Abstarct: Bearing capacity and settlement of soil beneath the foundation have been received a significant attention of many researchers and geotechnical engineers over the last century and various relations have been proposed during these years for the estimation of settlement, ultimate and allowable bearing capacity of soil. The differences in bearing capacity is mainly attributed to the type of soil, shape of foundation and the depth of foundation embedment. Recently, raft and strip foundations are most often used in construction projects. Therefore, in the present study the finite element analysis method was performed to investigate the estimation of the settlement and bearing capacity of the raft and strip foundations on saturated and unsaturated fine grained (clay) and granular (sand) soils under drained and undrained conditions, using PLAXIS 3D Foundation software. In order to evaluate the over-consolidation ratio (OCR) of saturated and unsaturated clays in estimating the bearing capacity and settlement of the soil beneath the foundation 3 over-consolidation ratio (OCR=1, OCR=3 and OCR=8) were applied. In terms of constructing on saturated clay, with regarding to the presence of 2 types of settlements, namely: elastic settlement and consolidation settlement, the ultimate dead-load was applied within 1 day to evaluate the elastic settlement; and results were further compared with the classical theories. A good correlation was observed between all the settlement results obtained from the software and the classical theories. In all cases, the settlement values in strip foundations are lower than raft foundations. For unsaturated clays, with increasing the over-consolidation ratio a lower settlement differences is observed between these two types of foundations. In addition, increasing the over-consolidation ratio in saturated clays shows a lower construction settlement comparing to the unsaturated clays.