Moving from Archicad to Revit: What the Switch Actually Involves

Archicad is now sold only by subscription. Graphisoft stopped selling new perpetual licences at the end of 2024, closed the last upgrade and conversion offers in 2025 and March 2026, and is servicing the remaining support contracts only to the end of 2026. For a South African practice that has run Archicad on a perpetual licence for ten or fifteen years, that is a decision point whether you wanted one or not: subscribe to Archicad, or use the moment to look at what the rest of your industry is using. This guide is written by Modena Technologies, Africa's only Autodesk Platinum Partner and an Autodesk Authorised Training Centre in Cape Town. We sell Revit, we train people on it, and our consultants have sat beside practices while they moved to it. We would like you to move. We would also rather tell you what the move involves than have you find out on a live project.

The short version. The case for Revit in South Africa is not that it is a better drawing tool than Archicad; it is the ecosystem. Most of the structural and services engineers, contractors and BIM managers you will work with are on Revit and Navisworks, the BIM requirements written into larger tenders assume it, the people you will hire know it, and the AEC Collection puts AutoCAD, Civil 3D and Navisworks next to it. The move is real work: your models do not convert cleanly, your object library has to be rebuilt as families, and a Mac office needs Windows machines. Practices that prepare a template, train a pilot team and finish live projects in Archicad before starting new ones in Revit come out the other side in a few months. Practices that try to convert everything at once do not.

Why practices are asking now

Graphisoft announced its move to subscription in 2024 and has run it down in stages. New perpetual licences were sold until 31 December 2024. Existing perpetual holders could buy additional seats and upgrades until 31 December 2025, and the offers to convert a support contract into an Archicad Collaborate or Studio subscription at the old price closed on 31 March 2026. From 2026 Archicad is available only as a subscription, in three plans: Studio, Collaborate and the newly added Max. Support contracts that were still running are serviced to the end of 2026 and no further. Graphisoft's releases note that timing and conditions vary by region, so check with your Archicad provider what applies to your licence.

The practical effect is that the thing that kept many practices on Archicad, a paid-for licence that did not need renewing, is ending. Whatever you decide, you are paying an annual subscription from here. That removes the main cost argument from the comparison and leaves the better question: which platform connects you to the people you work with, the work you want to win and the staff you want to hire?

The case for moving

Your consultants are on it. In South Africa the structural and services engineers who work in BIM are almost all on Revit, and the contractors who coordinate models do it in Navisworks. Exchanging with them from Archicad works through IFC, which is a translation each way; working with them in Revit is native, with linked models, shared coordinates, cloud co-authoring and clash detection on the same files they use. The coordination problems that cost practices money on site are the ones that live in the gaps between translations.

Your clients and tenders are heading there. There is no national BIM mandate yet, but the momentum is visible, from the 2025 National Construction Summit's call for a National BIM Framework to the City of Cape Town's own BIM and digital-twin work, and the larger private clients and lead consultants who have already moved. Where a BIM deliverable is written into an appointment in South Africa, it is almost always written around Revit and the Autodesk cloud. A Revit practice tenders for that work without a caveat.

Your next hire knows it. Revit is what most South African universities, colleges and training centres teach, and it is what most candidates with BIM experience have used. A practice on Archicad trains every new hire from scratch or fishes in a small pool. A practice on Revit hires from the large one.

The collection comes with it. A Revit subscription today includes Twinmotion for Revit and the Forma design apps; the AEC Collection adds AutoCAD with its toolsets, Civil 3D, Navisworks Manage, 3ds Max, ReCap Pro and more, for about a fifth more than Revit alone. An architectural practice that also does site work, needs full AutoCAD for a client's drawings, or wants to run its own clash detection gets all of that from one subscription. Our collection guide shows the arithmetic.

Loyalty, identity and the decision

Archicad practices are loyal, and the loyalty is earned: the software has been good to them, the team is fluent, and a great deal of work has gone into templates, favourites and object libraries. Over ten or fifteen years the tool becomes part of how a practice describes itself. That is fine, right up to the point where a decision about the next ten years is being made by the people most invested in the last ten.

The test for a business owner is not whether you like Archicad. It is where your consultants, your clients, your tenders and your future staff are going, and whether the practice is choosing its platform or defaulting to it. A subscription decision forced by Graphisoft's timetable is, in that sense, useful: it is a natural moment to make the choice deliberately, with the numbers in front of you, rather than renewing by habit and having the same conversation again in three years with the gap wider.

Not the Revit you remember

Many Archicad users last looked at Revit seriously between about 2012 and 2018, often at a university or on a colleague's screen, and formed a view: slow, Windows-only, ugly, hard to draw in, a struggle to render. Some of that was fair at the time. It is a poor guide to the product on sale in 2026, which has had an annual release every year since.

