Another morning coffee thought bubble ( Google AI Pro)
Top Countries by SketchUp Usage
Based on tracked company installations and professional usage data, the following countries represent the largest shares of the SketchUp community:
Rank
Country
Estimated Count / Share
Primary Industries
1
United States
~16–20% (6,500+ tracked firms)
Architecture, Interior Design
2
United Kingdom
~6–7% (1,500+ tracked firms)
Urban Planning, Construction
3
India
~6% (1,300+ tracked firms)
Civil Engineering, 3D Rendering
4
France
~5–6% (1,100+ tracked firms)
Architecture, Landscape Design
5
Canada
~4% (1,100+ tracked firms)
Woodworking, Construction
6
United Arab Emirates
~3–4% (900+ tracked firms)
High-rise Architecture
7
Spain
~3% (850+ tracked firms)
Historical Preservation, Design
8
Brazil
~2–3% (450+ tracked firms)
Interior Design, Furniture
9
Netherlands
~2% (450+ tracked firms)
Sustainable Architecture
10
Australia
~2% (250+ tracked firms)
Residential Design, Education
Regional Distribution (2026 Projections)
SketchUp’s market presence is broadly split across three major economic zones:
North America (AMER): Dominates with approximately 34.3% of the global market share. This region has the highest concentration of “Pro” and “Studio” subscribers, driven by the US and Canadian residential construction sectors.
Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA): Represents the second largest block. European growth is driven by Germany, France, and the UK, while the UAE serves as a major hub for SketchUp in the Middle East due to rapid infrastructure development.
Asia-Pacific (APAC): The fastest-growing region, holding roughly 30.7% share. India and South Korea are leading the surge, largely due to the software’s accessibility for students and the shift toward digital construction workflows in emerging economies.
User Demographics & Industry Breakdown
Architecture & Planning: Accounts for roughly 25% of the user base.
Subscription Growth: Trimble reached 1 million active subscribers in late 2024, a number that has continued to climb through 2025 and 2026 following the integration of AI-powered features like the “Claude” conversational modeling assistant.
Education: A massive portion of “users” (millions) are students and educators using SketchUp for Schools, though these are often excluded from “commercial customer” lists.
[!NOTE] These figures are based on tracked company data and industry surveys (e.g., TheirStack and Poliigon). Because many users utilize the free web version or personal subscriptions, the actual number of individuals per country is likely 5–10 times higher than the tracked “firm” counts shown above.
And an estimate of the Metric / Imperial user balance,
my AI query was sparked by downloading a Live Component to my PC and noticing that the file was using imperial units despite the interface being in metric and my understanding of LC’s is the coding is in metric.
While Trimble (the developer of SketchUp) does not release specific telemetry data on user settings, we can derive a highly accurate estimate by cross-referencing regional user distribution with global measurement standards as of 2026.
Based on global industry trends and SketchUp’s user demographics, it is estimated that:
Metric Units: ~78% – 82% of users
Imperial Units: ~18% – 22% of users
Breakdown of the Calculation
The distribution of unit usage almost perfectly mirrors the software’s geographic market share:
Region / System
User Share
Unit Preference
Notes
United States
~18%
Imperial
The primary stronghold for feet, inches, and fractional modeling.
Europe (EMEA)
~35%
Metric
Almost exclusively millimeters (mm) or meters (m) for architecture.
Asia-Pacific (APAC)
~31%
Metric
Driven by huge user bases in India, China, and South Korea.
Rest of World
~16%
Metric
Includes Brazil, Mexico, and South America, which are entirely metric.
It’s not an AI estimate at all - the data has all come from a single data source (theirstack.com) - essentially a guesstimate based on scraping job sites for roles that mention “SketchUp” and SketchUp Pro.
Again, AI has done nothing in this instance beyond act as a search engine - albeit a search engine with unwavering confidence in what it is saying.
It misses huge parts of the ecosystem: freelancers, small studios, students, and anyone using SketchUp without formally advertising it in a job spec - which is a massive portion of its real user base.
It will also miss out those thousands of businesses where SketchUp is secondary or tertiary in usage behind other tools.
It is also going to be massively weighted towards large firms hiring digitally via large brand recruitment websites (probably with APIs) in the US and Western Europe.
Funnily enough the biggest user of “SketchUp Pro” is actually Trimble if you look at it.
So yeah, not massively useful unless you sell SketchUp and want a sense of some large firms know you don’t know who are using it.
Of course it is an estimate.. and it clearly outlined its limitations.. and it found those results in a few seconds, I am sure before AI that task would have taken hours and hours of trying to track down that data.. do you now of any more accurate or accessible sources of that data ?.
Yes there are many unrepresented users of Sketchup.. but does the invalidate the % for each country or region?.. or the ratio of metric to imperial users… ?
This is exactly where I have been with SU since I discovered it around 2003. It’s never been my main tool. I’ve “brought” it with me at every job I’ve had since then. Meaning that I showed my new employer it’s importance in my work flow. I use it less now at current role but I do use it and as often as I can.
Statistics is always somewhat problematic. I live in a country with a small population of less than 6 million so we would always fall through the sieve. And as to breaking down the usage per industry, i would guess that of Finnish professional skateboard track designers, 100% use SketchUp. I have seen a demo by the guy.
Absolutely it will invalidate the usage per country - when you start interrogating the data you will see there are huge gaps exactly because of how it has been collected.
I don’t have a better source. When it comes to using AI as an unaccountable research assistant whose results are unverifiable or completely fall apart under 10s of scrutiny, my point is that the results are worth nothing.
So are you argueing that no data is better than some data?..
actually AI did state the limitations and it did also post the source..
Knowing where the software users reside is not meaningless or irrelevent data. It should be a factor in how software is developed.
Finally, as this was a casual post, I intentionally put it in the “Off Topic” sub group.. my understanding is that this sub group was intented exactly for this purpose !
It’s disrespectful to other people to expect them to read a long LLM generated post with information that the LLM fundamentally doesn’t care about. You yourself are ambivalent to the quality of the source. It doesn’t contribute anything to the forum.
It’s fine to say that you don’t know something or that the information would be hard to acquire at a distance without a dedicated survey.
Well, this IS the Off-Topic corner of the forum… and, really, no one NEEDS to read ANY posts on the forum.
Yeah… AI is a tool and how you use any tool should come with thought by the user. Does it HURT to look at something like this? No, I don’t think so… does it hurt to assume that this is 100% true and not try to dive deeper, seek sources, and verify? Heck yeah!
This is not exclusively true to using AI, but should be a way of thinking for ANY data we receive, nowadays!
well, yeah, in about 86% of the cases, it’s better not to have incorrect data.
how do I know this ?
well, I don’t have data, but I made a guess, and somehow, better to have data right ?
edit : if you feel the need to re-read my message, it’s ok, so do I. not everyone is as good as Bilbo when it comes to complex sentences. it’s more fun that way
My wife works in medical research. She was asked by one of her colleagues to prepare a report and use the company version of whatever AI they paid €£¥& millions for.
Most of the data was wrong, without proper documentation, missing links to source data, etc. etc.
She spent an hour prompting it to make a chart that I made in less than 20 minutes…
It’s a hot pile of steaming blackbox wealth transferring ■■■■.
