Draftform is a Windows PDF tool for marking up drawings, taking measurements and comparing revisions. It does the handful of things engineers do on every drawing — and deliberately not much else.
Bluebeam Revu and Adobe Acrobat are capable products, and for plenty of teams they are the right answer. But three complaints come up again and again — and none of them are really about missing features.
Revu is subscription-only and priced per user, per year, across several tiers. If your team marks up a few drawings a week, that gets hard to defend at renewal.
3D PDF, forms, scripting, cloud sessions. Powerful if you need them, but they crowd the interface for everyone who doesn’t — and new starters feel it first.
Panning and zooming a dense vector sheet is the single most common thing you do. When it lags, nothing else about the tool matters much.
Not a smaller Revu — a different set of trade-offs, with one architectural decision that changes how revisions work.
Your markups live alongside the file, not inside it. So when a drawing is superseded you swap in the new revision and the markups are still there — no flattening, no redrawing, no unflatten dance. Flatten only when you actually want to hand something over.
Length, area, perimeter, angle and count, with per-viewport calibration for sheets that mix scales. Running totals as you work, and the whole markups list exports to CSV or a formatted PDF report.
Knowing what a tool skips is as useful as knowing what it has. These are choices, not a roadmap — we would rather be excellent at review than adequate at everything.
If your work depends on those, Revu is genuinely the better tool, and we would rather you knew that now than after a trial.
Draftform 0.9 covers the full drawing-review workflow and is used on real work every day, but it is pre-release software: expect rough edges, and don’t make it the only copy of anything that matters.
Testers get the signed installer, a direct line for feedback from inside the app, and a say in what gets fixed first.
Pricing is announced at launch. The short version: per-seat cost is the thing we set out to fix, and we don’t intend to lose that argument.