Bluebeam vs. NetDocuments

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

NetDocuments positioned itself to work in the legal industry, and it has done a very good job. It's kept pace with the challenges presented by the law and it's grown in its offerings. Any organization that must balance mobility and security would benefit from the use of NetDocuments as a platform.

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

• File Organization. Netdocuments is a great tool to neatly organize your virtual files and separate them by workspaces (matters). Each workspace contains folders (document types) that can be customized according to users' needs and preference.
• Searching your data base. All the documents and emails saved in Netdocuments are searchable. The search feature works great.
• Cloud based document management system. Simply put, Netdocuments can be accessed from ANY web-enabled device. This is becoming more and more important in the age of satellite offices, working on-the-go, and telecommuting.
• Disaster preparedness. Should something happen to your office, your documents are safe, secure and accessible.
• Seamless integration with Microsoft Applications. Netdocuments provides users with Microsoft applications integrations that can be easily installed on each individual machine.
• Support. There is an extensive on-line help library which provides incredibly helpful articles with step-by-step instructions. If you cannot find solution on-line, telephone support is staffed by courteous and knowledgeable people.
• Security. This is especially important for a law firm. A designated administrator can put in force workspace, folder, document, or profile-based security.

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

• In my opinion, VERY Expensive. You can not find documents without OCR. OCR doubles your storage cost as they save the OCRd document as a second version.
• In my experience, very annoying latency, even when trying to preview documents. As a result, folks in my office often try to save locally as opposed to storing in the cloud.
• I orginally signed up for NDMax. However, it would only process one document at a time. I am not a transactional firm, so, in my opinion, this was essentially worthless.

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

The product is simple to learn and adheres to well-known web user protocols. The NetDocuments team spends a lot of time talking to customers regarding how to improve their interface, and are pretty quick about implementing good ideas. The system is reliable and repeatable, and similar functions are laid out consistently and in formats that users are used to.

Incentivized

NetDocuments is a performant web app. It is reliable and provides all the functionality of a sophisticated document management system. It also can serve, through its APIs, as a base system for other applications, which enhances its value. Other vendors find the company easy to work with, and it consistently seems to be the first to offer new features and technologies to its customers.

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

I've never had to contact support, but I won't give it a ten. We've had a few hiccups along the way, but nothing that couldn't be fixed within 24 hours.

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

WatchDox and WorldDox both provided what looked like similar features but too much of the technical requirements fall on the customer and they, at the time of my evaluation, were not true cloud products. They were client \ server-based product hosted in the cloud. If you do not know the difference, research until you do. iManger is a viable alternative if you are just not able to get the internet speed you need for NetDocuments. But heads up it is not the Swiss Army knife for security features like NetDocuments.

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

• Allowed the elimination of large amounts of in-house storage and the support required to maintain it.
• Eliminated the need for backups and disaster recovery for large amounts of data.
• Enabled secure remote access wherever the Internet is present.
• Provided enhanced security without the necessity of a large number of people and infrastructure.

Incentivized