The things that have changed since then, taking Autodesk's own release notes as the record: native PDF import and export; Dynamo visual programming built in, and running faster in the 2027 release on a rebuilt .NET platform; Twinmotion for Revit included with the subscription for real-time visualisation; cloud worksharing and co-authoring through Autodesk's cloud rather than a server in a cupboard; a rebuilt graphics engine, in tech preview in 2026 and production-ready in 2027, that changes how large models feel to navigate; toposolid site modelling and a direct link to Civil 3D; coordination models and issues from the construction cloud inside the Revit window; carbon analysis on the model's own materials; the Forma site, building and data-management apps included in the Revit subscription from 2027; and an AI assistant, in tech preview, that interrogates model data and builds views and schedules from a sentence. Dark mode arrived too, for those who care.

None of that means Revit now draws the way Archicad draws; it does not, and a fluent Archicad user will miss things for a while. It does mean that the decision should be made against the current product. Do not judge it from memory or from a video. Ask us for a demonstration on your own project type, with your own drawings, and judge that.

Ask for a Revit demonstration on your project type

When to stay on Archicad

We would rather say this than sell a seat that comes back to us at renewal. If your consultant chain is on Archicad and likely to stay there, your clients have never asked for a Revit deliverable and are not going to, your team is fluent and stable, and you have no appetite for a slower first project, then subscribe to Archicad and carry on. The move costs more than the licence, and a practice that makes it for its own sake will resent it. The practices that should move are the ones who recognised themselves in the section before this one.

What actually changes

The two products are built on the same idea, one model from which drawings are produced, and an experienced Archicad user understands Revit's logic within days. What changes is the vocabulary, a few habits and, most of all, the library.

In Archicad	In Revit	What to expect
Storeys	Levels	Direct equivalent; levels also host elements and drive views
Layers and layer combinations	Categories, visibility settings and view templates	The biggest habit change: elements are controlled by what they are, not by which layer you put them on
GDL objects and the object library	Families	Not convertible; families are rebuilt or sourced, and South African content is thin
Attributes, favourites and the template	The project template, with types, styles and view templates	Your standards carry across as a translation, set up once before the first project
Pens and pen sets	Line weights, object styles and view-specific overrides	Graphic standards are rebuilt in the template
Views and layouts, the layout book	Views and sheets, the project browser	Direct equivalent, with views placed on sheets as viewports
Renovation filter	Phasing	Direct equivalent; Graphisoft's own Revit add-in maps one to the other on exchange
Zones	Rooms and areas	Direct equivalent
Teamwork and BIMcloud	Worksharing, with a central model on your server or in the Autodesk cloud	Same purpose, different mechanics; cloud co-authoring with consultants needs the Forma Design Collaboration subscription
Hotlinked modules	Linked Revit models and groups	Equivalent for most uses
Mac or Windows	Windows only	A Mac office changes hardware as well as software; see below

Your models and library: what carries over and what does not

This is where expectations go wrong. An Archicad model can be exported to IFC, and since Archicad 25 it can also be saved directly as a Revit file. Either way, what arrives in Revit is the geometry: walls, slabs, roofs, openings, with their positions and their IFC classification, and simple properties. What does not arrive is what makes a model a working model: the parametric behaviour of objects, the hosting of a window in its wall, the layer-to-category logic, the annotations, dimensions and layouts, the Teamwork structure. A GDL object saved to Revit becomes a fixed family that cannot be edited the way a native one can.

So the rule for a transition is not "convert the models". It is: finish live projects in Archicad, start new projects in Revit, and convert only for reference. A converted model is useful as a background to trace the existing building, or as a linked reference for a project in a later phase; it is not a model to carry on documenting. For the overlap period, Graphisoft's free Revit add-in, IFC Model Exchange with Archicad for Revit, imports IFC2x3 with zones mapped to rooms and renovation status to phasing, and exports back the other way, so an Archicad project with a Revit consultant, or a half-moved practice, can keep exchanging while it finishes.

The object library is the real cost. Fifteen years of GDL doors, windows, sanitaryware and furniture do not become families. A practice moving to Revit needs a working library of twenty or thirty families for the first project, built or adapted to the products it specifies and the way it draws, with more added as projects demand. We build families as a defined piece of work, and the first project tells you which ones you actually need.

Your people and your template

The sequence that works is the one in our AutoCAD to Revit guide, and for an Archicad practice it has one advantage: your people already think in models. Pick a champion, usually the most curious senior technician, and a pilot team of two to four. Set up a Revit template from your Archicad standards before the first project, so the team learns Revit and not Revit plus "why does this look wrong". Train the pilot team on Revit Architecture Fundamentals, three days in Cape Town or live online with SACAP and SAIAT CPD points, and have the champion go on to Advanced within a few months. Give them a small, typical project with a deadline you can move, with someone to call. Let the rest of the practice follow once the template exists and there is an answer in the office.

