Bluebeam vs. eSUB Construction Software

As stated before, the mobile application is a great companion to the desktop version. Either one works great in viewing, editing and saving documents. While the measurement tool is handy to have, we have found the precision to be lacking when measuring scaled drawings (construction design drawings). While it is a good rough place to start for measurements, we wouldn't recommend relying on the precision of the measurements taken on something with a very large scale.

Incentivized

As a subcontractor - yes (overheads are a big deal, this can help manage it by being simple and productive) As a general contractor - no (I think there are more things a GC would need at their disposal) If your whole company is on board it can be a powerful tool, but everyone -even site workers, need to be 100% on-board. It can't do what it's supposed to do if only some are using it.

Incentivized

• Overlaying pdf drawings to identify changes made by architects.
• Scaling dimensions when the architect has not provided required dimensions to proceed with work in the field.
• Hyperlinking construction documents with required information makes it much easier to look through multiple sheets in less time.

Incentivized

• It is built with subcontractors in mind. There are many PM software available but this one aims at the commercial subcontractor.
• It does a great job covering the basics of typical commercial work. There are areas that allow you to customize such as adding reservations of rights to documents.
• It can integrate with Microsoft quite a bit, we use this in our work every day and being able to export or sync data/calendars has been helpful.

Incentivized

• If you have several tabs open and you try to drag one out for a side by side view then you do not have all the modification options and you have to combine them back together.
• There is a lag time when hitting the print option.
• There is also a lag time when opening files, sometimes I think the window is frozen.
• I wish the basic version also had basic file editing, as in editing a document as Adobe does.

Incentivized

• Purchase order integration with Quickbooks
• keeping track of progress billing or partial billing of PO's and sub vendors
• time cards UI is really wonky for daily reports.

Incentivized

Bluebeam is a powerful PDF viewer and mark-up tool. We are more familiar with it than Adobe Acrobat Pro or other viewers, and it has more features geared towards construction document managers than Acrobat Pro does.

Incentivized

I'm constantly finding that Bluebeam Revu does more than I knew it could. And when I find something that it can't do, I've found that Bluebeam truly listens to its user base and will work to incorporate any good suggestion when feasible.

Incentivized

Its hard for me to give a rating on this one as we rarely have to use the support feature for Bluebeam. However, when we have used it, they have been ultra supportive in helping us get exactly what we needed. I know another engineer was trying to figure out a feature and the rep gave a detailed tutorial on how to complete the task

Incentivized

It has been helpful whenever I've called. They have been able to walk me through solutions and even direct me to the right answer. There was only 1hr difference between time zones so this was manageable. If we experienced bugs, their IT department was helpful at remedying and they were always rolling out updates.

Incentivized

Bluebeam is a diverse program with many functions and tools, whereas competitive programs only specialize in one or few tasks. Although there are many tools within the program, users can still quickly learn how to use the program to best fit their needs. There is always a help tab for any assistance needed.

Incentivized

eSUB is not even close when it comes to the offerings that the others have. eSUB is a happy medium for the functionality it provides and is at an affordable price point that it doesn't break the bank. Other solutions are a lot more integrated into the company processes and procedures, which means more upfront investment to get the platform to go live. eSUB's simplicity makes it easier to roll out because it doesn't integrate with as many aspects of the business.

Incentivized

• A major positive aspect is being able to take your computer home without taking the entire set of paper drawings. They have made it so easy to navigate a set of drawings that I can work at home using only the digital drawings.
• Collaboration with owners and architects has been a great feature. Setting up a Bluebeam studio and having everyone get in and mark things up, then having the architect be able to go in and see what markups have been added, has made the constructability review process much much better.
• Even when not working on drawings, Bluebeam is a very good tool for working with standard PDF documents. The markup tools are very easy to use.
• The negative aspect is the takeoff function because some people would like estimators to use the Bluebeam takeoff because it would make their job easier down the road; however, the actual act of doing a full scale takeoff in Bluebeam would require much more time.

Incentivized

• It has cut down the time to do payroll, time tracking on our major projects

Incentivized