AgroForest Designer vs World Machine

AgroForest Designer is web software for planning food forests and other layered planting systems. It lets users map site boundaries over map, satellite, combined, or orthomap views, then add features, planting zones, and paths. Its public plant database can be filtered by growing conditions and includes reusable recipes, cultivars, and personal plant records. The generator creates an editable proposal from a recipe, planting area, density, objectives, and a 1-, 5-, 10-, or 20-year horizon. Other planning tools show sun paths and indicative shade, elevation contours, distances and areas, and harvest periods. Professional plans include technical drawings, plan sharing, QGIS workflows, and selected GeoJSON, project-data, and 3D model exports. The shade model omits terrain and objects beyond the plan, so critical conditions need on-site verification. The Free plan is free; paid plans start at €14.99 a month. Free and Starter omit professional delivery tools.

World Machine is procedural 3D terrain-generation software for artists creating realistic or stylized landscapes, including game, film, and visualization work. Its node graph offers more than 100 devices for terrain, erosion, rivers, masks, materials, and outputs. Simulations cover flow-based and thermal erosion, snow accumulation, river channels, lakes, and coastal erosion; Dragontail Peak adds terrain with overhangs, cliff faces, and caves. Exports include heightfields, meshes, masks, and PBR textures in standard formats, with listed file types including RAW, EXR, TIFF, PNG, TER, OBJ, glTF, and GLB. Compatible tools named by the maker include Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, Blender, Maya, and Cinema 4D. Professional and higher editions support tiled builds for worlds larger than memory and can resume builds after interruption. The free Basic edition has the Indie toolset but caps each output asset at 1025×1025 pixels and is limited to non-commercial use. Paid plans are Indie at $119 a month, Professional at $299 a month, and Studio Site at $1,999 a month. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.