Expect an experienced Archicad user to be comfortable in the interface within two or three weeks, working without daily help after two or three months, and back to their previous output per person somewhere between three and six months after the first live project starts. Those are our ranges from practices we have supported, and they assume the template and library are ready; they stretch when the team is learning Revit and inventing standards at the same time.

Your hardware

Revit runs on Windows only. For a Windows office this is a check of memory and graphics on the pilot team's machines, which our Revit workstation guide covers. For a Mac office it is a hardware decision alongside the software one, and it should be planned rather than discovered. The practical path is to equip the pilot team first and the rest of the practice as they move, so the hardware spend follows the rollout rather than preceding it; a Revit workstation costs in the region of a Revit seat, and it lasts several subscription terms. We build and stress-test Revit workstations in Cape Town and will spec them for the pilot team as part of the plan.

Which Revit to buy

For a practice, start with full Revit, because the first project with two people on it needs worksharing, and if anyone also drafts in AutoCAD, needs Navisworks or does site work, the AEC Collection costs less than the pieces. For a sole practitioner, the AutoCAD Revit LT Suite is a sensible and inexpensive way in; our Revit LT vs Revit guide covers where it stops. Subscriptions are per named user, so a practice can mix seat types and change them at renewal. Current prices are on the product pages; they move with the exchange rate, so we have not printed them.

What it costs

The licence is the known number. The rest is where the money and the time go: training for the pilot team and later everyone else; a template configured to your standards; a starting library of families to replace the GDL library; support during the first project, measured in hours and days; hardware for a Mac office; and the first project at reduced speed. Practices moving from AutoCAD report the documentation stages of the first Revit project taking a quarter to a half again as long; an Archicad practice, already fluent in modelling, tends to sit at the lower end of that range, with the gap closing on the second project and reversing on the third. The figures depend on your practice, which is what the discovery consultation is for.

How Modena helps

We do this as defined pieces, scoped and quoted before they start. A discovery consultation looks at your consultant chain, your clients' requirements, your library and your team, and tells you whether to move, when, and what the first project should be. From there: Revit Template Configuration and Setup built from your Archicad standards; Revit Family Creation for the library you need to start; the Fundamentals and Advanced courses; BIM consulting and support through the first project; a Revit model health check at the end of it; and workstations if you need them. Because we also sell and support the software, you get one answer on which edition to buy and one number to call.

Talk to us about moving from Archicad See Revit training dates

Frequently asked questions

Can Revit open Archicad files?

Not directly. An Archicad model reaches Revit either as an IFC file, which Revit opens or links, or as a Revit file saved from Archicad 25 or later. Both bring the geometry and classification across; neither brings the parametric objects, hosting, annotations or layouts. Treat a converted model as a reference, not as a working model.

Do we have to convert our existing projects?

No, and you should not try. Finish live projects in Archicad, start new ones in Revit, and convert only what you need as a reference. Keep one or two Archicad subscriptions for the run-off period and for archived projects you may need to reopen.

What happens to our GDL object library?

It stays with Archicad. Revit uses families, and GDL objects are not converted into editable ones. A practice needs a starting library of twenty or thirty families for its first project, built or adapted to the products it specifies, and adds to it as projects demand.

We are a Mac office. Can we run Revit?

Revit runs on Windows only, so a Mac office needs Windows workstations. The sensible way is to equip the pilot team first and the rest of the practice as they move. Our Revit workstation guide covers what Revit needs; we build and spec the machines.

Can we keep working with consultants who are on Archicad?

Yes. IFC works in both directions, and Graphisoft's free Revit add-in handles the exchange, mapping zones to rooms and renovation status to phasing. Most practices find the number of Archicad consultants they deal with is small compared with the Revit ones, which is often part of why they move.

Is Revit still slow and hard to look at?

Judge it on the current release, not on memory. Revit 2027 ships a production-ready rebuilt graphics engine, Dynamo built in, Twinmotion for Revit and the Forma apps included, cloud co-authoring, native PDF, dark mode and an AI assistant in preview. It still does not draw the way Archicad draws, and a fluent Archicad user will miss things for a few weeks. Ask us for a demonstration on your own project type before deciding.

How long until we are as productive as we are now?

Plan on a slower first project, a second close to even and a third that is faster. Most practices are back to their previous output per person within three to six months of the first live project starting, provided the template, library, training and support were in place before it started. Archicad practices tend to sit at the quicker end because the team already thinks in models.

Next step

If your licence decision is due and you recognised your practice in the case for moving, the next step is a conversation, not a purchase order. Contact us with the size of your team, who your consultants and clients are and what your library looks like, and we will tell you whether to move, which edition fits, who should learn first and what a sensible first project looks like. If you want to see the current Revit first, say so and we will show it on your project type.

This guide is part of our software buyer guides, which cover the Autodesk decisions we are asked about most.