Bentley Systems offers ProjectWise, a construction management software for keeping construction project personnel and engineers up-to-date with most recent progress information, with daily logs and punchlists, risk item lifecycle management through identification, creation, tracking and resolution, RFI management, and document storage with automated sharing.
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SketchUp
Score 8.3 out of 10
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SketchUp is 3D modeling software with an emphasis on usability. SketchUp is a Trimble product.
$119
per year
Pricing
Bentley ProjectWise
SketchUp
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free
$0.00
per year
For Schools (free with G Suite or Microsoft education account)
ProjectWise is good for really large projects with many team members. I would not recommend it for small projects or those with a small team of people working on them. It is best for technical people and those who plan to use it daily. There are better FTP options out there if you just want to use them for file sharing.
SketchUp is great for individually studying options for building design. It is an awesome conceptual tool to be able to quickly model and manipulate a building to study different designs. It is not good for complex geometries, especially curves. Surfaces have a hard time registering and cutting into one another. It also eventually needs to go into Revit to be more realistic as it is not good as a documentation tool
Quickly exploring solutions in 3D: We get a lot of "what if" and "what would that look like" questions. While hand-sketching and hand-drafting can be fairly quick, SketchUp allows me to quickly create 3D and 2D views of a detail or solution, change dimensions and materials in a flash, and show a client or installer the plan in minutes.
Creating professional design documents in LayOut: Projects of any scale need good documentation. Using a combination of SketchUp and LayOut, I can create a Design Intent Set, plans for permitting, a set for mechanical trades to mark-up, etc. Having clear, appropriately-scaled drawings with dimensions or notations is a must, and we don't always have the time or budget to get an architect involved!
Using live files to guide discussions: Not all clients are "visual" people, so opening their model and orbiting around their space in real time has been extremely helpful. Clients and trades enjoy the perspective views so much that we often include them in the full-sized drawing sets to give a good "overall" view of the project intent. For complex or tight spaces, sometimes un-rendered plans and elevations just aren't enough!
It's worse than a virus, it WILL get into every part of your system, with the only way to get rid of it is to do a full system format.
Integration is dependent on if Bentley wishes to support your software.
DMS system, it just makes it incompatible with native programs unless you have integration, which is at Bentley's discretion for support, exporting to your system is a work around, though this takes significant time to export and to re-teach PW linked file locations when you reimport it.
Clunky user interface, if you want to work on more than 1 file at a time expect to be at least 50-80% slower.
a Labyrinth of forms that are prone to user error.
Interface straight out of Windows 2000, and that's generous.
Inability to delete or even "Recycle bin" files, this is more an admin issue but most PW instance lock out deleting files, which makes it impractical for general use.
Encourages unnecessary and convoluted workflows, This comes down to the Pro of "The backend is customisable," it may be customisable but this encourages system admins to write convoluted and time consuming workflows just because they can.
Seems to require an IT team to manage it - this probably relates to the highly customisable component.
We typically wait a few years in between renewing, as even older versions are powerful tools for modeling, and we make sure the amount of feature changes are worth the re-investment.
It is very user friendly and easy to learn. It's simplicity allows for a low learning curve so more people can learn it faster. The downside is that most schools are no longer teaching it, so many younger professionals come out of school not knowing it and knowing more complex software and they have a hard time "dumbing down" their skillsets
Sketchup is so intuitive; I can't recall ever looking for official support. However, there are many user forums online that can answer more questions. The usefulness of the online forums is, however, tempered by the fact that there have been many versions of the software under different ownership and support regimes, and thus finding the right information for the right version of the software can be a challenge.
I think ProjectWise is better for technical users than Dropbox, one drive, or SharePoint. It is less intuitive than any of the others though. It is better for restoring files and creating an audit trail than any of the other programs. It is better for sharing large files in a short period of time than SharePoint or one drive. It is also better for larger teams and larger projects than SharePoint or Dropbox.
We have not evaluated any other competing software to this one. I heard about this software from a friend who teaches how to use it. She showed me in just a few minutes and I was HOOKED. I saw immediately the possible help it would be to my business. Thank you.
Provides a central place for people to store files.
Incredibly long time to fill out forms to initialise a file. 4 hours to update files instead of about 10mins.
Significantly longer to open drawings. up to 1.5mins to open vs about 10seconds.
Can't easily batch script over files, thus making this workflow either ineffective or redundant. Scripts can take 10mins to do an hours worth of repetitive tasks.
Restricts you to 1 file at a time, so rather than in the morning opening 10-15 files at once and doing other work while they open you have to site their and open via dialogue boxes each and every file. This can take 10-15mins of your morning run.
People seem to email more documents unofficially now, which kind of defeats the first point.
