Apps for architects: what runs on the iPhone and iPad, by job

An architect's iPad carries a sketching app, a markup app for the drawing set and a viewer for the office's models; the iPhone carries a scanner for site visits, a field app for issues and photos and a timer. The useful question is not which to rank first but what each one is for, what it runs on and what a year of it costs. Below: the apps published lists name most often, grouped by job, each in its maker's own words with the price its maker publishes, plus the one job none of them is built for.

Most architects already have the apps. Fewer can say what each is for, which ones run on the phone rather than the tablet, or what the year's bill comes to once the per-seat prices are added up. This page sorts that out, job by job. It covers apps, not AI: rendering tools, the assistants built into design software and the AIA's guidance are in our guide to AI for architects, and ChatGPT on a project has its own page.

Who is writing: Equerry, whose own app sits in the last group, the general assistants, marked as ours. Equerry does not read drawings or BIM models, and nothing on this page is advice about what the AIA or any licensing board permits. No maker paid to be here, there are no affiliate links, and a subscription to anything listed earns us nothing.

How the list was assembled

The jobs are the ones that recur across published lists of architecture apps, from software vendors' blogs to one practising architect's podcast notes; the apps under each are the names those lists repeat, and the lists themselves are named further down. Three rules:

• The maker describes the app. Every description is quoted or closely paraphrased from the maker's site or its US App Store listing, read 6 November 2026. Nothing was tested or scored; within a job the order is alphabetical.
• Prices are the maker's published prices, with the billing period, because "$33 a month" can mean a $400 commitment. Where a maker's page priced in another currency or published nothing, the entry says so; nothing was converted. Prices change and may exclude tax.
• Platforms are as the maker lists them. Several apps here are iPad-only, and several field apps are phone-and-tablet with a browser on the Mac.

Apps for architects by job: the dated table

Sketching and modelling

This is the iPad's job, and the Apple Pencil is the reason. Morpholio Trace is the app that the most lists name first: its maker says it "combines the beauty and speed of sketching with the intelligence and precision of CAD", draws to scale over an imported plan or PDF with a ruler, protractor and triangle, and exports to AutoCAD, Rhino and Illustrator. The maker's site publishes no price table; the US App Store lists Trace Essentials at $4.99, Trace Plus at $9.99, Trace Pro Monthly at $7.99 and Trace Pro at $24.99, with the billing period stated only on the monthly one. It runs on iPhone as well as iPad, which is how it ends up on site. Concepts is the vector alternative, "a flexible vector-based sketchbook", free to start with a Pro subscription at $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year, and it is the one of the three that also runs on Windows, Android and a Chromebook. Procreate is a painting app rather than a drafting one, "Sketch. Paint. Create.", $12.99 once on the US App Store with "No subscriptions"; it is where presentation sketches and renders get finished by hand. The modelling apps next to them are SketchUp for iPad, included in every paid SketchUp plan from Go at $10.75 a month per user billed annually, and Shapr3D, whose Pro seat is $299 a year billed annually and excluding VAT.

Markup and drawing sets

Bluebeam is the markup app the architecture lists and the construction lists agree on. The desktop product is Revu for Windows; every plan also includes Bluebeam on the web and on iPhone, iPad and Android, where its pricing page lists viewing and marking up PDFs and offline access with Studio sync, and notes that measuring PDFs is "Not yet available on Android". Basics is $260, Core $330 and Complete $440 per user a year, shown with a dollar sign and no currency named. The AutoCAD app is the other one: a free download that views DWG files, with AutoCAD Web at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year in-app for "light editing and generating fundamental designs", in Autodesk's words. If the office runs Archicad, the viewer is BIMx, below.

Site capture and floor plans

Three apps turn a phone into a measuring tool, in three different ways. magicplan draws a floor plan as you walk the rooms; its App Store listing describes it as "the advanced floor plan app" for remodelers, restoration and claims professionals, and its in-app plans start at Sketch, $12.99 a month or $129.99 a year, with Report at $39.99 a month or $399.99 a year. Polycam scans a space into a 3D model and a plan; the free plan is "For beginners discovering 3D scanning", Basic is $150 a year and Business $400 a year per user, in US dollars. Twindo is the app formerly called Canvas, by Occipital: "As-built models built for design professionals", which means you scan with a LiDAR iPhone Pro or iPad Pro from 2020 or later and order the CAD or BIM model back, priced per square foot on top of a Starter plan at $0 a month and Essentials at $29 a month, with a $20 minimum per 3D order. All three need the newer, LiDAR-equipped phones to do their best work, which is worth checking before a site visit on an older iPhone.

