Survey: Help Identify the Best Planning Apps of 2023

In 2023, with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) for the masses among the trends to watch in the planning field, the world of mobile apps seems poised on the brink of a generational shift. Every year, Planetizen uses a survey to crowdsource insights into the use of apps and mobile phones in planning practices of all varieties—from the private sector to the public sector, academia, and advocacy. In doing so, Planetizen hopes to share information about the best mobile apps for the various applications of planning. We also hope to identify remaining gaps in mobile technology specific to the purposes of planners.

Of course, it’s hardly been a generation since mobile apps became a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, presence in the professional and private lives of planners. This light-speed rate of change is even more reason to continue the tradition of crowdsourcing this list of Top Apps for planners. No one person could possibly keep up with all the apps available on the market by themselves, so the utility of this list will be greatly increased by your participation. Maybe we’ll even see AI-driven apps start to show up on the list.

Please take a few minutes in the next few days to take the survey and share little information on how you use apps as a planner, and, most importantly to the wider world of planning, which apps you have come to rely in the various tasks, responsibilities, and roles of your professional or academic life. Those who have been taking this survey for years will see a lot of the same questions, but with a few small revisions. There is a new question that attempts to capture apps that have fallen into obsolescence, for example. But for the most part, this is the same survey we have been using since 2012.

The survey will still only take a couple minutes to complete. Please feel free to share the survey with colleagues to help Planetizen gather as much feedback as possible. Every year after we post this list, we get an email from someone who says we missed their app. Please help spare us those emails this time around. But mostly, we want to hear from as many planners and related professionals as possible, so we can provide a complete list of the most useful, fun, and engaging apps available on the planning market.

It might be useful to peruse the entire list of Top Apps posts, including the most recent posts, from 2022 and 2019. If you are still using the apps reported by these previous posts, we still want to hear about it. With that, we’ll provide the link to take the survey on SurveyMonkey one last time.