Free control panel design software: electrical CAD compared

A control panel is documented as a set of drawings and the lists that come out of them: schematic sheets, a panel layout, a terminal plan, a wire list and a bill of materials. Free software that draws a tidy schematic but cannot produce the lists leaves you typing them by hand, and typed lists are where panel errors live.

This compares the free options on what decides whether a tool will carry a real panel. Every term below comes from the vendor's or project's own page, checked in October 2026.

What a panel package has to produce

• Schematics over many pages, with symbols to a recognised standard and a title block on every sheet.
• Cross references, so a contactor coil on one page shows where its contacts are drawn, and each contact shows where its coil is.
• Wire numbers, applied consistently, ideally by the software.
• A terminal list, for building the panel and for checking the field wiring against it.
• A bill of materials, generated from the devices on the drawings.
• Exchange formats: DXF for whoever uses another CAD package, PDF or images for everybody else.
• A panel layout to scale, for the layout itself and for the heat calculation.

The free options compared

QElectroTech: the free tool built for this

QElectroTech is free software for electrical diagrams under the GNU GPL, available for Windows, macOS and Linux. Version 0.100 was released in January 2026 and the source repository was still active in October 2026. The project says its symbol collection passed 8,000 symbols in that version, split between an official collection and a contributed one.

It works in folios, which are pages, each with an editable title block. The features that make it ECAD rather than drawing software are all in the documentation:

• Cross references. A device drawn several times, such as a contactor whose coil is on the control folio and whose contacts are on the power folio, is a master element with slave elements. The documentation notes they then appear as one item in the bill of materials.
• Auto numbering. Patterns for folios, elements and conductors, chosen from the Auto Numbering panel, so conductors are numbered by pattern rather than by hand.
• Terminal blocks as their own element type.
• Lists. Project, Export to CSV writes the nomenclature (the parts list), and a separate command writes the list of wires, both as CSV for a spreadsheet.
• Exports. Folios export to PNG, JPEG, bitmap and SVG, and to DXF; the export page lists the formats, and the project credits a contributing company with the DXF export code.

The cost is learning a dedicated tool. Check early that the symbols you need follow the standard your customer works to, because a large, partly contributed library varies in style.

ProfiCAD: free at home, paid at work

ProfiCAD's editions page sets out exactly what the free Home licence leaves out. Home is for hobby use. In a commercial environment it may only open, view and print documents that somebody else created; creating or modifying documents for commercial purposes needs the paid licence.

Home stops at 3 pages per drawing, against 600 for the paid licence, and it does not include the bill of materials, netlist, list of wires, list of cables, cross references, title block creation or DXF export. Image export and layers are in both. The paid version runs as a full 30-day trial without a credit card, on Windows, with Parallels suggested for a Mac. The product page describes the paid licence as perpetual rather than a subscription.

SEE Electrical: a trial, not a free edition

IGE+XAO sells SEE Electrical by subscription. Its product page offers a free 30-day working version with all features, counted from registration, limited to 3 pages of schematics per project. It runs on Windows 10 or 11. The product can be extended with additional modules, SEE Electrical 3D Panel among them. It is a fair way to evaluate the product and not a way to draw a panel for nothing.

LADX CAD: free drafting in the browser

LADX CAD is a two-dimensional drafting tool for electrical and panel drawings, free with no account, no download and no watermark. It draws lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, polylines, text and dimensions, with object snap, typed commands and named layers. Eleven templates are numbered the way a control package is read: cover, index, legend, power distribution, control supply, PLC digital and analogue cards, safety, panel general arrangement and terminal schedule. It imports and exports DXF and exports PDF.

It is a drafting tool, so cross references, wire numbers and lists are written by you, not generated. Use it for layouts, general arrangements and schematics of small panels, and keep the lists in the BOM template and the cable schedule template. Without an account, the drawing is stored in your browser; signed in to LADX Studio, drawings are kept with a project.

Worked example: one start/stop circuit in two tools

Take the circuit from motor control logic, hardwired. On the control sheet: a 24 V DC supply, overload contact F2 95-96, stop button S1 (normally closed, 11-12), start button S2 (normally open, 13-14) with contactor K1's auxiliary 13-14 in parallel as the seal-in, and coil K1. On the power sheet: the motor circuit breaker, K1's main contacts 1-2, 3-4 and 5-6, the overload and the motor. S1 and S2 are on the door, so wires 2, 3 and 4 leave the panel through terminals X1:1 to X1:3.

In QElectroTech, draw two folios. Place K1's coil as the master element and link the main contacts on the power folio and the 13-14 contact on the control folio to it as slaves; the master carries the device information for the parts list and the cross references to its contacts. Set a conductor numbering pattern so the wires are numbered by the software. Draw X1 as terminal block elements. Export the nomenclature and the wire list to CSV.

In LADX CAD, start from the control supply template, draw the circuit, type the wire numbers, write the contact references under the coil, draw X1 on the terminal schedule template, and export DXF for the panel builder. Then fill in the BOM template. Its first seven columns, with the four devices from this circuit, look like this:

Item,Category,Description,Manufacturer,Part Number,Qty,Unit
1,Motor control,Contactor with 24 V DC coil,,,1,ea
2,Motor control,Thermal overload relay,,,1,ea
3,Operator,Pushbutton NC (stop),,,1,ea
4,Operator,Pushbutton NO (start),,,1,ea

For four devices on two sheets the difference is minutes. For forty sheets it is the reason ECAD exists: rename a contactor in a drafting tool and every reference to it is a separate edit, each one a chance to leave the panel builder with two answers.

Where the free tools stop

• Pages. ProfiCAD Home at 3 per drawing, the SEE Electrical trial at 3 per project.
• Commercial use. ProfiCAD Home excludes it. QElectroTech and LADX CAD do not.
• Time. SEE Electrical's trial ends after 30 days.
• 3D layout. None of the free routes here gives you a 3D panel model; SEE Electrical offers one as an additional module, and LADX CAD is two-dimensional.
• Manufacturer data. Ordering codes, catalogues and accessories have to be typed in by you in all of them during free use.

When paying is worth it

Commercial packages such as EPLAN Electric P8 and AutoCAD Electrical earn their price in specific situations: the customer requires their project format, the job runs to hundreds of pages, several engineers edit the same project, or the parts data has to flow straight into purchasing. If none of those applies, a free tool and a disciplined documentation habit carry a surprising amount of work.

What goes wrong

• Typed lists drift from the drawings. The drawing is revised, the wire list is not, and the panel is built to the list. Generate lists where you can; where you cannot, check them against the drawing at every revision.
• A hobby licence on a paid job. ProfiCAD is explicit about this, and the drawing does not stop being commercial because it was small.
• The page cap halfway through. Count pages before choosing a capped tool: cover, index, legend, power, control, one per I/O card, safety, layout, terminals.
• Expecting DXF to carry meaning. A DXF carries geometry, layers and text. Device data and cross references arrive as text at best, in any tool.
• A drawing that lives in one browser. LADX CAD without an account stores the drawing in the browser, so clearing browser data clears the drawing. Export it, or sign in.
• No wire colour legend. Say which colour means what on the legend sheet, in line with the wire colour codes the panel is built to.