SketchUp is a genuinely good 3D modeller, and a lot of cabinet shops draw in it. The gap was never the drawing. It is everything after: the cut list, the sheet layout, the labels, and the file your router reads. WoodWright makes those from the cabinet itself — free, and with no plugin chain to assemble.
Every figure below comes from a page SketchUp publishes, checked 7 September 2026. Where they publish a per-month price on annual billing, that is what the row says — we are not going to restate a competitor's price in a shape they never used.
| SketchUp Free | Browser only — and “not for commercial use”, in SketchUp's own words |
| SketchUp Go | $10.75 / month per user, billed annually · web and iPad · no extensions, no LayOut |
| SketchUp Pro | $33.25 / month per user, billed annually · desktop, LayOut, Extension Warehouse |
| SketchUp Studio | $71.58 / month per user, billed annually · Windows only |
| SketchUp trial | 7 days, free, no credit card |
| Perpetual licence | Not sold. SketchUp stopped selling the perpetual Classic licence on 4 November 2020 |
| Extensions | Third-party. Each author sets their own price — SketchUp publishes none of them, so neither do we |
| WoodWright | $0. No seats, no revenue cap, no trial clock, no card |
Pro at their published $33.25 a month, billed annually, is $399 a year — that multiplication is ours, the number in it is theirs. Set beside what the paid cabinet packages cost, SketchUp is the cheap option, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
The figure that catches a shop out is the free one. SketchUp Free runs in a browser, and SketchUp's own help page states plainly that it is not for commercial use.
So the moment you draw a kitchen you are being paid for, the free tier is not the tier you are on. Its published export list is SKP, PNG and STL — no DXF, and nothing a nesting program or a router wants.
Sources, all SketchUp's own: Plans and pricing · SketchUp Free (help) · SketchUp Free (plan page) · SketchUp for Web features · Free trial · Extension Warehouse · System requirements · Purchase options and pricing · SketchUp home
What a shop needs off a drawing is a list of parts, a sheet layout, labels for the floor and a file the machine reads. In WoodWright those are not a second job.
Design the cabinet the way your shop builds it and every part that design implies is generated — ends, deck, top, back, stretchers, nailers, shelves, drawer boxes, doors and fronts — sized, grouped by material, and carrying its own dados and bores.
Change the width and the list re-derives. A cut list kept anywhere else drifts the moment the design moves, and that is where the wrong dimension comes from.
True-shape nesting with the grain locked and remnants tracked, on the same seven-cabinet kitchen that rectangular nesting takes eight sheets to cut.
Direct programs for eight controllers — Mach3/4, GRBL, LinuxCNC, Masso and more — plus a layered DXF for any CAM. Simulated and read back; none has cut on iron yet, so run the first on scrap.
A working SketchUp cabinet setup is the modeller plus the extensions you picked, each with its own author, price and release schedule. WoodWright updates as one thing, and the parts of it that matter run offline on your own machine.
Cut list, sheets, lumber, quote, BOM and drawings — one job, in order, from the model you already drew. Nothing gets re-drawn and no dimension gets typed twice.
Four things, and they are real. If we skipped them you would be right not to trust anything above.
Macs. SketchUp's published system requirements list current macOS releases for its desktop app. WoodWright is Windows 10 and 11, with a macOS build on the bench and no date. If your shop draws on Macs, that decides it — and the price should not talk you out of it.
Anything that is not a cabinet. SketchUp models the site, the staircase, the timber frame, the strange one-off a client sketched on a napkin. WoodWright models cabinets. When the job is not a cabinet, SketchUp is better and it is not close.
The ecosystem. 600-plus extensions in the Extension Warehouse, plus 3D Warehouse for pre-built models, plus a community and a body of tutorials that no new tool can manufacture. Nothing WoodWright has is in the same category.
Track record. SketchUp has been drawn in professionally for years. WoodWright went public in September 2026 and has no third-party reviews, because it has not earned any yet.
Neither of these is a bad tool. They are answers to two different questions, and only one of them ends at your saw.
| What it is | SketchUp: a general 3D modeller · WoodWright: a cabinet CAD |
| Price | Pro $33.25/mo billed annually · WoodWright $0 |
| Free tier | Browser only, not for commercial use · WoodWright free for paid work, every bench |
| Cut lists & nesting | What the extensions are for · generated from the design itself |
| CNC output | Whatever your extension and CAM chain does · G-code for 8 controllers plus layered DXF — simulated, not yet cut |
| 2D documentation | LayOut, included with Pro and Studio · WoodWright drawing sets from the same job |
| Platform | SketchUp desktop runs on Windows and macOS · WoodWright Windows 10 and 11, macOS on the bench |
| Extensions | 600+, desktop only, third-party · WoodWright: one app, nothing to bolt on |
| Trial | 7 days, no card · WoodWright free forever, no clock |
Take a kitchen you cut last month, build it in WoodWright, and hold the cut list against what you actually cut. That is the only test that settles it, and it costs an afternoon.
Worth knowing before you do: Windows only for now, and if your router is in production today, dry-run the first program on scrap.
Related: cutlist generator · plywood nesting optimizer · CNC output · cabinet design software for Mac · what the paid packages cost