Accela ePermitHub vs Bluebeam Revu vs e-PlanSoft: Which Should You Choose for Plan Review?

Manually managing PDFs, or worse, pen and paper, stopped working for city governments as the pace of plan review has steadily increased in the past decade.

Today’s plan reviewers are expected to keep up with rising construction demands from citizens and politicians alike, and many are being asked to use AI to augment their workflows and speed up.

As you research electronic plan review solutions, you’ll come across three popular options: Accela ePermitHub, Bluebeam Revu, and e-PlanSoft. As you’ll see below, the choice between these isn’t exactly black and white. We’ll show where each platform excels so you can make the right choice.

What are Accela, Bluebeam Revu, and e-PlanSoft?

Broadly speaking, each platform offers an electronic plan review solution. Under the hood, though, their approaches differ significantly.

Accela

Of the three platforms, Accela is by far the most comprehensive for city management and local government needs. Accela bills itself as an end-to-end platform for permitting, licensing, asset management, and more. A quick review of the scope of its offerings – which includes everything from short-term rentals to plan review – confirms that.

Accela’s plan review product, ePermitHub, integrates with Accela’s Civic Platform, which allows agencies to digitally manage their permitting and review processes.

Bluebeam Revu

Bluebeam Revu is primarily marketed and sold for construction, so if you need a PDF markup tool designed for construction plan sets, then Revu is a solid choice. Bluebeam offers four pricing tiers: Basics, Core, Complete, and Max.

Basics includes Bluebeam Revu and Bluebeam Cloud, with PDF creation and markup plus basic length and area measurement tools. Meanwhile, Core includes more advanced measurement capabilities and CAD workflows, and the highest tier, Max, offers advanced features, including Bluebeam’s AI features like automated checks for plan errors and LLM integrations that can edit documents and collect metadata.

e-PlanSoft

Of the three options, e-PlanSoft is the only dedicated plan review solution.

Like Bluebeam, e-PlanSoft lets you review and comment on plan sets in a markup-like experience, but it is much more than just a markup tool.

e-PlanSoft was built for collaborative, cloud-based review. That means that everyone reviews and comments on the same plan set in real time – not different versions that are reconciled and compiled later. While e-PlanSoft doesn't offer native permitting functionality like Accela, it integrates with 8+ permitting partners and offers a flexible API for custom integrations, so you can slot it right into your permitting suite.

e-PlanSoft also offers time-saving AI features that can help flag errors before the review begins, check versions on resubmission, and help reviewers turn findings into actionable feedback for applicants.

How does Bluebeam Revu compare to e-PlanSoft?

On the surface, Bluebeam Revu and e-PlanSoft seem to fill a similar niche: electronic plan review markup. A closer look, though, reveals significant differences.

For one, Bluebeam Revu is a desktop markup tool, while e-PlanSoft is a comprehensive platform for plan review. Both platforms offer the following features:

• An open API to connect to your permitting software.
• Review many documents across different projects simultaneously.
• Reviewer comments.
• Side-by-side comparisons across different documents.
• Secure interactions between contributors/collaborators and project team members.
• Cloud support.

But as a plan review platform, only e-PlanSoft gives you advanced plan review features like:

• A world-class markup tool with dark mode, snap-to-measure, and intuitive measurements.
• Real-time collaboration – every discipline reviews and marks up the same plan set, not a copy that needs to be reconciled later. In comparison, while Bluebeam Studio Sessions offer real-time capabilities, the desktop-based Revu product does not.
• An intake portal for applicants that not only gets the project into the queue, but includes automated checks for "review readiness" and fixes issues (like unflattened PDFs) if needed.
• Status checks and updates to see where plans sit in the review process
• Comment reconciliation from across disciplines into a corrections list for applicants
• A database to write and store pre-written standard comments, allowing you to re-use your most frequently-used comments across plan sets
• Unlimited online document storage (Bluebeam Studio also includes this, but you can only join Studio sessions and not create them with a Basics subscription)

Here’s a quick breakdown by use case to help you decide when Bluebeam makes sense versus e-PlanSoft.

How does Accela ePermitHub compare to e-PlanSoft?

