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 It's absolutely well suited to anyone needing accurate piping takeoff and laboring estimates, with great reporting and up to date pricing. I love that I didn't need to spend time trying to update the price logs. It's easy to learn, and works well in a large or small environment, and lends itself to more than just estimating, but becomes a good project management tool as well. Fantastic software.
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 FastPIPE was very fast to learn, very straight forward and user-friendly. It's easy to use and teach new interns and project engineers how to quickly takeoff sections to backup change orders or assist in heavy bid load. It's fantastic at keeping up to date on price changes. I'd get updates often, and they were usually within 2-3% of our discount prices with local vendors. In the few instances it wasn't, FastPIPE was very easy to adjust or factor for project costs. Is great at being able to pull up reports and graphs and track different materials and labor costs for factoring. We bid on a lot of high rise residential buildings, so we do takeoff by floor. It would give detailed reports per page as opposed to just a lump sum. Very detailed so it was easy to adjust per our project approach. 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 It was a trick or two learning how to upload prints correctly, I think that interface could be a bit easier, but it's already better than most of the competition. Might be nice to have easier labor factoring, in case we want to pre-load our own instead of MCA time factors for piping labor It would auto update upon opening occasionally. It's fairly fast, but I prefer to OK that in case I just need to come up with something quickly and don't want to wait. 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 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 I've used the quote soft piping takeoff as well, and it's just not as easy to use or update. Basic methodology and interaface is similar, but it's more 'clunky' to use, is harder to keep updated and to upload PDF's for takeoff, and it's just not as streamlined or user friendly. Akin to comparing driving a truck to a sports car. The Fast Pipe is really smooth and easy to function in.
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 Best impact is time saved. It's so much faster to do bid takeoff and hit the ground running Being able to 'draw in' on design-build and being able to print my takeoff has been helpful when turning the job over so the field install understands the approach taken to get the job. Ease of use and learning has made it much more cost effective to bring new people up to speed. Read full review ScreenShots