I was recently asked to develop a set of floor plans using Visio. The Visio requirement was a legacy reason, because that was our first drawing tool. As part of breaking the M$ hegemony, I wanted to see what viable alternatives were out there. It had to free, available to all platforms and not too complicated to use. I talked to a city planner friend of mine, Dave. He recommended Google's SketchUp. Apparently for urban planning and development it is a fairly ubiquitous tool. I had heard of SketchUp before and thought I would give it a try.

Although it has a small learning curve, after 20 minutes, I was up and running. Google has provided plenty of getting started videos online, so the amount learning material and content is great.

As a drafting tool, it hits the sweet spot for me. The ability to rescale objects in your drawing allow for the iterative approach. The vector drawing object model allows for greatest flexibility to extend and tweak your drawings.

There is a vibrant user community online and there are plenty of resources available

Ruby is the Sketch-up scripting language that allows you to blend in extensions and automation later if needed.

The payware (Pro version) brings professional looking plots and printed plans to life with Layout.

As an alternative to Visio for drafting, SketchUp is superior alternative.