Permitting and Review or Dedicated Plan Review Software: Which Do You Need?

In May 2026, Georgia enacted a new permit clock, introducing 45-, 20-, and 14-day review timelines. Chronic housing supply shortages and a surging population have strained builders, so the Georgia legislature hopes a shorter timeline and a statewide dashboard can get development back on track.

Housing shortages are increasingly common across the United States (recent estimates say as high as 4.7M homes); it seems every city faces the same problems: developers are in limbo, and plan reviewers are overloaded.

Today, local governments use software to streamline their permitting process from intake to approval. These same permitting systems offer some lightweight plan review features. Still, as you’ll see below, they pale in comparison to a comprehensive plan review platform that can integrate with your permitting system.

What a Permitting System is Designed to Do

Permitting systems are great for handling the permitting process electronically. That’s useful for the admin aspect of permitting, but it’s not always helpful for the actual plan review portion.

Permitting systems are designed to:

• Facilitate permit submission from applicants
• Follow the permit through stages to approval
• Collect fees for the permit
• Schedule inspections
• Integrate with other government systems

Yes, permitting systems support digital intake and routing, and some offer markup tooling or integrations with markup tools like Bluebeam, but as you’ll see next, they don't cover the specific needs of plan review.

What Plan Review Software Manages That Permitting Systems Leave Out

Permitting systems manage the administrative parts of the process, while plan review software equips plan reviewers to do their jobs well.

Electronic plan review software can transform your review process by:

• Facilitating collaborative review
• Streamlining the feedback process
• Automating busy work with AI

Facilitate Collaborative Review

If you only have a permitting system, you’ll be beholden to the review tools inside it or the markup tools you manage to integrate. If neither solution offers real-time collaboration, then you’ll end up spending hours comparing plan sets marked up by each discipline to reconcile the feedback.

In contrast, plan review software gives you a shared review environment where multiple departments can review the same plan set with comments, markups, and version history in one place.

With e-PlanSoft, it really is the same document – not multiple versions that need to be reconciled later – and every discipline gets a best-in-class markup experience on it. That means disciplines spend less time passing files around and checking whether everyone has the latest version, and more time completing reviews.

Streamline the Feedback Process

Similar to the above, for many permitting systems the feedback process will be manual; it’s up to you to collect comments across disciplines, consolidate them (often into a Word document), and send them to the applicant.

Plan review software fixes this in two ways:

Some platforms like e-PlanSoft offer a built-in standard comment library, allowing you to save comments you use often to reuse later. All of your comments across disciplines are then automatically compiled for you to share directly with the applicant.

You can also compare previous versions to spot the changes made in revisions when someone resubmits. With earlier comments still available for reference, that means you can check whether issues were addressed and focus on what needs another look.

Automate the Busy Work With AI

Most permitting solutions are investing in AI that automates the entire review process. We’re less interested in the concept of AI replacing or completely automating plan review (because let’s face it, it can’t) and more interested in the ways that AI can remove the busywork from the plan review process to speed you up.

That means leveraging AI in areas like:

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.
3. Indexing: Our sheet indexing assistant does the prep work for you by identifying and organizing sheets before the review begins.
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.

The right plan review software, combined with AI, can help you meet tight deadlines.

Signs You Need Dedicated Plan Review Software, Not an All-in-One Solution

What if your permitting system offers some plan review features – isn’t that enough? It might be, until something breaks.

For permitting systems, plan review is often sidelined when it comes to investment and feature development. While you could get decently far using a permitting system and a desktop markup tool, the following are the signs we see that it’s time to make the switch towards a dedicated plan review platform:

• 2+ disciplines are reviewing plans: It’s easy to manage a manual process with one discipline, but if three or four need to review the same plan set, forget about it. When multiple disciplines are trying to get complex approvals done, they end up sending plans around by email, which is the coordination problem a dedicated tool solves.
• You have a new permit clock: Is your city/state updating its SLAs like Georgia, or introducing transparency to the public like in Chicago? Some plan review platforms, like e-PlanSoft, offer time-tracking capabilities so you can demonstrate exactly how long a plan set sits at each stage of the process.
• You’re losing institutional knowledge: A paper-based manual process could be lost entirely if the people who manage it leave without documenting every step. But by modernizing your plan review process with dedicated software, you preserve your processes without relying on any single individual.

Check out the eight signs that your plan review process is broken for more signals that it’s time to make a change.

The Ideal Solution: Plan Review Software Integrated With Your Permitting System

The ideal solution for most local governments is a dedicated plan review platform that integrates directly with your permitting system.

In practice, that looks like:

• Automating intake: When someone submits a permit application with plans attached, those plans should route to reviewers without manual handling, spreadsheets, or email.
• Complete record management: The completed plan set has to live somewhere once review is done. For example, e-PlanSoft has multiple options for where records are stored and managed in the cloud.
• A seamless process for resubmissions: Plans rarely get approved on the first try, so a good integration needs to handle notifications that tell the applicant when to resubmit and automate how resubmissions are handled in the queue.

This is exactly what a modern digital plan review platform like e-PlanSoft was built to do. e-PlanSoft integrates with nine permitting suites, including popular platforms like BS&A, Accela, and Clariti. e-PlanSoft also offers a flexible REST API, so you can build custom connections to meet your needs.

This means you don’t need to rip out your permitting system for better plan review features; just integrate e-PlanSoft into your permitting flow, and it will handle the rest.

What’s the Best Electronic Plan Review Software?

If plan review is starting to feel like an exercise in maintaining your sanity, it’s time to move from a lightweight offshoot of your permitting platform to a dedicated solution.

Now which platform will you pick?

There’s no “one winner” here. The right tool depends on your team size, how many disciplines are in your review process, and whether you need a true enterprise solution or not.

For example, if you need an enterprise solution for plan review, then Avolve may be a good choice. Or if sequential reviews, comment reconciliation, or wrangling large PDFs are common problems, e-PlanSoft is a top contender.

To help you compare your options, we created a tool that will allow you to see how different plan review solutions stack up – ranging from manual PDF management to enterprise software.

See which platform is right for you, and take a step towards bringing your plan review process into the 21st century.