Bought once, not rented
I estimate structural steel and I have used Revu for years. This is the comparison I would want if I were the one deciding, including the parts that do not go my way.
Download Excalibur View freeSide by side
| Bluebeam Revu | Excalibur View | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Per user, per year | Once per seat |
| Price | $260 to $590 per user per year | Free for one person. $250 per seat for the Office server |
| If you stop paying | It stops | It keeps working, forever, on the version you have |
| Where the drawings sit | Your machines, plus Studio in their cloud | Your machines and your own server |
| Self-hosted server | Studio Enterprise, limited support, 3.2 is the final release | The only way it works |
| Markup format | Standard PDF annotations | Standard PDF annotations |
| Tool chests | .bpx and .btx | Reads .bpx and .btx |
| Source code | Closed | Published, source-available under the Elastic License 2.0 |
| Telemetry | Yes | None. There is no server of mine for it to talk to |
| Mac desktop app | None. Revu for Mac reached End of Life on 28 June 2023 | Yes. One universal build, signed and notarized by Apple |
| iPad | Yes | No |
| Sessions with outside parties | Studio, and everyone in the industry already has it | No equivalent |
| Trade tool chests for steel | Build your own or buy third-party | 1,518 shapes in 25 sets, sold separately |
Bluebeam figures from their pricing page and their Studio Enterprise notice, checked 23 September 2026.
Where Bluebeam is still better
If none of this applies to you, the rest of the page is worth reading. If any of it does, stay where you are.
- Studio Sessions. Everyone in the industry has Revu. When an architect wants to mark up a set with you live, that happens in Studio. I have nothing that replaces it, and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon.
- The iPad. Revu has an iPad app and a browser app. Mine has neither, so if your guys mark up on a tablet in the field, that is a real gap.
- Twenty years of edge cases. Revu has seen every strange PDF a printer has ever produced. Mine has seen a few thousand.
- Quantity Link and the ERP integrations that some offices have spent years building. If yours is one of them, the licence saving is not what the move costs you.
Where I think mine is better
Narrower claims, and each one is checkable.
- You own it. One payment. Updates are a separate, optional $100 per seat per year, and the version you have keeps working if you skip them.
- Nothing leaves the building. The Office server runs on a machine you own. I never receive your drawings, markups or takeoff, and there is nowhere for them to go.
- You can read every line. The app and the server are both published. Your compliance officer can check instead of taking my word, and a shop that is only allowed to run what it compiled itself can compile it.
- It runs natively on a Mac. Bluebeam does not. Revu for Mac reached End of Life on 28 June 2023, the last version was 2.1 from December 2019, and Mac users are pointed at the browser app or the iPad app. Excalibur View is the same desktop program on both, from the same source.
- It was written by an estimator. The shape list is the one I use. The reports are the ones I have to produce. That is a smaller claim than it sounds like, and it is the reason the takeoff works the way it does.
Common questions
Do my existing markups survive?
Yes. Markups are ordinary PDF annotations. A set you marked up in Revu opens with everything in place, and it goes back to Revu or Adobe afterwards without anything being flattened or lost.
Do my tool chests come across?
Yes. It imports .bpx profiles and .btx tool sets with their tools, custom columns and unit weights.
Is the free version limited?
It is the whole desktop app, for one person, with no account and no expiry, on any work you get paid for. What it does not include is the Office server, which is what lets an office share sets and markups.
What happens to Revu 20 at the end of 2026?
It reaches End of Life on 31 December 2026 and loses Studio and API access. Open and Enterprise licences are deactivated entirely. The details, by serial number.
Can I run both?
Yes, and I would. Install this beside Revu and run a real bid through it before you decide anything. They do not interfere with each other.
Is it open source?
No, and I do not call it that. It is source-available under the Elastic License 2.0: read it, change it, build it yourself, but do not resell it as a service. The licence in plain words.
Run it against a real set
Free for one person. No account, no email address, nothing to cancel.