Moving from AutoCAD to Revit: What the Switch Actually Involves
Most of what is written about moving from AutoCAD to Revit is either Autodesk marketing or a training company's sales page. This guide is written by Modena Technologies, Africa's only Autodesk Platinum Partner and an Autodesk Authorised Training Centre in Cape Town. We sell both products, we train people on both, and our consultants have sat beside practices in the Western, Eastern and Northern Cape while they made the switch. We have seen it go well and we have seen it go badly, and the difference is rarely the software.
The short version is this. Moving to Revit is a change in how your practice works, not a change of drawing tool. The licence is the smallest part of what it costs; the real cost is the time your team spends being slower on the first project. The practices that do it well prepare three things before they start, a template, trained people and a pilot project with a forgiving deadline, and they accept a slower first job in exchange for a faster third one. The practices that struggle buy the licences, send everyone on a course and then try to use Revit like AutoCAD with a deadline on top.
In this guide
Should you switch at all? · What actually changes · Revit LT, Revit or the AEC Collection · Your people · Your template and content · Your first project · Your hardware · What it costs · How Modena helps · FAQ
Should you switch at all?
Not every practice should, and it is worth being clear about that before spending anything. The signals that say yes are practical rather than philosophical. Clients or lead consultants are asking for models, or for drawings coordinated from one. The same design change is being drawn three or four times across plans, sections, elevations and schedules, and the versions do not always agree. Coordination errors are reaching site. You are competing for work where a BIM deliverable is a condition of appointment. Or you want to grow output without growing headcount in proportion, which is what a coordinated model does for documentation.
The signals that say not yet are just as real. If your work is purely 2D and will stay that way, for example shopfitting layouts, small alterations or signage, AutoCAD remains the right tool and nothing in this guide should push you off it. If nobody you collaborate with is on BIM and nobody is likely to be, the coordination benefit shrinks. And if the practice is winding down or the principal is a few years from retirement, the payback period may simply be too long.
The South African context is worth a paragraph. There is no national BIM mandate today. There is visible momentum: the 2025 National Construction Summit declaration included a National BIM Framework among its goals, the CIDB has been named as the body best placed to drive adoption through contractor grading, and the City of Cape Town already uses BIM and digital twins on its own assets. Private adoption is being pulled along by international clients, by complex projects and by lead consultants who have already moved. Our reading is that the direction is settled and the timing is yours. The practices that move while it is still a choice get to do it on a small project of their own choosing rather than on a large one with a client watching.
What actually changes when you move to Revit
In AutoCAD you draw lines, arcs and text that represent a building, and your skill is in making those drawings fast and consistent. In Revit you build the building once, as walls, floors, roofs, doors, windows and stairs with real dimensions and real relationships, and the plans, sections, elevations and schedules are views of that one model. Move a window and every drawing that shows it updates. Add a door and the door schedule counts it. That is the whole idea, and everything else about the transition follows from it.
What you lose, at least at first, is the speed of a practised hand and the freedom to fudge. An experienced AutoCAD technician can draw almost anything quickly and can make a drawing say what the deadline needs it to say. Revit will not let you do that. If the section does not agree with the plan it is because the model is wrong, and you fix the model. In the first weeks that feels like the software fighting you. It is in fact the software doing its job, and it is why the drawings stop disagreeing with each other later.
What you gain is coordinated documentation, schedules that produce themselves, three-dimensional views for the client without a separate exercise, far faster revisions once the model exists, and a model that structural and services engineers can work with directly. For a practice that bills on documentation, the time saved on revisions and coordination is where the return comes from.
The single most common trap is an experienced AutoCAD user trying to make Revit behave like AutoCAD: drawing in 2D detail lines instead of modelling, linking old DWG files in as a crutch, and ignoring the warnings Revit raises. It produces a model that looks like a set of drawings but behaves like none of the above. The practices that struggle longest are almost always doing this.
Which Revit: Revit LT, Revit or the AEC Collection
Autodesk sells Revit three ways and the choice matters more than the price difference suggests. Revit LT comes bundled with AutoCAD LT as the AutoCAD Revit LT Suite, and it is a real Revit: the same model, the same views and schedules, the same files. What it leaves out is everything to do with working together. Revit on its own is the full product. The Architecture, Engineering and Construction Collection includes Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Navisworks Manage and more, for roughly a fifth more than Revit alone.
