Sandwich plates are one of the important components in construction of engineering and especially aerospace structures. In this paper, buckling analysis of sandwich plates was investigated experimentally and analytically using layerwise theory. The sandwich plate was rectangular and made of two composite laminates as skins and a viscoelastic core. The formulation was based on the first order shear deformation theory and the Rayleigh-Ritz method was used for approximating and determining the displacement field. The behavior of viscoelastic material modeled using Zener three-element model. The results obtained from layerwise theory compared with experimental results and showed good agreement. This study demonstrated that, layerwise theory could describe buckling behavior of sandwich plates with high accuracy and represents more realistic and acceptable description of behavior of the plates with much less computational cost.