Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro vs. Simpro

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.

Incentivized

Simpro is well suited for job and team management, tracking inventory and the workflow is very logical. The mobile app for our field technicians works very well to clock on and off and then being in a position to report to a customer based on factual information has made invoicing a breeze! Reporting can be a bit frustrating especially on materials used on different cost centre numbers as you can only specify a job number, but not a cost centre number.

Incentivized

• It helps to collaborate on different components of projects that work according to different specifications in one place.
• With this the client can have all date at once where they can review all things.
• The place where an architect and other Engineers coordinate to get a full-fledged model.

Incentivized

• Billing: straight from a closed, complete job. Carries overall equipment, hours, takes one click to bill.
• simPRO retains notes on all emails; notes can be entered by anyone to track communication with clients.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Ability to create leave forms for the employees (to my best knowledge, this doesn't exist).
• Ability to color code jobs, quotes by criticality.
• Assign status to equipment (e.g. "ordered"; "arrived").

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

As mentioned before, materials reporting could use some work as one cannot report by cost centre number, only by job number. It makes it difficult with large jobs with multiple cost centre numbers to easily extract information for reporting. Other than that the system is user friendly and easy to understand.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It is a great option for solar project management. It needs some improvements for real-time one-page reports, inventory management, scheduling and custom views. I believe these will come because they listen to their customers. I would also like to see some better training and not be expected to pay out of pocket for it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

monday.com was easier to set up and you can create boards with loads of subtasks which helps manage a project. Also, the ability to integrate with google was much better as we could link it to the calendar and also store documents that the engineers could see easier onsite. Overall we could make monday.com work better for our business based on how we are set up but simPRO will be great for other businesses with more specific needs.

Incentivized

• We are able to complete a design quicker.
• 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.

Incentivized

• Increased team collaboration.
• Increased inventory awareness.
• Decreased down time between jobs.

Incentivized