| AutoCAD Revit LT Suite | Revit | AEC Collection | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who it suits | A sole practitioner or small practice where one person works on a model at a time | Any practice where two or more people work in one model, or that coordinates consultants' models | Practices that also need AutoCAD, Navisworks, Civil 3D or 3ds Max alongside Revit |
| Several people in one model (worksharing) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Point clouds from laser scanning | No | Yes | Yes |
| Add-ins and Dynamo automation | No | Yes | Yes |
| Structural and MEP modelling tools | Very limited | Yes | Yes |
| Rendering inside the product | No, cloud rendering only | Yes | Yes |
| IFC export for open BIM exchange | No | Yes | Yes |
| Includes AutoCAD | AutoCAD LT | No | Yes, full AutoCAD, plus Civil 3D, Navisworks Manage and others |
| Relative cost per seat per year | About a quarter of Revit | Baseline | About 1.2 times Revit |
Our advice is simple. If you are one person, or two people who will never need to be in the same model at the same time, Revit LT is a sensible and inexpensive way in, and you can move up later without losing anything. If you are a practice, start with full Revit, because the first time two people need to work on one project you will otherwise be buying again. If you also keep AutoCAD for existing work, or you need Navisworks or Civil 3D, the AEC Collection costs less than the pieces and settles the question. Current prices and subscription terms are on the product pages; they change with the exchange rate, so we have not printed them here. For the full arithmetic on the collection against single licences, and how to mix seat types across a team, see our AEC Collection vs individual licences guide; for the 2D side of the practice, our AutoCAD vs AutoCAD LT guide covers when LT is enough.
Your people: who learns first, and how long it takes
Do not train everyone at once. It feels decisive and it is the most expensive way to do it, because people trained months before they use the software forget most of it. Pick a champion, usually the most curious senior technician rather than the most senior person, and a pilot team of two to four. Train them, give them the first project, and let the rest of the practice follow once the template exists and there is someone in the office who can answer questions.
Formal training gets people through the interface and the core of modelling and documentation in days. Our Revit Architecture Fundamentals course is three days, runs in person in Cape Town and live online at the same time, and earns SACAP and SAIAT CPD points; there is an on-demand version for people who prefer to learn at their own pace or cannot spare three consecutive days. The champion should go on to Revit Architecture Advanced within a few months, because that is where families, worksharing and the setup decisions are taught. Structural and services practices follow the same path with the Revit Structure and Revit MEP courses.
Competence, as opposed to familiarity, comes from the first project with support available. Realistic expectations for an experienced AutoCAD technician: comfortable in the interface within two or three weeks, working on a live project without daily help after two to three months, and back to previous output per person somewhere between three and six months after the first live project starts. Those ranges assume the template and content are ready before the project begins. They stretch considerably when the team is learning Revit and inventing standards at the same time.
Your template and content: set up before the first project, not during it
The template is the single biggest accelerator in a Revit transition and the step most often skipped. A Revit template carries your title blocks, line weights, text and dimension styles, sheet and view naming, project browser organisation, default views and schedules, and the settings that make a drawing look like it came from your office. Your AutoCAD standards do carry across, as a translation rather than a copy, and setting them up once before the first project means the team learns Revit rather than Revit plus "why does this look wrong".
Content is the other half. Revit families are the doors, windows, sanitaryware, furniture, structural members and detail components you place repeatedly. South African manufacturer content is thin compared with Europe and the United States, so most practices here need a small working library built or adapted for the way they draw and the products they specify, with more added as projects demand. A practice that starts its first project with a configured template and twenty or thirty well-made families moves at a completely different pace from one downloading content from the internet as it goes.
We configure templates and build families as defined pieces of work: see Revit Template Configuration and Setup and Revit Family Creation. Both are scoped and quoted before we start, so you know what you are getting and what it costs.
Your first project
Choose the pilot carefully. It should be small, typical of the work you do most, and have a deadline you can move. A house, a small commercial alteration or an internal fit-out is ideal; a competition entry or a hospital is not. Tell the client you are changing software. Most are supportive, and the honesty buys you the slack you will need.
Then hold to a few rules. Model the things that drive the drawings, which means walls, floors, roofs, openings, stairs and structure, and do not under-model them to save time; it costs more later when the drawings stop agreeing. Do not link your old DWG details in as a crutch for the parts you have not learnt yet; learn to detail in Revit, so the whole set lives in one place. Decide in advance which drawings live in AutoCAD and which in Revit, and keep AutoCAD for the jobs that were already under way rather than for parts of the new one. And set aside half an hour a week to clean the model: purge unused families and views, resolve warnings, and check file size. It is the cheapest maintenance you will ever do.
Support during the pilot is what separates a slow first project from an abandoned one. Having someone to call when the stair will not cut properly or the schedule shows the wrong count saves hours each time, and it is how the team learns the habits that matter. We provide that as BIM consulting and support during the project, and a Revit model health check at the end of it tells you what the team got right, what to fix in the template, and what to teach before the second project.
Your hardware
Revit asks more of a computer than AutoCAD does, in particular more memory and more graphics memory, and most machines bought for AutoCAD fall short on one or both. Before the first project, check the machines the pilot team will use. Our Revit workstation guide sets out Autodesk's requirements, the thresholds we specify to and how to check your current machine, so we will not repeat it here.
What the switch costs
Practices tend to budget for the licence and are surprised by the rest. The licence step from AutoCAD to Revit, or to the AEC Collection, is real but it is a known number on a product page. The other items are where the money and the time actually go, and they are worth listing even without figures, because the figures depend entirely on your practice.
