UrbanPlanning.app Urban Planning Software Review

UrbanPlanning.app is a web-based project management workspace for urban planners, planning consultants, permit expeditors and municipal planning departments. Each project gets its own workspace with tabs for files, drawings, tasks, chat, maps, forms, finances, plan checks, permits, zoning, conditions of approval and milestones. The vendor presents it as a replacement for spreadsheets, shared drives and email threads, and as a lighter option than enterprise permitting systems. Four plans run from $49 to $599 a month, and every plan starts with a 14-day trial.

What it does

The help center lists 17 sections: Overview, Projects, Tasks, Plan Checks, Finances, Maps, Files, Drawings, Chat, Forms, Reports, Contacts, Permits, Zoning, Analytics, COA (conditions of approval) and Milestones. The plan-check tracker logs each agency submittal with a date, notes and attached files, and moves it through six statuses: Submitted, In Review, Corrections Required, Resubmitted, Approved and On Hold. Tasks move through To Do, In Progress, In Review, Complete and Blocked, and the app emails the assignee when a task is assigned, 24 hours before it is due and when it is updated.

Invoices are created inside a project; with QuickBooks Online connected they are pushed to QuickBooks and payment status syncs back. The homepage also says existing projects can be imported from a CSV file, and the vendor's screenshots show a task board, a plan-check list by agency, a finance view with invoices and an interactive map with markers, drawn shapes and layers.

Clients are invited by email to a read-only portal. According to the help center they see milestones and status, plan-check statuses, files you share, task progress without internal notes, and the drawings and maps for their project, and they can upload documents and chat with your team. Internal notes and comments marked private stay hidden, and financial details appear only if you share them. The portal is listed from the Department plan.

Plans and pricing

These are the vendor's published prices in US dollars, read on its homepage, Terms of Service and help center. The plans differ mainly in how many active projects and team members they allow and in which tools are switched on. The table gives prices and limits; the list under it shows what each plan adds to the one before.

• Starter: Google Drive file linking, GIS maps (street view and project pins), tasks, chat, email support.
• Professional adds: parcel data lookup, environmental review forms, distance and area measurement, drawing version tracking, priority email support.
• Department adds: plan-check tracking, satellite and topographic map layers, client portal, QuickBooks integration, phone support.
• Enterprise adds: dedicated account manager, custom onboarding and training, priority phone support, 99.9% uptime SLA, early access to new features.

Yearly billing works out to $41, $109, $249 and $499 a month, and the homepage's Annual toggle is labeled 'Save 17%' while the individual cards show 16% on Starter, 15% on Professional and 17% on Department and Enterprise. Divide the monthly price by the project cap and the cost per active project falls from $16.33 on Starter to $8.60 on Professional and $5.98 on Department (our arithmetic, with every slot used). The Terms say prices and limits may change with reasonable notice.

What each plan leaves out

The pricing cards and the help center agree on where the main features start. Plan-check tracking, the client portal and QuickBooks sync are listed from the Department plan at $299 a month, and so are the satellite and topographic map layers, so Starter and Professional get street view and project pins. Parcel data lookup, environmental review forms and drawing version tracking start on Professional. That matters because the vendor's page for permit expeditors leads with the plan-check tracker and the client portal, and its page for consultants leads with the client portal and QuickBooks invoicing, while its own cards call Professional ($129) the plan for small firms and permit expeditors and Starter ($49) the plan for solo consultants, and list none of those features on either. The homepage and help center describe the trial as full access to all features, but the Terms tie it to the features of the plan tier you select, so it is not clear what a Starter or Professional trial includes.

