The Options chip in the top bar — “Design options — draw the alternative without losing this one” — keeps several schemes of the same plan together. Save as new option… copies the plan you are looking at into a second scheme in its own tab, and the chip switches between them.
Design options are a Pro feature and need an account, because the schemes live in your cloud projects.
The workflow
- Draw the layout you have — the as-built, or the first idea.
- Save as new option… and name it for what makes it different: “Kitchen to the garden”, “Two-bed”, “Stair moved”. The name prints in the title block, so a printed set says which scheme it is.
- Change the new one freely. The first is untouched.
- Switch between them from the chip whenever you like.
Switching options does not re-frame the 3D camera — two options are one building answered twice, so you stay where you were standing.
Compare
Compare options… puts “plans and numbers side by side, with the differences called out”: the drawings at one scale, and the quantities beside them, so “which is bigger, and by how much” is answered rather than guessed.
Why not two projects, or two tabs?
You can use tabs for this, and people do. Options are better in three ways: the schemes are grouped as one project in your project list, each keeps its own version history, and neither can be lost by closing the wrong tab.
What options deliberately are not is two schemes inside one document. Every derived number — the room schedule, the takeoff, the heat loss — reads the whole document by design. Two plans in one file would be one building to all of them, and they would be right about that: the totals would add up both schemes.
What this doesn’t do
- No ghost-tracing a sibling. You cannot see option A faintly under option B while drawing.
- No options comparison PDF sheet. Compare is a screen view; the PDF set is per option.
- No merge. There is no way to take one room from A into B other than copy and paste.
Next
Plans and pricing for what else Pro includes, and tabs for the free version of the same idea.