Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review SmartBid is also very useful for conducting sub-contracting analysis and management simulations in the didactic field. The procedures for sharing documents are helpful, but the graphic can be improved. Many forms can be pre-filled. This helps a lot in saving time and money! SmartBid is great for exporting and/or sending single or mass emails. However, as mentioned, it would be useful to simplify some pre-construction processes and improve the overall communication
Read full review Pros Live updates between design teams. This keeps the team up to date for quicker design and frees up personnel from having to do file transfers. The cloud-based platform gives your company a little bit of a break on computer requirements. Allows multiple offices and/or cloud-based consultants to collaborate on a design as if they are one office or one company. Read full review It's very easy to set up a job and manage who receives solicitations. You can also keep detailed notes on who've you contacted and see if they're actually downloading and reviewing the documents. You can add a confidentiality agreement clause which they must accept before accessing the documents. It then stores this information if it ever needs to be accessed. This is much cleaner and easier then sending out a NDA form and having the subcontractor return it before actually sending drawings/docs. You can send Invitations to Bid and set it up to continue sending these ITB's until the subcontractor responds. However, this can also be a negative point because once you set up a delayed ITB, it doesn't update as the subcontractors view and respond to the ITB's. So if a sub is "Not Responded" and you set up a delayed ITB to fire off every day for 5 days, and the sub responds after day 2, that sub will continue to receive ITB's for all 5 days. Uploading drawings is quick and easy. It's especially convenient if you link to one of your cloud services such as Egnyte, Google Drive, etc. The search tools are quick and easy and often very accessible from any page. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review We have seen intermittent problems with notes disappearing. Ability to have more than one project bidding open at the same time/on multiple windows. Mobile apps. Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review SmartBid has an excellent support team that is always at your service. Any problem I've had (when I've even had them) has been resolved almost immediately, along with tips on how to avoid them in the future. If you're looking for a program with excellent customer service, look no further than SmartBid.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review SmartBid is used by more of the contractors that we happen to do lots of work with. It has basically the same features. However, SmartBid will let subcontractors view all the jobs a general contractor is bidding, even ones we were never invited to. So it has the potential to bring more opportunities.
Read full review Return on Investment Positively we use for all safety items, so its potential to save money is really something cannot be quantified. It has helped document trends, big items leading trends and odd ball cases which overall helps perfecting process to eliminate those trends and save time. Negative impact is we need to pay for another program to handle budget, submittals and bidding so we are paying for two systems and paying for all employees to learn each system and possible make errors since there are differences in the systems. Read full review It is a big time saver compared to sending out individual emails. It saves time in having multiple individual databases for company contact info. It ensures that everyone is getting the same information. Read full review ScreenShots