Where it works

The product is written around US, and mostly California, planning practice. The Privacy Policy says the zoning lookup sends an address to Esri's geocoding service and reads parcel data from the county ArcGIS services of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties, plus the statewide zoning layer from California's Governor's Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation and the City of Los Angeles' ZIMAS. The help center says the zoning map layer shows designations 'where available'. The environmental review tools are built around CEQA, California's environmental review law, and NEPA, its federal counterpart. We found no mention of Canada, the UK, Australia or New Zealand on the vendor's pages, and the three homepage testimonials name Southern California, Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Free trial, billing and cancellation

Every plan starts with a 14-day trial, and the vendor's pages leave open when a card comes in. The help center describes a trial without a card: the sign-up form asks only for a name, email, role (planner or client) and password, and after 14 days the account becomes read-only, so you can log in and view everything but not create projects, tasks or invoices, until you choose a plan and pay. You are charged immediately when you subscribe, with no second trial period. The homepage FAQ and the Terms say a card is not charged until day 15 (the Terms add that no payment is needed to start), and the page's own script sends the plan buttons in the pricing section to a Stripe checkout page. We did not complete either flow, so check what the sign-up screen or a plan button asks for, and whether subscribing early charges you at once, before entering a card.

Billing runs through Stripe, monthly or yearly. You can cancel from account settings and keep access to the end of the paid period; the account then becomes read-only and, per the help center, nothing is deleted. A downgrade takes effect at the end of the billing cycle, and you must archive projects or members above the lower plan's limits first. Monthly plans are not refundable. Annual plans can be refunded in full if you ask within 14 days of the charge, with the money returned in 5 to 10 business days.

Data, security and support

The help center lists encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest, row-level security on a Supabase and PostgreSQL database, three workspace roles (Admin, Manager and Member) and daily automated backups. The Terms say the service is hosted on Vercel and Supabase and that you keep ownership of what you upload. The Privacy Policy names Supabase, Vercel, Stripe, Resend, Intuit (when QuickBooks is connected), a website analytics provider and the Esri and government mapping services as the services that receive data, and says personal information is not sold.

Export is described two ways: the help center says you can export your data at any time, while the Terms promise a machine-readable export within 30 days of a written request. None of the pages or help articles we read mentions a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report, a penetration test, single sign-on, a public API or a status page, and the footer's 'All systems operational' label is not linked to one, so a department with formal procurement rules should ask for those items in writing.

Support depends on the plan: email with a reply within 48 hours on Starter, priority email within 24 hours on Professional, phone and email within a few hours on Department, and a dedicated account manager on Enterprise. The 99.9% uptime figure is part of the Enterprise plan, and the Terms call it a commercially reasonable target and not an absolute guarantee. There is no native mobile app and no offline mode; the site is responsive and works in a phone's browser.

How it compares

The vendor compares itself with three alternatives. Against spreadsheets it points to live project status, a client portal, a per-agency plan-check tracker, files attached to projects and an audit trail. Against general project tools such as Asana, Monday and Trello, its help center says they do not come with plan-check tracking, GIS maps or planning terminology. Against legacy permitting systems such as Accela, its comparison table says setup takes under an hour instead of months, prices are published in monthly tiers instead of enterprise contracts and the client portal is built in; the same page says the table is based on public information and that UrbanPlanning.app is not affiliated with Accela. These are the vendor's own comparisons and we did not verify them.

From the pages we read, the product sits between a spreadsheet and a public permitting system: a project workspace that uses planning vocabulary. The pages describe custom intake forms and a portal for invited applicants, but not a public portal where residents apply for permits, inspection scheduling or fee schedules, so a department that needs those should ask about them before relying on it as a replacement for a permitting platform.

Before you buy

UrbanPlanning.app is operated by Do You Need One, LLC according to its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, both dated September 17, 2026, and California law governs the Terms. The domain was registered on April 29, 2026, so this is a young product. The About page says it was built by a developer after talking with a planner and that the team is small; the pages we read show no founder's name, address or phone number, only a support email and a contact form. The homepage says it is trusted by planning professionals across the country and quotes three unnamed users, a senior planner, a planning consultant and a permit expeditor; we could not verify them. A web search on October 21, 2026 found no review on G2, Capterra, Product Hunt or Reddit. Everything above is what the vendor says it does: we read its pages, help center and legal documents on that date and did not use the product, so the 14-day trial is the practical check, ideally on one real project with your own agency submittals.