Support

• Pro has support that the SketchUp Free version doesn't have. This support comes in the form of email. The SketchUp Free version does have online help, in the form of user and reference guides.
  
  

Modeling in 3-D

• You can create 3-D models in SketchUp Free, but you can't add custom behaviors to them. You can in SketchUp Pro, which refers to these behaviors in its documentation as "Dynamic Components." SketchUp Free can use but not create Dynamic components. A particular staircase in SketchUp demonstrates dynamic components. When you resize a regular staircase to a greater height, the staircase won't add any more steps, whereas a dynamic staircase will. You can identify dynamic components in the "Components" window of the "Windows" menu by the small green arrow in the component's icon.
  
  

File Types

• SketchUp Pro supports many more file formats than those of the SketchUp Free version, though some plugins for the SketchUp Free version allow you to compensate for at least some of this difference between the two versions. The SketchUp Pro version lets you export to the "3ds" format, which Autodesk invented for its 3ds Max modeling application. You can import 3ds files in SketchUp Free. Another Autodesk format SketchUp Pro can export to that SketchUp Free can't is the "dwg" format. Pro can also export to 2-D files that SketchUp Free can't export to. These types include Adobe's Portable Document Format. Pro also allows you to export information for every entity in your scenes to a spreadsheet file. You can then edit, sort, and filter this data to evaluate and validate it with a spreadsheet program.
  
  

Presentation

• SketchUp Pro has several commands for creating presentation-quality graphics that SketchUp Free lacks. These commands include those for making drawings with multiple pages; adding annotations to your drawings; embedding SketchUp models in 2-D documents; and the ability to create presentations for large screen formats. Pro packs many of these commands related to presentation in a 2-D design program it bundles with Pro. That program is called "Layout."