AutoCAD mobile (formerly AutoCAD 360) is an easy to use drawing and drafting app from Autodesk. It enables users in design, construction, and engineering industries to view, create, mark-up, edit, and share drawings on mobile devices.
$10
per month
Bluebeam
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Bluebeam Revu is a PDF management, control, and editing tool. It enables collaboration and markup within shared documents across projects’ life cycles and has takeoff and bid creation capabilities.
AutoCAD 360 has multiple functionalities that adapt to circumstantial conditions. It has a focus on available tools at all times and deserves to be updated to be at the forefront of technological platforms. It is very useful in some aspects of functionality to have access to less dense and capable tools to develop environments and improve visualization.
The program is great for editing construction drawings, stamping/approving official documents and overlaying revised documents to see design changes. You can use it as an estimating takeoff tool, estimating database, document control, cloud document storage, the list goes on! Bluebeam poses many applications for the user to utilize for the desired needs. There may be some other software that has one specific function that can perform the specific task better, but Bluebeam is a holistic program with many tools for use.
Once you set Bluebeam Revu as your default PDF handler, it launches immediately when clicking a PDF to open. The speed with which it opens documents is impressive.
Creating PDF's out of other documents, such as Word, Excel, JPG's, etc. is simple.
Digitally signing documents is a simple, secure process. You can keep your signature password-protected, yet still access it quickly.
The Bluebeam Revu mobile application ( I use the iOS version on an iPad Pro), is awesome. Not only does it handle PDF's like you would expect it to, it allows for effortless digital signing of documents on the fly. Nice to be able to quickly sign a document and email right back out from the tablet no matter where I am.
It'd be nice to be able to use AutoCAD 360 to leave comments on peoples files, such as being able to annotate a certain part of it and mark it for review, so then its author can look at the note and make necessary changes.
If you have several tabs open and you try to drag one out for a side by side view then you do not have all the modification options and you have to combine them back together.
There is a lag time when hitting the print option.
There is also a lag time when opening files, sometimes I think the window is frozen.
I wish the basic version also had basic file editing, as in editing a document as Adobe does.
This is so useful so we would like to keep renewing as Autocad 360 does. In fact we are very optimistic about the tools that come in every renewal because we will then have even more features available.
Bluebeam is a powerful PDF viewer and mark-up tool. We are more familiar with it than Adobe Acrobat Pro or other viewers, and it has more features geared towards construction document managers than Acrobat Pro does.
I'm constantly finding that Bluebeam Revu does more than I knew it could. And when I find something that it can't do, I've found that Bluebeam truly listens to its user base and will work to incorporate any good suggestion when feasible.
Its hard for me to give a rating on this one as we rarely have to use the support feature for Bluebeam. However, when we have used it, they have been ultra supportive in helping us get exactly what we needed. I know another engineer was trying to figure out a feature and the rep gave a detailed tutorial on how to complete the task
Although there are lots of alternatives to AutoCAD mobile on the Google play store and the app store, many of these alternatives are not professionally developed and are associated with shady developers. So there might be a privacy or security risk with the usage these alternatives. However, DWG FastView is a worthy competing alternative.
We feel there is not another program out there that would compare to Bluebeam at this current time. Some of the other programs out there do not include studio or the overlaying process which is one of our main uses. The ease of hyperlinking makes this product stand out the most.
A major positive aspect is being able to take your computer home without taking the entire set of paper drawings. They have made it so easy to navigate a set of drawings that I can work at home using only the digital drawings.
Collaboration with owners and architects has been a great feature. Setting up a Bluebeam studio and having everyone get in and mark things up, then having the architect be able to go in and see what markups have been added, has made the constructability review process much much better.
Even when not working on drawings, Bluebeam is a very good tool for working with standard PDF documents. The markup tools are very easy to use.
The negative aspect is the takeoff function because some people would like estimators to use the Bluebeam takeoff because it would make their job easier down the road; however, the actual act of doing a full scale takeoff in Bluebeam would require much more time.