Model and drawing viewers

The viewer is chosen by the office's desktop software, not by the architect holding the iPad. BIMx is Graphisoft's, "an interactive app for exploring BIM projects and linked documentation sets" from Archicad, free on iPhone and iPad with "BIMx Pro features, available with Graphisoft account-based licensing"; the maker's FAQ answers the price question with "No. You can use BIMx for free with a Graphisoft account." Revizto V5 is the coordination platform's app, free on the iPad and Apple Vision, and useful only if the practice or the contractor has a licence: "Users can be invited to an active Revizto license or buy a subscription", and no price is published. The AutoCAD app above and SketchUp for iPad double as viewers for their own file types.

Field reports and issues

On site the iPhone is for photos, issues and the report that goes out that evening. ArchiSnapper, now sold by Deltek, is the one written for architects: "a mobile field reporting and punch list app built for A&E firms of any size", on iPhone, Android and the web, with a 14-day trial and no published price. Fieldwire publishes the clearest prices in the group, Basic at $0 and Pro at $39 per user a month billed annually. Procore publishes none: "Pricing for Procore depends on the products you need and the amount of construction you do." Autodesk Forma is the renamed Autodesk Construction Cloud app, "Autodesk Construction Cloud mobile is now the Forma mobile app", and the App Store lists Forma Build Essentials at $99.99 and Autodesk Build Unlimited at $174.99 as in-app purchases without stating the period. Which of the four you open is usually decided by the contractor, since the field app is where the contractor's RFIs live.

Time and the practice

Two names recur for the practice itself. Harvest is the timer: free for one person, "Built for individual freelancers", and $11 a seat a month, or $9 billed annually, for a team, with iPhone and Mac apps. Monograph is "The easier way to run a strong Architecture & Engineering firm", a web platform priced "$45 - $490 /mo" with no tier breakdown published and no app of its own, "accessible from any device". Both appear in the lists below, including Monograph's own, which is worth knowing when reading its ranking.

The general assistants, as one category

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are on every architect's phone by now, and they belong on this list as a category rather than as three competing entries: chat apps for iPhone and iPad, free to start, paid for more access, and none of them an architecture app. Their pages priced themselves by where we read them from: ChatGPT's and Gemini's plan pages showed us euros (ChatGPT Go €8, Plus €23 a month; Google AI Plus €4.99, Google AI Pro €21.99 a month) and no US price, while Claude's showed US dollars (Pro $20 a month, or $17 billed annually). What architects use them for, and what not to paste into them, is on the ChatGPT for architects page; the tools with "GPT" in the name that are really standalone rendering services are a separate category, covered there and in AI for architects. Equerry sits in this group too, with one difference described in its own section below: it is built around what you send it about a project, not around a blank chat box.

iPad apps for architects: what runs on the tablet

The iPad is the drawing device and the phone is the site device, and the table above splits on that line. iPad-only or iPad-first: Procreate (iPad; Pocket is a separate iPhone app), SketchUp for iPad, Shapr3D's design work, and Revizto V5, whose App Store listing names the iPad and Apple Vision but not the iPhone. Runs on both: Morpholio Trace, Concepts, Bluebeam, the AutoCAD app, BIMx, magicplan, Polycam, Twindo and the field apps; Harvest's App Store listing is iPhone only. If the iPad is the only device on a site visit, the gap is the scanners' LiDAR requirement, which Twindo states as "a LiDAR-enabled iPhone Pro or iPad Pro from 2020 or newer"; a base-model iPad will run the apps but not the scans.

