A Cedreo alternative for the remodeler who is not going to sit and draw

Nobody is defending this phrase

Page one is alternativeto, Capterra on six country domains, GetApp in German, comparasoftware, alternative.me, itqlick twice, trustradius and machow2, plus two of Cedreo own comparison pages against Coohom and Planner 5D. No vendor has written a real page here and no publisher has either.

Every one of those lists answers the same way, which is here are nine other design tools sorted by price. That answer is fine if you already know you want design software. It is useless if you clicked because you are not sure that is what you need.

So this page asks the question the lists skip. Before you shop for an alternative, work out which of three different things you are actually short of.

What Cedreo is, said fairly

Cedreo calls itself 3D home design software and says you can draw a complete house in two hours. Elsewhere on their own site the figure is one hour for a 3D floor plan and renderings. Either way, that is fast for what it produces.

What it produces is a set: site plan, floor plan, cross section, elevation, roof plan, a table of surface areas, and photorealistic renderings they say come out in a few minutes. There is a terrain tool that does a lot plan in under twenty minutes. Their stated audience is home builders, contractors, remodelers, architects and interior designers, and they say they have more than three thousand users.

The pitch is honest and it is aimed at a real cost. Their own words are about not paying a design firm for floor plans and revisions. If you are currently sending jobs out to a draftsman and waiting a week for a revision, two hours at your own desk is a genuine win.

Note who is operating it, though. Their own help text says you will need a mouse to draw and furnish your project. The two hours is your two hours. Nothing in Cedreo goes and looks at the house, and nothing in it involves the homeowner at all.

Their pricing page names three tiers, Personal, Professional and Enterprise, plus a free plan that gives you one project and the basic drawing tools. Personal projects come with twenty rendering credits, and the paid tiers carry monthly rendering credits that do not roll over. Read the figures on their own page rather than off a directory, because the directory figures for this category are routinely out of date.

Cedreo does not price anything

This is the part no list ranking for the phrase mentions, and it is the whole reason some people land here disappointed.

Read every page on their site and there is no estimating, no cost book, no material pricing and no quantity takeoff for cost. The only arithmetic it does is areas: a table of surface areas and an automatic calculation of surfaces on the terrain tool. Those are square footage figures, not money. The only cost Cedreo talks about reducing is the design fee you currently pay somebody else.

That is not a criticism. It is a design tool and it does not claim to be anything else. But it does mean that if you came to this phrase because you are tired of guessing at numbers, swapping Cedreo for another design tool will not touch the problem. You will have a nicer picture and the same blank space where the price goes.

It also means the two hours is being saved from the wrong place. Drawing was never your bottleneck. Driving across town to find out whether the ceiling is eight feet or nine was.

And we do not draw

Being straight about our own limits, because this is the row where it matters most.

We do not do design. There is no mouse, no furnishing, no layout options to try. We do not produce elevations, cross sections, roof plans or construction documents. We cannot give you a drawing set for a permit, and we cannot show a client three different kitchen layouts and let her pick. If any of that is the job, Cedreo is the product and this page is a dead end for you.

What we do is the capture and the number. You send the homeowner a link. She opens it in the browser already on her phone, with nothing to install. On a recent iPhone Pro the LiDAR sensor measures the room. On any other phone she photographs it and types the room sizes in, and the scope tells you which numbers came from the sensor and which ones she typed. A vision model reads her photographs. A model writes the scope brief. The price is arithmetic against your own cost book, line by line, with every quantity traceable back to the capture.

We do produce renders, from an image model, so there is a picture to put in front of her. It is a picture, not a plan. It is there so the conversation has something to look at, not so anybody can build from it.

Which makes the overlap between us and Cedreo narrower than the word alternative suggests. We both end up handing the homeowner an image. Only one of us hands you a priced scope, and only one of us hands you a drawing set.

• No design iterations, no layout options, no furnishing
• No elevations, sections, roof plans or permit drawings
• Renders come from an image model and are not construction documents
• The price is your cost book, not a model and not a national average