Motif and its BIM 2.0 rivals can’t yet do everything that Revit does. Neither could Revit when it first launched, and neither will whatever Autodesk builds to replace it. Martyn Day on why ‘come back when it’s finished’ is the wrong test
For years, architects have complained about Revit. It is slow, expensive, awkward to automate and built on computer science conceived in the late 1990s. Practices buy workstations with 16, 32 or 64 cores, then spend much of the working day inside an application that makes limited use of them. Now there is a new complaint, highlighted by the launch of Motif’s BIM platform today (read our exclusive in-depth article). The alternatives aren’t yet finished. Of course they aren’t. Nothing that sets out to challenge 26 years of software development is going to be finished at launch, and nothing ever will be, if the entry requirement is doing everything that Revit already does.
Motif joins a growing group of what this magazine has called BIM 2.0 applications: Snaptrude, Qonic, Arcol, Hypar and others, each rethinking BIM around cloud computing, modern data architectures and, latterly, AI. None has Revit’s breadth and none can replicate every family, plug-in, Dynamo script, template, standard and workaround that practices have built up around it. That is the reason architects often give for not making the move. More accurately, it is the reason moving is hard.
Consider what ‘finished’ actually involves. A BIM authoring system needs a geometry kernel and graphics engine capable of handling very large buildings at interactive speeds, parametrics, constraints and change propagation. Objects need multiple representations, appearing differently in 3D, plan, section, schedules and quantities. Then there are families, types, materials, annotation, dimensions, tagging, sheets, revisions, title blocks, visualisation, phasing, work sharing, version history, IFC / DWG, APIs, scripting, stairs, railings, curtain walls, roofs, structures and MEP. Then there are edge cases. Add cloud infrastructure, security, permissions and now an AI stack.
Give the BIM 2.0 developers your difficult models and horrible families. Tell them what is missing, break their software and make them fix the things that stop you using it.
Revit has had more than a quarter of a century to accumulate all this. Nobody starting today with tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding is going to reproduce it at launch. What matters is what these new applications can already replace and whether the architecture underneath can take them somewhere Revit cannot easily go.
The sceptics do have one good argument. A tool that cannot produce a co-ordinated construction document set cannot deliver a building, and documentation is exactly where most BIM 2.0 tools are thinnest. But plenty of architectural work does not end in a tender set. Competitions, feasibility, concept and early-stage design, interior fit-outs and option studies all offer places to start. The useful test is ‘can it do this workflow?’, not whether it can swallow Revit whole.
Revit’s greatest strength isn’t Revit
Revit’s greatest strength is the ecosystem customers have built around it: RVT archives, family libraries, scripts, plug-ins, training, office standards, internal expertise and hundreds of undocumented fixes that everyone knows because that is simply how the job gets done. Autodesk did not create all of this. Practices have spent 15 to 20 years building much of it themselves, at considerable expense, and that investment is now one of the biggest obstacles to moving elsewhere.
Some of it is genuine intellectual property and hard-won expertise, but some of it is scar tissue. A surprising amount of what we now regard as BIM expertise has grown out of learning how to keep increasingly complicated Revit projects running.
Large Revit projects are routinely divided into separate models by building, level, zone or discipline to keep them manageable. Some of that division is legitimate: disciplines own their models, contracts draw boundaries, and federating models by author is how openBIM is meant to work. But a great deal of additional fragmentation is driven by performance, with projects split and linked, separated into worksets and selectively loaded to keep them responsive. These are no longer ingenious workarounds invented by desperate BIM managers; they are established Revit practice, and Autodesk itself documents them as ways of improving performance on large projects.
The RVT format also changes between releases and newer files cannot simply be opened by the previous version. Consultants therefore need to coordinate which release is being used, upgrading a live project is approached cautiously, and practices commonly keep multiple versions installed to support existing jobs and libraries. Autodesk itself recommends planning upgrades around suitable project milestones. A continuously versioned cloud model has its own problems, but it does not have quite this annual file-format ritual.
Putting an agent on old computer science does not make the underlying computer science new. It makes the old computer science the bottleneck for the agent.
Cloud collaboration adds another layer. Revit Cloud Worksharing is not included with a Revit subscription, or with the AEC Collection. Autodesk requires each person authoring a cloud-workshared Revit model to have the additional Forma Design Collaboration entitlement, previously called BIM Collaborate Pro. Customers who want Autodesk’s cloud collaboration environment therefore pay for another service on top of the authoring application.
Autodesk’s own cloud-worksharing guidance warns that opening, synchronising and saving can become problematic as file sizes increase, and recommends techniques such as opening only necessary worksets, reducing loaded RVT links and avoiding simultaneous synchronisations. None of this makes Revit unusable. Millions of people successfully deliver buildings with it every day. It is simply part of the accumulated operational knowledge required to make large Revit projects work.
