Adobe Acrobat DC is the current version of the well-established document / PDF management solution, part of the Adobe Document Cloud (the other part being Adobe's eSign services based on technology acquired with EchoSign in 2011).
$12.99
per month
Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro (formerly BIM360) is a construction software for project managers, site managers, and Building Information Modelling (BIM) managers. It is designed to connect the office and site components of construction, providing cloud-based access to plans and models.
In Human Resources, hiring new employees has many steps that can easily be forgotten about. Adobe Acrobat is a tool to make onboarding not only easier, but more efficient, and a great way to keep record of all pre-employment requirements. When hiring a candidate quickly, there is not always time for in-person onboarding. You can send policies and agreements out for signature using Adobe Acrobat. It is easy for the recipient to navigate, and they are able to keep a record for themselves. All changes are time-stamped, making for great record keeping and capturing of this process.
Autodesk Bim 360 is well suited to the majority of construction projects in my opinion. On the construction side I could see how the straightforward nature of the platform would be well liked. The new update with the widgets is a great touch and allows for ease of site visits by showcasing good to know info like project location on a map and the local weather. You can also customize the "widgets" as you see fit to add more information if necessary to the home screen. From my experience as a LEED consultant, Bim 360 does not differ much from other platforms used for submittal review like Procore. It is easy enough to search for what you want but searches do take a while and you need to move the cursor over every time you search and do not find what you're looking for, which seems very unnecessary. Overall it is fine for reviewing documentation but isn't anything extraordinary.
Bim360 is extremely unintuitive and frequently confusing to end users.
There are multiple avenues of sharing and collaboration for models and information. The advantages/disadvantages of each and how to perform even the most basic of tasks requires extensive training and mentoring for even the most advanced of users.
There are many enormous limitations and constraints to BIM 360 that are not immediately obvious and even contrary to published marketing materials and even product naming.
Development cycles of the product are seemingly monthly, but incredibly minor. This makes the desperately-needed and glaringly obvious massive usability, capability, and performance improvements into deal-breakers and hair pulling events. Change cannot come fast enough.
There are no integrations into Microsoft's Azure AD SSO or other 3rd party SSOs available for SMBs. This makes the provided MFA a huge headache for all SMBs.
There are no integrations into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem for SharePoint/OneDrive or Outlook. This is desperately needed for most organizations using Bim360.
I bought a perpetual license to Acrobat some time ago, but if the software ever stopped being supported in my version of windows or other solution that makes me need to buy another license I would not hesitate to do so since it saves me a lot of headaches. There are workarounds to merge files and edit pdfs with an online interface but I dont think those are a good usage of time when Acrobat exists.
My overall experience with Adobe is great because because the it has almost all of the tools in one place and it can be used it for most of my work without going anywhere else. Because the tools are available right there in the main interface, it makes it very easy to use.
It's not very difficult to use for majority of all our users. We really like storing and managing all our project data in one location so users have only one option to access the requested information. Managing our architectural engineering projects with two workflows in one system is really a good asset
One of the best features of Adobe Acrobat is its speed and stability. When dealing with massive multi-page files, having to reload a crashed program over and over again would slow down progress unnecessarily. And expanding on that, having the table of contents generated allows me to skip to different pages with ease, a necessary feature with exceptionally long files. word searches are even more helpful with text recognition.
Because I don't need it. Used it years ago for account management/billing issues but they have changed the user experience so more of that can be managed online. If I have a question the knowledge base or a video that Adobe has posted answers
AutoDesk support is slow and if you are not an enterprise customer they will likely tell you to go to forums and post for help pushing the support on the high-level end-users (some of which are AutoDesk employees). I haven't actually had issues requiring support with docs altough there are some features I wish it had
Works well with JamF and SmartDeploy. These are our Enterprise imaging solutions for Mac's and PC's. The Enterprise installer is required when pushing out this app.
There really is no comparison. Although we use other PDF programs, we mainly utilize Adobe. Not only because we find it to be a better program but also because everyone is more familiar with it. However, the other products are implemented for various reasons, such as a feature or 2 that we find necessary to use at times.
The saving in reduced field changes/mistakes quickly paid for the license plus some. The software allows for easy data collection, especially at project completion for field software by checklist creation. Furthermore, the internal punch-list tracking, tracking completion lists and punch lists created for us by others is optimal compared to the competition. We chose Bim360 over other options due to its ability to import out of other software programs directly into the system, adding reports in one location and then distributing it to subcontractors and internally from there to fix deficiencies. It does the tracking, importing, markups of pictures and document viewing well and fulfills our needs.
I find that many users aren't aware of many features of the software they use, nor may they be comfortable with learning multiple-step processes. For the simplest of PDF purposes (scanning, downloading, exporting), it gets a thumbs-up. For anything involving electronic signatures, meh--causes eyes to glaze over, or forgetting what all is involved.
Savings of time trying to format documents correctly; PDFs hold their format.
Ease of transfer for print-ready or larger file types.
It has empowered multiple "non-designer" users to manipulate PDFs in minor ways, saving our design team time and allowing them to use their resources/time on other, more complex projects.
The fact that your files are not on your servers. Anytime that the Autodesk servers go down you are down; it does not happen very often but when it does there is nothing you can do about it except wait.
Because of how BIM360 licensing is setup it does force you to manage the personnel on a project closer. This can at times be viewed as a negative but in the long run is positive because with better management comes better profit.