Training for the pilot team, and later for everyone else. A template configured to your standards, and a starting library of families. Support during the first project, measured in hours or days rather than weeks. Hardware for the people who need it, usually not the whole office at once. And the cost nobody puts on the spreadsheet: the first project at reduced speed. Practices typically report the documentation stages of the first Revit project taking somewhere between a quarter and a half again as long as they would have in AutoCAD, with the gap closing on the second project and reversing on the third. That lost time is the real price of the transition, and almost everything in this guide is about making it smaller.
What moves the number is mostly within your control: how many people move at once, whether the template and content exist before the first project, whether the pilot is small and forgiving, and whether there is someone to call. A practice that gets those four things right spends less in total than one that buys licences for everyone and works it out on a live deadline, even though the second practice appears to have spent less at the start.
How Modena helps practices make the move
Everything above is work we do for practices in the Western, Eastern and Northern Cape, and we do it as defined pieces rather than open-ended consulting. It usually starts with a discovery consultation to understand how you work now, what your clients are asking for and which of your people should go first. From there we configure a template to your standards and build the families you need to start, train the pilot team on the Fundamentals course, support them through the first project, and run a model health check at the end of it. Each piece is scoped and quoted before it starts.
Steps 2 to 4 happen before the first project starts. In blue: the Modena service that supports each step.
-
1Decide
Should you switch at all, and when?
Discovery consultation -
2Champion and pilot team
Two to four people, not everyone
You choose; we help you pick -
3Template and content
Your standards, your families
Template Configuration, Family Creation -
4Training
Fundamentals for the pilot team
Revit Fundamentals course -
5First project, supported
Small, typical, forgiving deadline
BIM consulting hours -
6Health check
What to fix, what to teach next
Revit Model Health Check -
7Roll out
The rest of the practice follows
Advanced course, more training
Because we are also the people who sell and support the software, you get one answer on which edition to buy, one place to call when something does not work, and a team whose consultants teach Revit for a living and use it on real projects, including our own scan-to-BIM work. If you would rather talk it through before deciding anything, that is what the discovery consultation is for.
Talk to us about moving to Revit See Revit training dates
Frequently asked questions
Is Revit hard to learn after years of AutoCAD?
The buttons are not the hard part. Most experienced AutoCAD users are comfortable in the Revit interface within a few weeks. The hard part is the change in thinking: you stop drawing lines that represent a building and start building the building once, then letting Revit produce the drawings. People who accept that early learn quickly; people who try to make Revit behave like AutoCAD struggle for months.
Can we keep using AutoCAD alongside Revit?
Yes, and most practices do for a while. The risk is maintaining two sets of drawings for the same project. Decide before the first Revit project which drawings live in which tool, and keep AutoCAD for the jobs that were already under way rather than for parts of new ones. The AEC Collection includes both, so the licence need not force the choice.
Do we need Revit LT or full Revit?
Revit LT suits a sole practitioner or a small practice working alone on a model. Full Revit is the right choice as soon as two people need to work in the same model, as soon as you receive point clouds or consultants' models you need to coordinate properly, or as soon as you want add-ins, Dynamo or in-product rendering. Practices that choose LT to save money and then need any of those end up buying twice.
How long until we are as fast as we are now in AutoCAD?
Plan on the first project taking noticeably longer, the second being close to even and the third being faster. In calendar terms most practices are back to their previous output per person within three to six months of starting the first live project, provided the template, training and support were in place before it started. Without those, it takes longer and some practices never get there.
Do we have to model everything in 3D?
No. Revit models what matters for coordination and documentation and draws the rest as 2D detail, the same way a good set of drawings always has. The mistake is under-modelling the things that drive the drawings, such as walls, floors, roofs, openings and stairs, because the drawings then stop agreeing with each other and you lose the main benefit.
Will our consultants need Revit too?
Not necessarily. You can export DWG, PDF and IFC for consultants on other tools, and you can link their DWG files into your model as background. The real gains in coordination come when the structural and services engineers work in Revit as well, which is increasingly the case on larger projects in South Africa, but your move does not depend on theirs.
Can we reuse our AutoCAD title blocks, details and standards?
Mostly, yes, but as a translation rather than a copy. Title blocks, line weights, text and dimension styles, sheet numbering and view naming all have a place in a Revit template and are set up once. Your 2D detail library can be imported, although you will get more value from redrawing the details you use most as Revit detail components over time.
Is BIM compulsory in South Africa?
Not yet. There is no national BIM mandate, although the construction industry bodies are moving towards a national framework and public clients such as the City of Cape Town already use BIM on their own assets. In practice the requirement comes from clients and lead consultants on individual projects, and it is becoming more common on larger commercial, institutional and international work.
Next step
If you recognise your practice in the first half of this guide, the next step is a conversation rather than a purchase order. Contact us with the size of your team, the kind of work you do and what your clients are asking for, and we will tell you which edition fits, who should learn first, and what a sensible first project looks like for you.
