Ready to bring plan review into the 21st century?
We’re hearing that more often on calls as the pace demanded of plan review seems to increase every year while capacity does not.
Whether you’ve hit your limit managing plan review on PDFs because five different departments need to review everything in sequential order or you’ve been dangerously close to missing more deadlines than you care to admit, you’re not alone.
The solution is cloud-based plan review software that allows you to upload, comment on, and review plans down to the centimeter. The problem is that every plan review vendor makes the same claims: They're easy to use, fast to implement, and will be loved by your team.
Let’s peel back those claims with an honest assessment of what to look for and which vendors excel by use case.
Plan review needs have evolved beyond what printed paper, let alone PDFs, can support. Politicians are under pressure to spur development, submissions are mounting, and headcount isn't always increasing enough to keep up.
Plan review software can help by augmenting what you can do while removing the common bottlenecks that slow you down.
Here’s how:
Plan review should be collaborative, but traditional methods treat it like anything but.
When each department maintains its own copies, someone has to reconcile the files and feedback. Plan review software gives you a shared review environment that lets multiple departments review the same plan set at the same time, with comments, markups, and version history in one place.
That means teams spend less time passing files around and checking whether everyone has the latest version, and more time completing reviews.
You’re likely flagging the same issues across multiple projects.
Plan review software can provide a built-in standard comment library, letting you apply and adapt those comments directly on the plans without searching a separate document and copying text between screens. You can then compile comments into a correction letter, reducing the work of assembling feedback for the applicant.
A resubmission shouldn’t mean hunting through an entire plan set to find revisions. If you manage plan review manually, it’s almost always the case.
Overlay and comparison tools help you spot differences between versions, while sheet mapping matches revised sheets to the previous submission. With earlier comments available for reference, reviewers can check whether issues were addressed and focus on what needs another look.
Uploading massive PDFs, emailing back and forth, losing a thread from a week ago – these are all solved problems with plan review software.
Plan review software that integrates with your permitting platform can help you bridge disconnects between departments by moving documents and review information between systems, reducing manual handoffs and keeping the process moving.
For governments that offer an expedited review process or face penalties for missed SLAs, accurate time-tracking is a must.
You won’t get that with manual plan review (unless you are diligent about keeping a stopwatch in your back pocket), but plan review software can bake this functionality in. With the right software platform, you can audit how long it takes to review a plan set and where the bottlenecks are in your process down to the second.
In short, modern plan review software turns segmented, time-wasting workflows into a streamlined process that keeps a human in the loop where it matters most.
Despite what many marketing pieces say, no one-size-fits-all solution exists. Instead, we think that there’s a best tool for a specific situation and category:
Some plan review platforms come bundled into a larger permitting suite, so you only need to purchase, implement, and onboard onto one platform.
If that’s a priority, then the most common ones that come up are:
Each is a solid solution for coordinating the entire permitting and plan review process.
But all-in-one solutions have two downsides worth noting: You’re locked into a permitting and plan review solution, which raises switching costs, and plan review will always be only a fraction of their focus.
When evaluating vendors, ask what percentage of the roadmap is dedicated to plan review versus other parts of the permitting suite.
For plan review especially, we recommend evaluating platforms based on their markup capabilities; larger platforms may focus more on being a system of record than a markup tool, which could force you to add a separate markup solution.
If you want to avoid vendor lock-in, you could choose a dedicated plan review solution that integrates with your permitting system.
Avolve is a great enterprise option with ProjectDox for larger cities and DigEplan as a mid-market solution, but another dedicated (and non-enterprise) option to consider is e-PlanSoft.
E-PlanSoft is a cloud-based platform for collaborative plan review. Collaborative is the key word there; with e-PlanSoft, every department can review, mark up, and comment on the same document in real time. Other platforms may appear collaborative, but they’re making copies of the same document behind the scenes. In contrast, with e-PlanSoft, there’s no need to reconcile multiple file versions back into one.
Unlike permitting suites, plan review is all e-PlanSoft does, freeing our team up to focus on plan examiners' needs rather than juggling priorities. It also lets us build a world-class markup tool with dark and light mode, snap-to-measure, intuitive measurements, and truly collaborative review, so all members of your team across departments can mark up the same plan set with clearly annotated comments at the same time, without file management or access issues.
If you have an existing permitting suite, e-PlanSoft can integrate with it; we integrate with other permitting systems, including Accela, Clariti, BS&A, SmartGov, AMANDA, Central Square, and more. You can review our full list of permitting partners here.
If you ever have a question, our support team is ready to help. Our support team is available from 5:00 am to 6:00 pm (Pacific time), Monday through Friday, except holidays. They also work alongside our product and engineering teams to ensure your questions are answered, and feedback is actioned.
Looking for an Adobe-like markup tool? It’s a natural transition from spending your time in PDFs, and there’s no better markup tool than 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 offerings for AI-powered review.
While markup tools can offer an excellent PDF-like review experience, they can lack some of the more powerful features you’ll find in dedicated plan review software like:
How about large cities or municipalities that need enterprise software? For that, Avolve ProjectDox and DigEplan are often a top choice.
Both are individual products in Avolve’s suite of offerings for governments and municipalities, backed by Avolve’s enterprise pedigree. One thing to watch out for is that enterprise sophistication can bring complexity. If you’re moving from manual methods to cloud-based software for the very first time, you may find yourself facing a steep learning curve, so make sure to get adequate training on the software if you go this route.
For departments that review plans sequentially, sending the same PDF to fire, electrical, and plumbing only to end up with a disorganized mess of comments to sift through, modern, collaborative plan review software is a must.
Of all the platforms above, e-PlanSoft was built for this.
e-PlanSoft was designed from the ground up for collaborative plan review. That means every department looks at and marks up the same plan set, not copies that get reconciled later. You can even set department-level roles to manage access so that each team only sees the review that belongs to them. And when you’re done with your comments, they’ll be added to the applicant’s corrections list automatically without you having to lift a finger.
If you feel like a bottleneck in the plan review process, or overwhelmed by submission volume, then collaborative plan review software is often the answer.
We’ve covered the above choices at a high level, so let’s get tactical. Below is a quick breakdown of the platforms we mentioned above and how they compare:
| Capability |
PDF Markup Tools
GENERAL PURPOSE |
All-in-One Permitting
PERMITTING SUITE |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Built specifically for plan review | ✓ | — | — |
| Configurable fields & workflows | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Reviewer comments & corrections lists | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Real-time, shared-document collaboration | ✓ | — | — |
| Familiar PDF-style markup | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Self-service intake portal | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| AI-assisted plan review | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Note: Capabilities vary by vendor and product tier. This table reflects common functionality found in each category.
If plan review is starting to feel like an exercise in maintaining your sanity, then it’s time to make the jump from PDF-based plan review to dedicated software.
There's no universal winner here; the right tool depends on how your team works. If you’re committed to having one permitting suite, an all-in-one platform makes sense. If you live in PDFs all day, a markup tool will feel familiar.
But if sequential reviews, comment reconciliation, or wrangling large PDFs are common problems, a modern, collaborative plan review platform could be your best option. Of the platforms on this list, e-PlanSoft is the only one built specifically for collaborative review.
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.
Interested in seeing how e-Plansoft works? Get in touch today. We'd love to show you how we can help modernize your plan review process.