room with the phone
You walk the room with the camera, or a LiDAR sensor on a recent iPhone Pro, and the app builds the plan from what it sees. The only one of the three that goes and finds out.
A room with no plan at all. Check the two or three walls that a piece of furniture actually depends on with a tape before you trust the layout to them.
Measured, within the error of the scan. That error is small but it is not nothing, and furniture fit is decided in centimetres.
magicplan, CubiCasa
A layout can look right and be wrong, and the eye will not catch it
We can show this on ourselves. Building the four studio layouts on another page of this site, every arrangement was placed by eye first and then drawn to scale and run through a clearance check. Two of the four had furniture standing inside the front door’s swing.
They looked completely fine. A door swing is a quarter-circle roughly ninety centimetres across that nothing draws unless you ask it to, and it is the single most commonly ignored piece of geometry in a room. A generated plan has exactly the same blind spot, for the same reason.
What we do with a plan
Decato does not generate plans and does not scan rooms. It takes one you already have: an agent’s listing image, a builder’s drawing, a photograph of a printed plan — and traces it back into wall runs you can correct by hand.
After that those numbers are the truth everything is measured against. Furniture is matched to real in-stock products and refused if it does not clear the walkways and the door swings, and what comes back is a priced list rather than a picture to interpret.
Correcting the traced walls is a real step, not a formality. The plan is only as good as the drawing it came from, which is the whole point of this page. Mac only for now, Windows planned; planning runs free on your own ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini key.
Common questions
Can AI generate a floor plan of my actual house?
Not from nothing. It can convert a drawing you already have, or build one by scanning the room with a phone camera. What it cannot do is deduce your walls from a description or a photograph of the living room. The tools that generate plans from a prompt are inventing a building, which is a different and legitimate job.
Are AI floor plans dimensionally accurate?
It depends which of the three you used. A generated plan has no relationship to your room at all. A recognised plan is as accurate as the numbers printed on the drawing you fed it: Planner 5D states that it cannot maintain dimensions the source does not carry. A scanned plan is genuinely measured, with the small error any scan has (Checked August 2026).
How long does AI floor plan recognition take?
Longer than the review sites say. Several put it at one to two minutes; Planner 5D’s own help centre says between 10 minutes and 24 hours, and tells you to contact support if nothing has arrived after a day. Plan the afternoon accordingly (Checked August 2026).
Do I still need to check the plan by hand?
Yes, and not all of it: just the walls that decide something. For most rooms that is three or four measurements: the wall the sofa or bed goes against, the opening it has to pass through, and the door swing. Everything else can be a few centimetres out without changing a decision.
What does Decato do with a floor plan?
Takes one you already have as a PNG or JPG, traces it back into wall runs you can correct, and then treats those numbers as the truth every later step is measured against. Furniture is matched to real in-stock products, checked against the walls and door swings, and anything that does not clear is refused rather than drawn smaller.