We have become extremely good at making Revit work, and after two decades it can be difficult to distinguish expertise in designing buildings from expertise in coping with the software used to design them. A new platform that removes some of those workarounds isn’t necessarily asking a practice to throw away valuable knowledge. It may be asking why some of that knowledge needs to exist in the first place.
We have been here before
None of the frustration with Revit is new. In July 2020, 17 UK practices, among them Zaha Hadid Architects, Grimshaw, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Wilkinson Eyre, wrote publicly to Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost with the results of their own survey: cost of ownership up by as much as 70 per cent between 2015 and 2019, five different licence models in as many years, and a platform that had gone from industry enabler to ‘constraint and bottleneck’, with practices paying more and using Revit less. Within weeks the signatories and supporters passed 100.
Six years later, Autodesk’s public Revit roadmap still contains some remarkably fundamental requests. Stairs and railings, curtain walls and materials remain recurring areas of user frustration, many workflows remain heavily dependent on single-core performance, large models still need careful management. To Autodesk’s credit, Revit 2027 finally shipped an improved graphics engine, but the headline additions were Autodesk Assistant, MCP access and the Forma Connected Client. The wrapping is arriving faster than the contents are being fixed.
Autodesk has made this transition before. When it bought Revit in 2002, two years after launch, its architectural strategy was Architectural Desktop (ADT), an object layer on AutoCAD with an installed base, content ecosystem and years of customer investment behind it. Revit could not do most of what ADT users did every day, but Autodesk did not wait for parity. It gave Revit to ADT subscription customers at no charge, put an unfinished product on thousands of desks and let firms discover whether the new architecture was worth the missing features.
It still took the best part of a decade for Revit to overtake ADT, which was renamed AutoCAD Architecture and gradually faded from importance. Autodesk wanted customers to try the new architecture before it had caught up with the old one.
Motif is attempting something similar from outside the Autodesk ecosystem. Its offer to a small group of early customers of two active users for the price of one for three years is obviously not the same deal, but the logic is familiar: reduce the cost and risk of trying the new architecture while there are still holes in it.
Autodesk has the same problem
The question I keep coming back to is how far you can take software whose fundamental architecture was conceived for another era of computing. Revit dates from a world of desktop CPUs, local files and limited GPU compute. Autodesk can add cloud services, APIs and AI around it, and clearly is doing so. But an AI agent ultimately must work at the speed of the application underneath it, and within its constraints. Putting an agent on old computer science does not make the underlying computer science new. It makes the old computer science the bottleneck for the agent.
Autodesk’s messaging about what happens next has been inconsistent. At AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD conference in 2025, Autodesk’s Carl Christensen was asked directly whether Forma was going to replace Revit or AutoCAD. His answer was no, subsequently explaining the relationship as ‘AND, not OR’. At NXT BLD 2026 there was a rather different message from Christensen, with Forma described as the direction in which Revit ultimately moves. Then, in a subsequent Autodesk interview with Christensen and Dan Lohmeyer, the wording shifted again. Thinking of Forma as a replacement for Revit was described as ‘the wrong framing’, while Autodesk simultaneously explained that, over time, many workflows supported by Revit today will be enabled in Forma.
New BIM applications do not mature in a development lab. They mature on awkward projects, under impossible standards, with difficult clients and experienced users who know where the bodies are buried.
Maybe ‘replacement’ is the wrong word. Look at what Autodesk is actually building. Revit is now a Forma Connected Client, Revit cloud data is being exposed through the AEC Data Model and its APIs, Autodesk Construction Cloud has become part of Forma, and collaboration, co-ordination, data and increasingly AI are being assembled around the new cloud platform. Autodesk says Revit will continue to be developed alongside it, and I have no reason to doubt that. But as more of the workflows, data and services that make up BIM move into Forma, the argument over whether Forma technically ‘replaces’ Revit starts to become semantic.
If Motif, Snaptrude, Qonic, Arcol or the other BIM 2.0 software developers start gaining meaningful traction inside Revit accounts, I would expect Autodesk to accelerate the creation tools in Forma. Autodesk already has Forma Building Design and has said that more workflows currently supported in Revit will move there over time. A few thousand serious customers putting real projects through competing tools would send a considerably stronger signal than another decade of requests on the Revit Ideas forum. The challengers do not have to replace Revit to have an effect; they only have to become credible enough to make Autodesk respond.
At some point Autodesk has the same migration problem as every BIM 2.0 developer. Things will be missing, workflows will have to change, and accumulated knowledge will not transfer neatly, although Autodesk has the considerable advantage of owning both ends of the journey and has already started moving parts of its customers’ workflow onto the new architecture.
That is why I find the completeness argument against Autodesk’s competitors increasingly strange. Motif, Qonic or Snaptrude are dismissed because they cannot yet reproduce the whole Revit workflow, while Autodesk is progressively moving pieces of that workflow onto a platform which cannot reproduce the whole Revit workflow either. I doubt Autodesk’s customers will be asked to wait until every last part of Forma is finished before they are encouraged to use it. The transition has already started.
