How to Collaborate with Revit in 2025: A Practical Guide
Revit collaboration isn’t as seamless as many teams hope—especially when working remotely or across offices. This guide explores the evolving landscape of Revit worksharing and dives into modern solutions that promise to fix long-standing pain points. If you're navigating slow syncs, file issues, or just trying to get your team on the same page, this is one read you don’t want to skip.
Have you ever struggled with collaboration in Revit? Are you unsure how to share Revit files securely? Or have you had difficulties syncing up Revit file changes with your colleagues?
As powerful as this BIM application is, it’s not always straightforward to work seamlessly with coworkers, customers or external contractors when using Revit.
But collaboration in Revit is possible. In this article, you will learn about:
- The problem with traditional Revit collaboration methods
- How Common Data Environments (CDEs) enable Revit collaboration—what they’re good at, and where they fall short.
- Problems with Revit collaboration in the cloud
- A practical solution for the number one problem most teams still face, even after choosing a CDE.
The traditional approach to Revit collaboration
Traditionally, when teams wanted to collaborate in Revit, they placed a central Revit file on a local file server. This worked well—so long as everyone was in the same office.
But as more and more people work remotely or in multiple offices, collaboration in Revit becomes much harder. Users encounter several common problems:
- Slow VPN performance
- Syncing issues
- File corruption risks
- No version control
And you miss out on modern collaboration features such as permissions, issue tracking, and backups.
A CDE lets you use Revit to collaborate
A Common Data Environment (CDE) is a central digital hub used to store, manage, and share project information across teams. In the context of Revit, CDEs streamline collaboration, version control, and accountability.
Within these environments, there are two main levels of collaboration with Revit:
- Model sharing and coordination – uploading, reviewing, and commenting on models.
- Worksharing (co-authoring) – multiple users working in real time on the same model.
Overview of CDEs That Support Revit Collaboration
There are several CDEs that support Revit collaboration. Let’s compare the most relevant platforms:
Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC)
Autodesk's own platform provides full Revit Cloud Worksharing. It's deeply integrated with Revit, allowing multiple team members to work on the same model in real-time. This connection is made possible through the Autodesk Desktop Connector, which mounts cloud-hosted files directly into the Revit interface, appearing much like a local or network drive.
Ideal for firms already using Autodesk tools.
This movie illustrates how Autodesk Desktop Connector works:
Bricsys 24/7
Bricsys offers a flexible CDE primarily for document management and coordination. It supports storing and sharing Revit files but does not support live collaboration. Files must be exported manually or managed using Bricsys' file management tools. This adds a few extra steps to the workflow but still works for teams using Revit alongside BricsCAD or other platforms.
Trimble Connect
Designed for model coordination, Trimble Connect is a good fit for mixed-software environments. It offers Revit model viewing, but not authoring or worksharing. However, it does provide the ability to upload Revit models directly to Trimble Connect from inside Revit, using a dedicated plugin. This makes it easier to keep files in sync and centralize updates without leaving the design environment.
Bentley ProjectWise
This is a heavyweight solution for large infrastructure projects. While it integrates with Revit via plugins, it lacks native support for real-time Revit worksharing. The ProjectWise plugin allows users to connect their Revit files directly to a managed ProjectWise data source, enabling check-in/check-out workflows, versioning, and metadata tagging from within the Revit interface—though without true co-authoring capabilities.
Dalux
Dalux is focused on construction and field collaboration. It’s great for viewing and reviewing Revit models (typically as IFCs) but doesn’t support worksharing. Revit models are usually exported to IFC format and then uploaded to Dalux manually or through integrations with BIM 360 or SharePoint. While there's no native Revit plugin, Dalux does allow users to view model geometry and metadata in the field, supporting effective coordination and issue management on site.
Graphisoft BIMcloud
BIMcloud is purpose-built for Archicad. It offers excellent collaboration tools—but only for Archicad users. It does not support Revit co-authoring. Revit models can be uploaded manually as reference files, but there is no direct integration or plugin that allows for publishing or synchronizing Revit data into BIMcloud. As such, any collaboration using Revit within BIMcloud remains limited to basic file storage and does not enable any meaningful model coordination or editing.
Revit Collaboration Platform Comparison
Only One Platform Supports Native Revit Worksharing
Autodesk Construction Cloud is the only CDE that supports true Revit worksharing.
Teams can co-author the same model from anywhere, with version control and rollback built-in. While the other CDEs offer some forms of Revit collaboration, they don’t offer ‘true’ collaboration.
But Revit Cloud Worksharing has serious problems
At first glance, Revit Cloud Worksharing via Autodesk Construction Cloud seems like the holy grail of BIM collaboration. But if you’ve spent time on industry forums or Reddit threads, a different picture emerges.
Users frequently report slow model open times, long syncs, and unexpected crashes—especially on large projects with multiple linked models. Even on fast internet connections, saving or publishing can take several minutes. And Autodesk themselves acknowledge performance issues with cloud models and suggest workarounds such as closing the Desktop Connector (Autodesk Support article)).
On forums like Autodesk Community, users describe the performance as being "extremely poor" and plagued by long load times. Meanwhile, a user on Reddit shared that Revit becomes sluggish even for basic actions, while another forum post openly calls ACC and Desktop Connector a "joke" due to syncing and file lock issues (Autodesk Forums).
Even on specialist sites like RevitForum.org, users report disconnections and frustrations over the mismatch between ACC and real-world consultant workflows—especially on large projects with multiple linked models. Even on fast internet connections, saving or publishing can take several minutes. And in the worst cases, users get booted out mid-session or encounter file corruptions.
The root cause? The network.
Revit was originally built for LAN-based collaboration, and while the cloud has extended its reach, performance still depends heavily on bandwidth, latency, and connection stability. This becomes painfully clear when working from home, on the road, or even from offices with inconsistent infrastructure.
So while Revit Cloud Worksharing is powerful, it's not flawless. And it’s definitely not fast for everyone.
How to Fix the Performance Problem: Move Revit to the Designair Cloud
The most effective way to fix the performance bottlenecks in Revit Cloud Worksharing is to move Revit itself into the cloud.
Instead of relying on home or office internet connections to push gigabytes of data back and forth, running Revit on a cloud-hosted virtual desktop—using Desktop as a Service (DaaS)—places it in the same data center as your CDE. That means blazing-fast inter-cloud connections between your Revit session and the Autodesk Construction Cloud.
These internal cloud-to-cloud connections avoid the pitfalls of consumer-grade internet. They operate over high-speed, low-latency infrastructure inside the same provider network, often exceeding 10 Gbps, with virtually no packet loss.
The result? Models open faster. Syncs complete in seconds. And crashes due to timeouts or failed uploads are drastically reduced. This means you can really use Revit to collaborate in the cloud
Our setup mirrors how many top-performing BIM teams now work: co-authoring models in ACC while accessing them from a virtual machine in the cloud.
At Designair, we help architecture and engineering firms make this transition smooth and painless.
Whether you’re exploring cloud-based Revit collaboration for the first time or want to fix long-standing performance issues, we’ll help you test it—using your own tools and your own models—so you can see the difference for yourself.
👉 Want to experience it firsthand? Let us know how we can help.
