Best Urban Planning Software

Graphisoft Archicad - Design and deliver great buildings. Design: Unleash your creativity with the leading BIM software developed by architects like you. Focus on what you do best — designing great architecture — thanks to powerful algorithmic design tools and large model support. Visualize: Archicad’s professional architectural visualization tools translate your conceptual designs into compelling imagery of future buildings. Bring your models to life, inspire the audience, and invite stakeholders to engage with your designs. Collaborate: Work with your team and other disciplines around the corner or around the world on projects of any size and complexity. Open standards and workflows mean collaboration is guaranteed — regardless of what software other team members are using. Document: Complete, out-of-the-box documentation tools combined with a powerful publishing workflow that complies with local BIM requirements means you can focus on your designs, not the paperwork.

VU.CITY is transforming cities through greater understanding, collaboration, and trust to help you turn possibilities into realities.‍ Test ideas instantly and visualize schemes in an accurate, up-to-date context, with functionality and data that helps you make better decisions, faster. Project teams can better collaborate and expedite decision-making, and communicate the compelling story of proposals to win over stakeholders. VU.CITY means that architects, developers, planning consultants, and local authorities share a clear path in mapping out a city’s future. Now everyone can work together to deliver the best possible city for all. VU.CITY helps you visualize, organize and analyze data clearly and easily so that everyone involved can make better and quicker decisions. Quickly identify and appraise sites. VU.CITY's visualization, design functionality, and planning data allow you to optimize your designs.

Modelur brings architects, urban designers, and planners all the essential tools needed to easily test multiple urban massing options in your favorite 3D modeling environment. Without having to manually recalculate areas and other parameters in Excel! Enter the area’s zoning regulations such as max. FAR, site coverage, green areas, max. building height and more, and create custom land-use types for greater flexibility and calculation precision. Use the urban massing generator to see how zoning rules perform in space and set maximum geometrical building values for the generator to get you started with a basic draft or simply import your dwg floor plans. Use the power of parametric modeling and automated data calculations to start designing and iterating your ideas. Say no more to manually transferring your model data to spreadsheets. Our Excel LiveSync functionality synchronizes all your model data to Excel spreadsheets in real-time.

ENVI-met is a 3D microclimate simulation software. The software is used for a wide range of applications, including urban planning, building design, and energy efficiency, considering not only one single climate parameter, but all of them. ENVI-met can simulate a variety of climate conditions, including day- and night-time temperatures, humidity, wind speed, and solar radiation in cities. The software can also simulate the effects of different building materials, such as glass and stone, on the climate of the surrounding environments. The program is used to predict the effects of urban design changes on the microclimate environment and human thermal comfort for people in cities worldwide. As climate change is having a major impact on our planet, it is essential, that more healthier and resilient cities are developed. To support these goals ENVI-met can be used to assess the potential of new buildings, green spaces, and urban planning and to make informed decisions.

Hektar is a cloud-based generative design software tailored for early-stage urban planning, pre-design, and schematic design. Developed by Parametric, it assists architects and urban planners in creating better projects by handling the inherent complexity of critical design phases. The platform utilizes evolutionary algorithms and artificial generative intelligence to produce feasible concepts and well-grounded estimates, methodically refining user inputs from rough frameworks to nuanced details. Hektar's toolset offers geometrical and geographical awareness, allowing users to define crucial aspects such as site access points, non-buildable zones, and user-defined streets. Additionally, it provides numerical inputs for further control over project parameters, including building depth, greenery, and parking. The software processes complex information, such as light and sun, from the beginning of the geometry pipeline, generating proposals.

​PlanMan is a cloud-based project management software designed specifically for architects and town planners. It offers a comprehensive suite of features to streamline administrative tasks and enhance productivity. Users can manage unlimited clients, projects, quotes, and invoices, all stored securely in one place. It includes built-in cloud storage for all project documentation, eliminating the need for shared network drives. Each project has a built-in chat room for instant communication, and client emails are stored against the relevant project for easy access. PlanMan's client portal allows clients to log in and view their enquiries, quotes, projects, documents, and invoices 24/7. Clients can also pay invoices online through Stripe or GoCardless integrations. The software supports managing co-consultants, creating and sending quotes from project templates, and generating invoices for clients and suppliers.

