Newforma Project Center vs PlanGrid

Likelihood to Recommend

Newforma is a great tool to collaborate with large teams and between firms. It allows for great documentation of transfers, activities, and other procedural aspects of projects that require collaboration between disciplines, for example, MEP, electrical, architectural and technology. For internal use, Newforma has been great for communications tracking and archival, as well as for record-keeping of all the users in a team or number of teams. Many great options are features are unused due to a lack of training or exposure to them, for example, the graphical viewers that can preview CAD, Revit, and other formats, or the markup tool available with the desktop client.

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Gil Lopez CTS ING

Integrated Technology Architect

TEECOMDesign, 51-200 employees

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Plangrid is well suited for companies (that are not currently using a different SaaS construction package) to make their construction document management more collaborative and mobile friendly. Companies requiring/wanting their subs and owners to collaborate with them as part of the life of a construction project will find Plangrid very helpful in fulfilling this goal. On the negative side, companies that are fully entrenched in using other construction suites will struggle to fully use Plangrid to its potential as pre-built integration between Plangrid and other packages is limited

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Jeffrey Rudacille

IT Manager

Edwards Construction Services Inc.Construction, 51-200 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Newforma Project Center

PlanGrid

Plan distribution & viewing

Plan markups & sharing

Issue tracking & punchlists

Photo documentation

Jobsite reports

Document sharing

RFI tools

Collaboration & approvals

As-built drawings

Mobile app

Submittal design and management

Pros

Newforma sits on top of our previous filing system (Windows Explorer). This was very important to us because we didn't have to change the project numbering system in order to fit Newforma's design. Also, if we were to decide we didn't like it, we could easily revert back to our previous methods.
Newforma does a great job of indexing information, making searches much easier by being able to use keywords instead of knowing the exact file location. No more traversing through countless folders before finding what you need.
Newforma keeps a read receipt for everything that you submit through it for issue tracking, and keeps an easy to read record of your workflow.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Civil Engineering Company, 11-50 employees

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Very easy to use, and training takes less than a few hours for field staff.
Connects office to field quickly and efficiently.
Uploading , naming, and tagging sheet is the best in the business.
Sheet and document manager always display most current information and also gives you the ability to look back at previous versions for changes.

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Verified User

Program Manager in Corporate

Construction Company, 11-50 employees

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Cons

File downloads.
User-interface.

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Verified User

Professional in Professional Services

Architecture & Planning Company, 51-200 employees

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The photo attachment process is a bit complicated. In ProCore (another similar software I've used), you can upload photos directly into RFIs for your reference, or into e-mails. For PlanGrid, you have to first upload the photo into the documents tab, then link them into the RFI. It's not intuitive and can add confusion to the documents tab.
Photos can't be directly uploaded. Between different devices and colleagues, it's possible you'll get an important photo outside of the PlanGrid photo capture feature within its app. Again, it's complicated for users to use.
In their new drawings viewer, the icons for actions do not have icons available. I had to use them all in order to understand what they meant, and I'm fairly tech savvy. I'm not sure if a new person to PlanGrid will pick up on each icon's abilities very easily.
There's no all-in-one solution in CM, but PlanGrid is fairly barebones, and I don't believe it has any ability to connect to other software. There's no ability to take meeting munites; you can hack the field reports feature to accomplish this, but it's clear that was not the intent of the designers.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Product Management

Construction Company, 11-50 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

PlanGrid 10.0

Based on 1 answer

We are at the point where we have shown our teams what is possible with this software. We cannot take it away and go back to the way we used to do things. I think that they would push back on us to give them access to something electronic. It is a good program that we will continue to use

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Kyle Montague

Senior Estimator

Spacecon Specialty Contractors, LLC.Construction, 51-200 employees

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

PlanGrid 8.2

Based on 1 answer

Very well thought app, easy to use and provides fast access to the project's plans (your own and your team's), improvements in the annotation posibilities and on-site report generator will be appreciatted. The punch-list report generator and the current/previous plan version compare tools works flawlessly. Haven't used the RFI's nor field report options yet

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Alvaro Flores

Associate Architect

Ingenya ConsultoresArchitecture & Planning, 11-50 employees

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Support

Newforma Project Center 7.0

Based on 1 answer

While I have never asked for support myself, a Newforma representative has been in the office annually to give training seminars and info sessions on how to fully use the product. I find this essential to keep the product relevant and make sure everyone knows its full capabilities and an important part of customer support.

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Verified User

Professional in Professional Services

Architecture & Planning Company, 51-200 employees

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PlanGrid 9.3

Based on 52 answers

Online chat during business hours is extremely helpful. The Plangrid staff has gone above and beyond many times to help us. One time they even offered to completely rebuild our 900+ sheet project so I could slip sheet a few old drawing revisions! This undoubtedly would have taken hours on Plangrid's end. They are always responsive and are continually improving, listening to user feedback.

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Verified User

Supervisor in Other

Construction Company, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

A good competitor against other similar solutions and support is excellent.

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Verified User

Manager in Customer Service

Architecture & Planning Company, 51-200 employees

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Plangrid, while not serving the external document distribution function, is unrivaled for internal document distribution and sharing in the construction industry. The speed at which documents are navigatable, the ability to download your projects for viewing without an internet connection, and the document mark-up and photo tools place it head and shoulders above the competition.

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James Nolan

Project Manager/Estimator

Hard Rock Concrete, Inc. Sunnyvale, CAConstruction, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Newforma makes it easy to transfer, share, archive, and search extensive data sets in a single GUI
For it to be effective, all users in a team must receive a basic training and use it consistently
Adoption in the industry is good (A/E); many teams use it consistently. Learning to use it once produces time-saving in subsequent projects

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Gil Lopez CTS ING

Integrated Technology Architect

TEECOMDesign, 51-200 employees

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It helped us "wow" a joint commission survey in 2016 and have a successful survey because he loved how we could access plans on an iPad, check suite sizes, and didn't have to carry around huge, heavy sets of life safety plans.

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Melissa McCain

Facilities Quality & Compliance Program Coordinator

Indiana University HealthHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees

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