Draftie reads a drawing the way a draftsperson does (walls, openings, room labels, scale) and hands back editable geometry. Not a redrawn image. Walls you can drag, with the millimetres updating as you do.
Free while in beta · no card · needs a laptop or desktop
Step 01
A photo of a hand sketch, a scan of an old plan, a PDF from your builder or council. JPG, PNG or PDF, single or multi-page.
Step 02
Draftie proposes a scale from what it read on the drawing. If there is no scale bar, type any length you know (a door width, a room dimension) and everything else follows from it.
Step 03
Every wall, door, window and room label comes up for review before it becomes your plan. Accept what is right, fix what is not, then start moving walls.
Three models, each doing one job, because one model asked to do all three does all three vaguely.
A segmentation model separates wall from room interior across the whole image. A detection model finds doors and windows as objects and works out which wall each one sits in. And a vision-language model reads the text on the drawing (“BED 1”, “3600”, “WIR”) so rooms come back named and dimensions come back as numbers rather than as ink.
The output of all three is then reconciled against geometry that has to close: walls must meet, rooms must be enclosed, and an opening has to belong to a wall. That reconciliation is the part most tools skip, and it is why you get a plan you can edit rather than a set of confident guesses that fall apart the first time you drag something.
It is worth being clear about what that means for accuracy. The models propose; the geometry engine decides what is consistent; and you approve. Nothing is applied to your plan silently, because a scanner that is right 90% of the time and tells you nothing is more expensive than one that is right 80% of the time and shows you its working.
Quality is decided almost entirely by what you feed it, and the ranking is not a surprise. A vector PDF contains real line geometry at real coordinates, so precision is preserved rather than inferred. A photograph contains pixels, so precision is inferred from them, and there is a floor below which the information simply is not there.
| Input | Typical outcome | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Vector PDF from CAD | Near-exact walls and openings | Nothing much: this is the best case |
| Scanned PDF, 300dpi | Very good; occasional merged wall | Check thin internal walls |
| Scanned PDF, 150–200dpi | Usable; expect some corrections | Wall thicknesses become approximate |
| Phone photo, plan filling frame | Good structure, scale needs setting | Shoot square-on if you can |
| Phone photo, plan small in frame | Unreliable | Re-shoot closer: this is the common failure |
| Hand sketch | Correct rooms, proportions need fixing | Write in one known dimension |
Most tools that advertise AI floor plans return an image. It looks like a plan, and that is the end of what it can do, you cannot move a wall, you cannot check a dimension, and you cannot hand it to anyone who needs to build from it.
Draftie returns the model underneath the drawing: walls with thicknesses, openings with sills and heights, rooms with types and areas. Drag a wall and the adjoining rooms re-shape while it is still moving, and the millimetres change as you go. Snapping holds to wall faces and centrelines, so a wall you meant to align actually aligns rather than sitting 3mm off.
Because it is real geometry, it exports as a real file. A DXF opens in CAD with millimetre coordinates. A 1:100 PDF prints at true scale, which means a 90mm wall measures 0.9mm on the sheet, the thing that makes a drawing measurable rather than merely printable.
A drawing carries its scale in one of three ways: a printed ratio, a scale bar, or dimension strings along the walls. Draftie looks for all three, and when it finds one it proposes a scale for you to confirm.
When there is none (which is every hand sketch and a lot of brochure plans) you supply one length instead. Any length you actually know: an 820mm door leaf, a 3,600mm bedroom, the overall frontage. Everything else in the drawing is then a ratio away from it.
One practical tip that materially changes the result: calibrate against the longest dimension you know, not the shortest. Measurement error scales with the reference, so a 300mm error on a 12m frontage is a 2.5% error across the plan, while the same 300mm error on an 820mm door is 37%. If you know the frontage, use the frontage.
You can also re-calibrate at any point afterwards by measuring something else you know. Nothing about the first scale is locked in.
The honest version, including where other tools are the better answer.
| Draftie | Image-based AI tools | Platform trace tools | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get back | Editable walls and openings | A picture of a plan | A background to trace by hand |
| Dimensions | Real millimetres, to 1mm | None, or approximate | Whatever you draw |
| Room names read from drawing | Yes | Sometimes | No |
| Manual redrawing needed | No | N/A: cannot edit | Yes, the whole plan |
| CAD export | DXF, millimetre coordinates | No | Varies; often paid tier |
| 3D and photorealistic renders | No | Often yes | Often yes |
| Works on a phone | No | Usually yes | Sometimes |
You have a plan of the house as it is and you want to try moving a wall. This gets you the existing house as geometry in a couple of minutes, so you spend your time on the change rather than on redrawing what is already there.
Client intake. Somebody arrives with a PDF and an idea; you get the DXF instead of spending the first billable hour retracing their existing floor plan.
An old listing plan that needs redrawing, or a scanned plan that needs to become a clean one. Read it in, tidy it, export a PNG or a true-scale PDF.
Accurate enough to be worth correcting rather than redrawing, which is the honest bar. A clean vector PDF comes back close to exact. A photo of a hand sketch comes back as a good structural guess with the odd wall in the wrong place. That is why nothing is applied silently, every wall, opening and label is presented for review first, so a mistake costs you a click rather than a plan.
Type in any length you know. A standard 820mm door, the width of a bedroom, the overall frontage, one real measurement calibrates the whole drawing. Use the longest dimension you are sure of, because error scales with the reference you pick.
That is the entire point. You get walls you can drag with live millimetre dimensions, doors and windows you can move and resize, rooms you can re-type, and snapping that holds. It is a floor plan editor that happens to start from your drawing.
JPG, PNG and PDF. PDFs can be vector or scanned, and single or multi-page, you choose which page to work from. If you have a choice, a vector PDF gives the best result by a clear margin.
A 1:100 PDF on A3 with a flooring schedule, a DXF for CAD software with millimetre coordinates on five named layers, and PNG or SVG for everything else. Exports are at true scale, so a measured drawing measures correctly.
It reads them. A vision-language model handles the text on the drawing, so “BED 2” comes back as a bedroom and “WIR” as a walk-in robe. You can re-type any room it gets wrong, and unlabelled rooms come back as untyped spaces for you to name.
Yes. The editor needs a screen at least 900px wide and a mouse: drawing walls to the millimetre is not something a phone screen does well, and we would rather say so than let you find out. Your account and plans wait for you on a laptop.
Plans save to your own account. Crops of the drawing are sent to AI providers we contract with in order to read the labels, and the privacy policy sets out exactly what goes where. Nothing is published or shared by default.
Free while Draftie is in beta, with no card required and no export limits. Plans save to your account automatically.
Most people begin with a photo of something on the fridge. Two minutes later it is a plan they can edit.
Upload a plan, freeDraftie produces concept plans, not construction documents, and its plan checks are advisory rather than a compliance certificate. Product specifications change, confirm current details with the manufacturer before relying on them.