We tested 5 tools that turn an old drawing into DWG
Most of the drawings people want in CAD are old. A plan from a 1950s catalogue, a blueprint scanned at the city office, a sheet somebody photographed on a desk. So we took two of those and ran them through five tools that come up when you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity how to get a drawing into AutoCAD. Same files, same day, October 2026. We make one of the five, Horezmi, so weigh our words; the screenshots speak for themselves.
The two drawings
The first is hard on purpose: a five-room house from an old plan catalogue, drawn in perspective, with room sizes printed on it and a page curl in the corner. Plenty of real «old drawings» look like this.
The second is the easy case: a flat plan of a small house, 24 by 24 feet plus a porch, clean lines, every room dimensioned. If a tool can't handle this one, nothing else matters.
Two kinds of tools
Before the results, one thing that explains almost all of them. PhotoCAD, Scan2CAD.online and NASJI are tracers: they follow the dark pixels and turn them into lines. The DWG you get is a very good copy of the picture. FloorScan and Horezmi read the drawing instead. FloorScan looks for rooms, walls and openings to measure them. Horezmi reads the whole sheet and draws it again as a CAD drawing.
Neither approach is wrong. They answer different questions: «give me this picture as lines» versus «give me the drawing behind this picture».
Test 1: the old catalogue plan
FloorScan accepted it as a floor plan, then found 1 door, 1 window and 0.5 m² of living area, and rated its own scale at 10% confidence. In fairness, it is built for flat 2D plans and says so.
PhotoCAD gave the nicest-looking result of the day: crisp linework, every label redrawn. But it is the same perspective picture, now in vectors. You can't measure a wall in it, because none of the walls are drawn at their real length.
Scan2CAD.online traced the outlines too, along with the shading, the background and the paper texture, so the result needs a lot of cleanup and still keeps the perspective.
Horezmi read the room sizes off the picture and drew a dimensioned plan: seven spaces with their areas, grid lines, dimension strings, and a 3D model of the house from the same reading.
Test 2: the clean flat plan
Here the tracers earn their keep. PhotoCAD's copy is excellent, Scan2CAD.online's DXF is tidy, and NASJI turned the page into 623 polylines and 12 text labels, free and without an account. NASJI misread a couple of labels («24 0», «ROOM») and left the units for you to calibrate, which is normal for a tracer.
Horezmi's sheet looks plainer, because it is a different thing: walls, doors and windows as objects, each room named with its area (138, 92, 39, 175 and 74 SF, within a square foot or two of the sizes printed on the plan), a room schedule, grid lines, dimension strings and a title block. You can change it by typing «make bedroom 2 one foot wider» rather than editing hatching.
What each one is for
- PhotoCAD: the best-looking traces, also for facades, products and illustrations. Three free conversions, then $15 to $49 a month; real-world scale and editing on the higher plan.
- Scan2CAD.online: free DXF drafts, three a day, files up to 2 MB. Good for a quick look at whether a clean drawing traces well.
- NASJI: free, no sign-up, DWG or DXF straight from a PDF page. A solid tracer if your scan is clean and you are fine calibrating the scale.
- FloorScan: quantities and quotes from floor plans for estimators. One free analysis, then a monthly subscription.
- Maket: we couldn't test it; uploading a plan needs a paid plan ($20 or $100 a month).
- Horezmi: an editable CAD drawing rebuilt from the picture, with rooms, areas, dimensions, a sheet and 3D, also for parts, tanks and site plans. No subscription: you pay per drawing, $5 free at sign-in.
Our take
If the picture is clean and you only need it as a backdrop to draw over, a tracer is enough, and NASJI or Scan2CAD.online will do it for free.
If the drawing is old, skewed, photographed or hand-drawn, or you need something you can measure, change and hand to someone else, you want it read and redrawn, not traced. That is the job we built Horezmi for. Whatever you use, check a couple of known dimensions before anything gets built from it.
Questions
What is the best way to digitize old drawings into DWG?
For clean line drawings, a tracer such as NASJI, PhotoCAD or Scan2CAD gives a faithful copy. For old, skewed or photographed drawings, or when you need rooms, areas and dimensions as CAD objects, a tool that reads and redraws the drawing, such as Horezmi, works better.
Can these tools fix perspective or a photo taken at an angle?
In our test the tracers kept the perspective of the picture. Horezmi drew a plan in scale from the dimensions written on it.
Which of them are free?
NASJI is free without an account; Scan2CAD.online gives three free DXF conversions a day; PhotoCAD gives three on sign-up; FloorScan gives one analysis; Horezmi gives $5 of credit at sign-in.