We study random unrooted plane trees with $n$ vertices sampled according to the weights corresponding to the vertex-degrees. Our main result shows that if the generating series of the weights has positive radius of convergence, then this model of random trees may be approximated geometrically by a Galton--Watson tree conditioned on having a large random size. This implies that a variety of results for the well-studied planted case also hold for unrooted trees, including Gromov--Hausdorff--Prokhorov scaling limits, tail-bounds for the diameter, distributional graph limits, and limits for the maximum degree. Our work complements results by Wang~(2016), who studied random unrooted plane trees whose diameter tends to infinity.