What architects say they use: the published lists, named

Four lists sit on the first page of results for this question, and they are worth reading with their dates. Monograph's "Top 26 Best Architecture Software", last updated 16 October 2026, puts SketchUp, Morpholio Trace and Concepts under design and drafting, Bluebeam Revu under collaboration and Monograph, Harvest and QuickBooks Time under time tracking; it is published by Monograph. Revizto's "Best architecture apps for iPad Pro, iPhone, and other devices in 2026", dated 29 May 2026, names Revizto first and then Polycam, Concepts, Shapr3D, SketchUp, ArchiSnapper, BIMx, magicplan, Morpholio Trace, Canvas, Procreate and Bluebeam Revu among twenty-five; it is published by Revizto. Life of an Architect's "Ep 158: Architects and iPads", 25 August 2024, is one practising architect's own kit, and it recommends Morpholio Trace "as the very first application you should get if you are an architect who just bought an iPad", then Bluebeam and Goodnotes. Archipreneur's "10 Best Apps for Architects That Make Life Easier" is dated 27 March 2018 and names magicplan, BIMx, Morpholio Trace and ArchiSnapper alongside several apps that have since been renamed or retired, so it is a record of what the job needed eight years ago rather than a shopping list. What all four agree on is the shape: one sketching app, one markup app, one scanner, the office's viewer, one field app, and the names Morpholio Trace, Bluebeam and BIMx.

The client side of the project: what Equerry keeps

Every app above holds a thing: a sketch, a markup, a scan, a model, an issue, a timesheet. None of them holds the conversation. "They want the island in the honed stone, not the polished one, and said so in the email after the showroom visit." "The planning officer asked for the ridge to come down before she'd support it." "I told their builder the tender would go out Friday." That record lives in the architect's head and in a mailbox search, which is why the first ten minutes of a client meeting so often go on reconstructing the last one.

Equerry (this is our app) is a personal assistant for iPhone and iPad that keeps that record and briefs you from it. It connects to nothing: you hand it things, the way you would hand them to an assistant, and ask it questions later.

Equerry has an email address of its own, ending in @mail.getequerry.app. Put it on the CC line of a live thread and every later reply arrives on its own for as long as the address stays there; the original stays in your mailbox, and it never asks for your inbox. Price: Pro is $39.99 a month or $329 a year.

What Equerry is not: a viewer for drawings or BIM models (a PDF you share is read as a document, not as a drawing), a field or practice system or a connection to one (it does not talk to Bluebeam, Procore, Autodesk, Monograph or your mailbox), a recorder of meetings, or a design or rendering tool. It holds only what you have sent it, plus your calendar if you allow that; an email you never forwarded is not in it. Two cautions before client material goes in. Everyone on a CC'd thread can see the address, so forward where that matters. And what you send, with the calendar snapshot if you allow it, is processed by the outside providers listed on our AI disclosure page so that it can be searched and answered from. Equerry claims nothing about what the AIA, your licensing board or your professional indemnity insurer permit; whether client material goes into any app here, ours included, is for your practice's policy.

Setting up the iPhone and the iPad

Start with what the office already pays for: the viewer that matches its desktop software, the markup plan if it has one, the field app the contractor uses and the timer the practice bills from. Then buy for the iPad only what the Pencil earns: one sketching app, and Procreate if presentation work is yours. Buy for the iPhone only what the site needs: one scanner, checked against the phone's LiDAR, and the field app. That leaves the client record, which is rarely bought on purpose and usually noticed the first time a client says "as we agreed in my email" about an email you cannot find. The habit itself, with or without an app, is in our guide to keeping track of multiple clients.

Sources, all read 2026-11-06. Where a maker's site published no price table, the figures are from the app's US App Store listing, as noted; where a maker's page showed us euros (ChatGPT, Gemini), the euro figures are given and no US price was shown. TopHatch, Concepts, and the Concepts App Store listing. Morpholio, Trace, and the Morpholio Trace App Store listing. Procreate, Procreate, and the Procreate App Store listing. Shapr3D, pricing, and the Shapr3D App Store listing. Trimble, SketchUp plans and pricing. Autodesk, the AutoCAD App Store listing and the Autodesk Forma App Store listing. Bluebeam, pricing. magicplan, pricing and the magicplan App Store listing. Polycam, pricing. Occipital, Twindo and pricing. Graphisoft, BIMx and the BIMx App Store listing. Revizto, home page and the Revizto V5 App Store listing. Deltek, ArchiSnapper. Fieldwire, pricing. Procore, pricing. Harvest, pricing. Monograph, pricing and Top 26 Best Architecture Software. OpenAI, ChatGPT plans and pricing. Anthropic, Claude pricing. Google, Gemini subscriptions. Revizto, Best architecture apps for iPad Pro, iPhone, and other devices in 2026. Life of an Architect, Ep 158: Architects and iPads. Archipreneur, 10 Best Apps for Architects That Make Life Easier. Makers change their products and prices often; where a maker's current page disagrees with this one, the maker's page is right.

Last updated 2026-11-06.

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