Issues like housing availability, sustainability goals, and economic changes are compelling cities to better plan for the future. ArcGIS Urban enables planners and design professionals to collaborate across teams with a web-based 3D application that supports scenario planning and impact assessment. ArcGIS Urban enables the digital transformation of city and regional planning to encourage collaboration with community stakeholders and help all groups work toward a more sustainable future. Create, track, and review development projects with a digital twin of your city. Incorporating building information modeling (BIM) and other types of 3D information throughout the project review process gives planners and developers a common view of urban development guidelines and reduces the time required for building applications. ArcGIS Urban makes creating, editing, and managing land-use and zoning plans simple with an interactive 3D environment built with planners in mind.

​Spacemaker is an intuitive, collaborative, cloud-based AI software that empowers architects, urban planners, and real estate developers to design high-quality site proposals. It enables users to create 3D massing models of their site and its surroundings using automatic data sets, test site proposals, and receive accurate analyses for over 100 criteria such as noise, wind, sun, and microclimate. Spacemaker streamlines early-stage planning and design workflows with intuitive tools and generative design, allowing for comprehensive feasibility studies and concept design. It offers ready-to-use data sets, smart design tools for fluid 2D and 3D drawing with real-time floor area tallying, and analyses for noise, wind, solar panels, sun, and parking design. Additional features include import and export capabilities with IFC and OBJ formats, automatic area calculations, microclimate analysis, visualization of differences between proposals, apartment generation, view analysis, etc.

The City Form Lab has released a state-of-the-art toolbox for urban network analysis. As the first of its kind, the centrality tools this ArcGIS toolbox can be used to compute five types of graph analysis measures on spatial networks: reach; gravity; betweenness; closeness; and straightness. Redundancy tools additionally calculate the redundancy index, redundant paths, and the wayfinding index. The tools incorporate three important features that make them particularly suited for spatial analysis on urban street networks. First, they can account for both geometry and topology in the input networks, using either metric distance (e.g. meters) or topological distance (e.g. turns) as impedance factors in the analysis. Second, unlike previous software tools that operate with two network elements (nodes and edges), the UNA tools include a third network element, buildings, which are used as the spatial units of analysis for all measures.

While urban growth accelerates worldwide, urban areas are becoming more sensitive to climate change. Urban Heat Islands (UHI), air pollution, and pluvial flooding are major threats to urban development and the health and safety of city populations. Municipalities need to take action to solve urban growth and climate change impacts. GREENPASS helps planners, developers and municipalities make the best decision for each phase of urban planning and development – dealing with up to 6 urban challenges. GREENPASS makes the impacts of green infrastructures and other structural measures on the urban environment visible, measurable, and comparable. GREENPASS offers the right solution for each phase of urban planning processes. From checking drafts to detailed planning and realization. Preliminary analysis based on machine learning database interrogation. Standard analysis based on regular BASIC simulation.

Simplex 3D is a high-resolution 3D reality-planning platform designed to help professionals visualize, plan, and build within accurate urban and infrastructural contexts. It provides seamless 360° navigation through cityscapes at up to 3 cm-per-pixel resolution, layering integrated data (zoning, transportation, financial, infrastructure) for comprehensive situational awareness. Users can import detailed architectural CAD or BIM models (such as from Revit or SketchUp), draft new structures, run “what-if” scenarios for height, shadows, and visibility, and evaluate designs within real-world surroundings. A complete collaboration workspace enables project stakeholders to share views, bookmarks, comments, and presentations in one unified environment, streamlining approval workflows and reducing misalignment. With engineering-grade measurement tools, split-screen past-vs-future views, and real-time data layers, Simplex 3D eliminates guesswork and supports data-driven decisions.