Ina…I’m in the same boat. I’m curious to know what you decided. I’ve been using Revit for 12 years, and I’m over it.

Rendering has fast and slow modes, including movies.

You can be designing in tenderer full 3D. Very seductive for the user.

Hard to select wo hands on. We looked at archicad, architrion, pin register Mylar and Vectorworks in 95. VW and pin register were the finalists. We made a great choice with VW.

Good luck.

Best regards, Ina

I am an architect and BIM manager, and I have been using Revit since 2009. I also have been trying ArchiCAD and I recently purchased VW 2020. Here are my thoughts:

1- Revit is more used than the both of them (at least in USA), therefore is becoming more demanded by clients and AEC consultants or contractors.

2- I like more ARchiCAD and VW for architectural design. In my opinion, they have better features, and are more architectural design friendly than Revit. Vectorworks, for example, has a tool for adjacency matrices, which is used by architects at the very beginning of the design process to define functional relationships. Also, VW has a very good module for landscaping design and urban planning.

3- The fact that VW and ArchiCAD use multiple CPU cores, instead of single core like Revit, make them more faster for processing graphics and calculations, therefore more efficiency.

4-The fact that ArchiCAD and VW are cross platform (Windows and MAC), makes them better for different IT settings.

5- The fact that ArchiCAD and VW can still be purchased at once or have a monthly subscription, is better for different small business structures. Let’s be honest, software as a service, in other words, subscriptions are more expensive, on the long run, than purchase a software every two or three years. Most of the features are not used or mastered in a single year, so why update the software every year and become a slave of subscriptions?

6- VW is way less expensive than ArchiCAD and Revit, and provide the same, and in some cases, better features for architectural design than Revit.

ArchiCAD has a comparable price to Revit, but offers the option to be purchased instead of a subscription, something that Revit does not currently offer.

7- VW has a lot of options when it comes to collaboration; it is capable of importing and exporting in almost all the main file formats used in the AEC industry, and I have been told that it offers collaboration in the same model.

I decided to purchase VW for all those reasons, and I am very happy with it so far.

Thank you for your article.