Landscape Software : You Get What You Pay For

by Kristyne McDaniel

Similar to home decorating software, landscape design software seems to come in two varieties: affordable for the average person and ridiculously expensive for the average person who wants the aid of software to help realize landscaping goals for their yard. The affordable landscape software titles tend to lack any real usefulness and can be down right frustrating to use, whereas the more expensive titles seem to have intuitive and well thought out functionality.

You want some examples that illustrate this point, correct? Again, like too many of the interior design software titles, the lower end landscape software suites often lack necessary components, or allow you to put together a replica of your actual backyard, but then won’t have a way to input the parts you’re trying to decide on, or perhaps lack the functionality to put the pieces where you need them to go.

For example, you may open the program and be able to find objects to represent your deck and even the deck chairs that are in your backyard, but when you go to put in your hot tub, which happens to be placed at a 45 degree angle from the other elements, the program simply won’t let you. You’ve suddenly discovered how useless the program is because the area around your hot tub is the area you’re trying to landscape.

That said, no landscape software is perfect and in order to end up with results that you want you’re going to need to come up with some ideas on your own. No matter how good the program is it’s still up to you to decide which direction to take things.

There are some landscape programs that are better than others. After all, we want a program that will help us better visualize the landscape ideas that we have in mind, and so the less buggy a landscaping program is the closer it will bring us to visualizing and then implementing the landscape vision in the minds’ eye.

After pouring over various reviews I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two titles at either end of the spectrum as far as good and bad landscape software titles that are affordable. ‘Your Complete Landscape and Garden Designer’ is a very good piece of software and ‘Grow It Gold’ is a very bad and very overpriced piece of landscape software. That said, I invite you to make your own decisions if you’d like to give either a trial.