How about the other side of the spectrum? Accela is an all-in-one permitting and plan review solution within a broader suite of products for local governments. In contrast, e-PlanSoft does only plan review.

Accela and e-PlanSoft’s plan review offerings both include:

• Configurable fields and workflows
• Native support for comments
• A PDF-like markup interface to review plans
• A self-service portal for intake
• AI-powered features to augment plan review

The key difference is that, for Accela, plan review is one piece of a larger product, while for e-PlanSoft, plan review is our only focus.

All-in-one solutions can be convenient, but we see two risks. First, they lock you into one plan review and permitting solution, which raises switching costs. More than that, plan review will always be only a fraction of their focus. Larger platforms tend to focus more on being a system of record than offering a best-in-class markup experience – which is something that matters when you’re in the weeds of plan review.

Here’s a quick breakdown by use case to help you decide when Accela makes sense versus e-PlanSoft.

Why Cities Trust e-PlanSoft for Modern Electronic Plan Review

Cities and local governments looking to bring their plan review process into the 21st century trust e-PlanSoft for the following reasons:

• Every department works from the same plan set
• AI that leans on your judgment, not replaces it
• Eliminate email and duplicate work

Every Department Works From the Same Plan Set

Plan review should be collaborative, but traditional methods treat it like anything but. We often speak to governments that wade their way through a mess of paperwork after each discipline reviews and comments on copies of the same plan set.

With e-PlanSoft, you get a shared review environment that lets multiple disciplines review the same plan set at the same time, with comments, markups, and version history in one place. Unlike other software platforms that create multiple files behind the scenes and reconcile them with technical wizardry, e-PlanSoft keeps everything in a single file. This saves you time, reduces the room for error, ensures that everyone has the latest version, and gives you more time to complete reviews.

AI That Leans on Your Judgment

The need for human expertise and judgment in plan review isn’t going anywhere. We firmly believe that, which is why we’re building AI that saves you time where you lose it most while preserving your judgment where it matters most.

Many new upstarts are offering AI-powered plan review to automate the entire process. Instead, we’re focusing on four key areas where plan reviewers lose the most time:

1. Intake: An AI assistant that cleans up submissions, identifies obvious gaps, and flags predictable issues early so you can hit the ground running with a new plan set.
2. Review: Automatically spot potential code issues, but lean on your comments to limit what the AI can suggest. That way, a human always sees why something is recommended and decides whether to apply the comment. The added bonus here is that the AI will only make recommendations based on what your team feeds it.
3. Indexing: Our sheet indexing assistant is focused on the repetitive work of identifying and organizing sheets.
4. Feedback: Finding an issue is only part of the work. Applicants also need to understand what requires attention. Our feedback assistant helps reviewers prepare clearer comments.

AI that tries to automate every facet of plan review is liable to make mistakes, which slows you down and forces you to babysit a tool and do double work. We believe in AI that speeds you up where it’s needed so you can focus on your most important work.

Eliminate Email and Duplicate Work

Who has time (or computing power) to email massive PDFs back and forth?

e-PlanSoft integrates directly with your permitting platform to bridge the gap between disciplines by moving documents and review information between systems, reducing manual handoffs and keeping the process moving.

That’s not the only way e-PlanSoft removes tedious busywork, though. We also offer other time-saving features, like a built-in standard comment library that lets you reuse common comments across documents instead of searching past plan sets to copy and paste them.

Looking for Collaborative, Cloud-Based Plan Review? Try e-PlanSoft

Between Accela, Bluebeam, and e-PlanSoft, you have three excellent choices to support your plan review and permitting process.

If you need a simple desktop markup tool, Bluebeam is a great choice. If you want an all-in-one permitting and plan review suite, Accela is the right option.

But if sequential reviews, comment reconciliation, or wrangling large PDFs are common problems, a modern, collaborative plan review platform like e-PlanSoft may make the most sense.

By taking the manual work of copying, routing, and consolidating documents off your plate, e-PlanSoft lets your whole team review the same plan set at once, so you can focus on compliance, safety, and staying a step ahead of your queue.

Click the button below to see e-PlanSoft for yourself.

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