How to draw a floor plan online for free (no install)
A 5-minute guide to drawing your first floor plan in zdraw — set up rooms with the rectangle tool, build walls, add doors and windows, then view it in 3D.
Why draw your plan in a browser?
Desktop CAD apps work, but they're heavy, expensive, and the learning curve is steep. For most jobs — sketching a renovation, planning furniture, mocking up a new build — you don't need a full BIM tool. A browser-based drafting app gets you there in minutes, on any device, with nothing to install.
This guide walks you through your first floor plan in zdraw:
- Sketching rooms as polygons
- Building walls automatically from those rooms
- Placing doors and windows
- Switching to a real-time 3D preview
The same file then opens in the AI rendering panel, so you can turn it into a photo-real visual when you're done.
Step 1 — draw the rooms
Open the Rectangle tool and drag out the first room. zdraw fills it with a light slab and labels it "Room" with the area in m². Double-click to rename — try "Bedroom 1", "Kitchen", "Living". Names matter later when we get to auto-placed openings.
Add more rooms next to each other. zdraw will tidy up shared edges and fold them into one continuous floor.
Step 2 — Build the walls
Click the 🏗 Build button in the top toolbar. zdraw traces the perimeter of all your rooms and emits exterior walls automatically. Shared edges between rooms become interior walls (100 mm by default).
If you reshape a room later, click 🏗 Build again. Walls regenerate to match — your manually-placed doors, windows and any custom walls come back, anchored to the right room edges.
Step 3 — Add doors and windows
Pick the Door or Window tool from the menu, click on any wall to drop a fixture. Doors hinge on the side facing the room interior (zdraw figures this out from the room shape automatically). Adjust sill height for windows in the side panel.
Step 4 — Switch to 3D
The right-hand panel is a real-time 3D view of your model. Walls, floors, doors and windows all appear immediately. Orbit with the mouse, zoom with the scroll wheel.
Drop furniture in from the 3D Assets Catalogue — drag any model into the 3D view and it lands on the floor, snapped to a wall if you hover near one.
Step 5 — Render
Click Open Render Preview, then either Path Trace for a deterministic ray-traced output, or Enhance (AI) to turn the current view into a stylised photoreal image. Both take a few seconds.
Next steps
That's the full loop — 2D to 3D to render, free and in the browser. For more, see the Tutorial or jump straight into the Gallery for ready-made example scenes.