Archicad

Archicad, developed by the Hungarian company Graphisoft (now part of the Nemetschek Group), is Revit's primary, fiercely loyal global rival. While Revit dominates North America and massive corporate engineering firms, Archicad is wildly popular in Europe and among highly design-focused, boutique architectural studios around the world. Its absolute biggest philosophical difference is that it is built *exclusively* for Architects. Revit tries to serve structural engineers, mechanical engineers, and architects simultaneously, making it famously clunky and rigid. Archicad was built by architects, for architects. Its interface is universally praised as being incredibly fluid, intuitive, and highly conducive to the creative, iterative design process. It is also incredibly famous for being the absolute pioneer of "OpenBIM." Because Autodesk tries to lock everyone into the proprietary Revit format (.rvt), Archicad relies heavily on the open-source IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) format. This allows an architect using Archicad on a Mac to collaborate flawlessly with a structural engineer using Tekla on a PC, completely destroying the vendor lock-in.