The price of staying put
From conversations I have had with large Autodesk customers, the cost of remaining within the existing ecosystem is becoming an increasingly important issue. Some firms tell me that historic discounts are disappearing as agreements are renegotiated, producing substantial increases in what they are being asked to pay.
Those same firms are extraordinarily difficult for Autodesk’s competitors to penetrate because so much of their production infrastructure is tied to Revit. It is a wonderful position for any incumbent software company to occupy. A customer with no credible alternative has very little negotiating leverage, whatever the reasoning behind individual Autodesk pricing decisions.
Move even one genuine workflow away from Revit and the conversation changes. The firm that has learnt something about the alternatives, discovered what does and doesn’t work and, most importantly, demonstrated that moving is possible, walks into its next renewal able to say so, and Autodesk’s account managers know the difference.
Swapping one dependence for another
BIM 2.0 brings its own risks. Cloud-native BIM can create a more complete dependence on a vendor than a proprietary file format does.
An RVT file can sit on a server you control, long after a subscription ends. You may no longer have a licensed copy of Revit with which to edit it, but the file remains in your possession and can still be inspected using Autodesk’s viewer. With a cloud-native model, continued access depends much more directly on the vendor’s service, commercial terms and export mechanisms.
That matters when the vendor is a startup which may change its pricing, be acquired or fail. Export fidelity to IFC needs testing at scale, offline working cannot be assumed, and getting out may depend on whatever exports and APIs the vendor provides rather than simply taking possession of a file on disk.
So test the exits as hard as the modelling. Ask what comes out, in what format, at what fidelity and what it costs to leave. A tool that removes Revit’s workarounds but replaces a file you possess with a cloud subscription from which you cannot easily escape has not removed the toll. It has moved the tollbooth.
Cloud-native also does not have to mean that every calculation stays in the cloud forever. AI may make powerful local hardware much more relevant again, particularly where cost, latency, privacy and sensitive project data matter.
Motif has thought about this. CTO Brian Mathews told me that although Motif is a cloud application today, it has been architected so that it could run on the desktop. He expects some compute to come back onto local machines as AI becomes a larger part of design. Shared data and collaboration may live in the cloud while geometry, AI and agent compute increasingly happen locally.
Conclusion
Practices need to give BIM 2.0 a chance. Nobody is owed your business simply for turning up, and nobody should rip out Revit next Monday. There is a large distance between doing nothing and betting the practice on somebody else’s Series A.
Buy a few licences, put real people on the software and find a competition, an interior fit-out, an early-stage design project or another workflow where failure isn’t going to bring the practice to its knees. Give the BIM 2.0 developers your difficult models and horrible families. Tell them what is missing, break their software and make them fix the things that stop you using it. New BIM applications do not mature in a development lab. They mature on awkward projects, under impossible standards, with difficult clients and experienced users who know where the bodies are buried.
If the software falls over, you have learned something and so have its developers. If nobody serious tries it because it cannot yet do everything Revit does, firms will keep waiting for mature alternatives while the alternatives wait for the real projects needed to mature.
There is a clock running. Most BIM 2.0 companies are funded by venture capital, while others, such as Qonic, have private backing, but none have unlimited time or money. Investors will eventually want evidence of a market beyond demos, conference applause and enthusiastic early adopters. If customers remain interested in principle but unwilling to put real projects through the software, some of these companies will run out of road before they have had time to build what the industry says it wants.
That would be a particularly stupid outcome for an industry that is extremely good at complaining about the software it has standardised on, but remarkably slow to engage with people trying to write something different. Real engagement gives developers the information they need to improve the software and the traction they need to fund the next stage. If AEC wants better choices, it has to help create them.
What I want to see is several serious software vendors competing for AEC customers again, forced to improve their tools, respond to users and keep moving the technology forward. Competition is good. Some of today’s challengers will disappear, but even forcing the incumbents to compete harder would be progress.
Motif is incomplete and so are its competitors. Some will fail, some may simply turn out not to be very good, and the best may be bought by one of the incumbents, which is how Autodesk acquired Revit in the first place. But there is a limited window in which customers can help turn this burst of BIM development and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into a genuinely more competitive market. If the industry’s response is still ‘come back when you can replace everything we do in Revit’, most of these opportunities will be gone by the time we decide we wanted them, and what remains will be more of the same, at whatever Autodesk decides it costs.
So, get involved while they are still here. And maybe send this article to the board the next time you have to explain why the demands of your current BIM provider are about to blow through the IT budget
BIM 2.0 software links
Arcol
(Website | AEC Magazine articles | NXT BLD presentations)
Hypar
(Website | AEC Magazine articles | NXT BLD presentations)
Motif
(Website | AEC Magazine articles | NXT BLD presentations)
Qonic
(Website | AEC Magazine articles | NXT BLD presentations)
Snaptrude
(Website | AEC Magazine articles | NXT BLD presentations)
NeoBIM
(Website)
