Guide
How to draw a floor plan online — free & to scale
A floor plan is just a to-scale, top-down drawing of a space: walls, doors, windows, and enough measurements that someone could build, renovate or furnish from it. You don't need CAD software or a design background — a browser is enough. Here's the whole workflow in FloorPlan Creator, from empty grid to a drawing you can print at architectural scale or send as a link. Budget ten minutes for your first room, half an hour for a whole home.
1 · Choose your starting point
There are three good ways to begin, depending on what you have:
- Blank canvas — drag out a rectangle with the Room tool and adjust from there. Best when you're sketching an idea.
- A template — open a ready-made floor plan template (single room, studio, L-shape or 2-bedroom) and reshape it. Fastest way to a complete plan.
- A paper plan or photo — use the Trace tool: upload a photo or scan of an existing plan, click both ends of one distance you know (a wall, a doorway), type its real length, and the image snaps to true scale so you can draw directly over it. The reference image never appears in your exports.
2 · Draw the walls
Draw the outer shell first, then divide the inside — the same order a drafter works in. Walls snap to the grid, to angles and to each other's endpoints, so corners meet exactly and lines stay straight. Rooms enclosed by walls are detected automatically and compute their own floor areas, even for irregular shapes. Standard wall thicknesses are about 20 cm for exterior walls and 10–12 cm for interior partitions; you can set the exact thickness per wall.
3 · Add doors and windows
Doors and windows live inside walls, the way real openings do. Place one on a wall, then drag it along to position it. Pick the style that matches reality: single, double, sliding or pocket doors, plain archways, and windows with proper glazing symbols. Door swing arcs are drawn automatically — flip the swing and the hinge until it matches the room. Typical widths: interior doors around 80–90 cm, entry doors 90–100 cm, windows 60–180 cm.
4 · Furnish and label the rooms
Furniture is what makes a floor plan legible at a glance. Drop in symbols from the library — 50+ true architectural top-view symbols across living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, office, outdoor and structural categories — and resize, rotate or mirror them to fit. Name each room and its area appears beneath the label automatically. The room schedule (click the area total in the status bar) lists every room's area and share, with optional cost-per-m² estimates.
5 · Get the measurements right
A plan without honest dimensions is a sketch. FloorPlan Creator measures as you draw: every wall shows its length, and automatic dimension chains outside the plan read the way a drawing set does — wall thickness, interior span, wall thickness, plus the overall dimension. Work in meters, centimeters or feet & inches, and use the Measure tool to check any distance, like a tape measure on screen.
6 · Export, print to scale, or share
When the plan is ready, finishing takes one click. Export a PDF plan set at an exact architectural scale — 1:50, 1:100 or 1:200 on A4, A3 or Letter — print it at 100% and you can measure the paper with a scale ruler. Multi-floor plans export one sheet per floor plus a room-schedule page, like an architect's set. Need pixels instead? PNG/JPEG up to 8K for listings and presentations, SVG vectors, layered DXF for AutoCAD, or a 3D OBJ of the whole building. Or skip files entirely and send a view-only share link that's always up to date and revocable anytime.
Common beginner mistakes (and easy fixes)
- Guessing measurements. Measure the longest wall of the real room first and draw it exactly; everything else hangs off it. Tracing a photo? Calibrate off the longest known distance for the best accuracy.
- Drawing rooms as separate boxes. Let walls share corners — connected walls resize together, and shared walls are how real buildings work.
- Forgetting door swings. A door that opens into the fridge is a floor plan's most expensive mistake. The swing arcs exist to catch exactly this.
- Skipping the scale check. Before printing, confirm the scale bar on the PDF title block matches a known dimension.
Frequently asked
Is it really free to draw a floor plan? Yes — the full editor, templates, tracing, 3D preview and image export are on the free plan. Print-to-scale PDF and CAD exports are part of the paid plans.
Can I draw a floor plan on my phone or tablet? Yes. The editor is touch-friendly — pinch to zoom, two fingers to pan — though a bigger screen makes detailed work faster.
Do my plans save? Automatically, to the cloud, with version history — and offline edits sync when your connection returns.