Qonic ✓

Qonic is a cloud-native, browser-based BIM authoring platform built around a genuinely different premise from Revit: instead of treating a building as a file that gets exported to IFC for interoperability, Qonic treats IFC itself as the native, live data model the software is built on. Every wall, assembly and product in a Qonic project is stored as structured, queryable data in the cloud from the moment it's created, not translated into an open format as an afterthought at export time. That distinction sounds technical, but it's the whole basis of Qonic's pitch: a database-driven model can support real-time multi-user editing, instant queries across a project, and clean data hand-off to downstream tools in a way a file-based model structurally can't, no matter how good the export routine is.

The company behind it isn't a startup guessing at what architects need -- it's built by the team that previously ran Bricsys, the maker of BricsCAD, which was acquired by Hexagon in 2018. Qonic NV is based in Ghent, Belgium, founded by CEO Erik de Keyser alongside Tiemen Strobbe, Mark Van Den Bergh and Sander Scheiris. De Keyser's CAD career goes back further still: an earlier BIM tool of his, TriForma, was acquired by Bentley Systems, so the Bentley connection some in the industry associate with Qonic is really about the founders' career history rather than a corporate spin-out. The team spent roughly two years in stealth before an open beta in 2023 and a full commercial release in 2024. Notably, AEC Magazine has reported that Qonic is self-funded, built by industry veterans and free from outside investor or shareholder pressure -- no public funding rounds exist because, as far as the record shows, none were needed.

The founding team's history is worth dwelling on a little longer, because it's unusual for this category. Erik de Keyser's career in AEC software goes back to TriForma, an early BIM tool that Bentley Systems acquired -- meaning De Keyser has now built and sold software to two different major infrastructure players in the CAD/BIM space (Bentley for TriForma, and later Hexagon for Bricsys), across roughly two decades. Bricsys itself, founded in 2002, built BricsCAD into a genuine DWG-compatible AutoCAD alternative before Hexagon's 2018 acquisition, and the core team -- De Keyser plus Strobbe, Van Den Bergh and Scheiris -- stayed together to found Qonic rather than dispersing after the sale. That continuity matters for how Qonic is being built: a two-year stealth period before even opening a public beta is the kind of patience a well-capitalized, experienced founding team can afford, and it shows in how methodically features have shipped (core modeling and collaboration first, native drawing generation only added once that foundation was solid) rather than a typical startup's pressure to ship a wide but shallow feature set to satisfy investors.

Inside the product, the workflow is organized around five verbs Qonic itself uses to describe the platform: Create (direct and intelligent 3D modelling, with push/pull geometry editing and a NURBS/solids core), Enhance (enriching models with data via Qonic Intelligence, an AI/neural-network layer that classifies 3D geometry automatically), Collaborate (real-time multi-user editing in the same cloud model), Coordinate (clash and conflict detection across disciplines) and Query (custom reporting across the live model's data). In 2026 Qonic added native drawing generation -- automatically producing annotated floor plans, sections and elevations directly from the IFC model rather than requiring a separate drafting pass, closing one of the more obvious gaps a browser-based challenger to Revit needs to close before firms will take it seriously for production documentation.

Qonic Intelligence, the AI classification layer, isn't just a marketing feature: it won the buildingSMART openBIM Award 2025 (also reported as the buildingSMART International Technology Award 2025) specifically for "Applying openBIM Classification through Advanced AI." For a two-year-old commercial product, an award from buildingSMART International -- the standards body behind IFC itself -- is a meaningful, independently judged signal that the AI layer does something more substantive than auto-tagging demo geometry, since the award process evaluates real openBIM/IFC workflows rather than marketing claims.

On interoperability, Qonic's own company page lists direct interoperability with Rhino, SketchUp and Revit (import and export) alongside full IFC support, and a public REST API (documented at api-docs.qonic.com) exposes models, products and their attributes, materials, spatial locations, classifications, custom properties and asynchronous jobs, plus real-time viewer interaction. That's a genuinely developer-friendly surface for a two-year-old product, though it's worth being precise about what exists versus what's implied: there's no dedicated integrations marketplace or named list of third-party platform partners beyond what the API and the three named connectors cover. Firms evaluating Qonic for a specific pipeline (say, importing existing Revit content, or scripting custom reports against the API) should treat the API docs as the actual source of truth rather than assuming broader ecosystem support exists.

Qonic ships as native applications across Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, in addition to running in the browser -- a genuinely cross-platform footprint that's still unusual among BIM authoring tools, most of which remain Windows-only. Pricing is transparent and published outright rather than gated behind a sales call for every tier: a real Free plan (up to 5,000 m² of portfolio, one active project, five models, unlimited viewers, one week of version history) sits alongside a paid Core BIM Platform priced by portfolio size -- from €258/month for 10,000 m² with unlimited users -- plus optional Coordination, Drawings and Planning add-on modules billed per 1,000 m². A separate three-month "Proof of Value" onboarding program exists for firms that want structured evaluation support rather than a self-serve signup.

It's worth situating Qonic within the wider wave of browser-native BIM challengers that have emerged since roughly 2021 -- Arcol, Snaptrude, Motif and others are all making some version of the same bet, that a cloud-native, real-time-collaborative architecture is overdue in a category still dominated by file-based desktop software. What sets Qonic apart within that group isn't the browser-first pitch itself, which several competitors share, but the specific choice to make IFC the actual native storage format rather than treating openBIM compliance as an export checkbox. That's a meaningfully harder engineering problem to solve well -- IFC's schema is verbose and was designed for interchange, not necessarily for being the live editing format of a modeling tool -- and the buildingSMART award for Qonic Intelligence is one piece of independent evidence that the team has made real progress on making that architecture work in practice rather than just claiming openBIM-native status as a marketing label.

Editor’s takeBIM•STACK editor's take: Qonic is one of the more credible browser-based Revit challengers precisely because it isn't a first-time founding team's bet -- it's built by people who already shipped and sold a CAD company, and it shows in how deliberately the product has been sequenced (stealth, beta, native drawing generation only added once the core modeling and collaboration story was solid). The genuinely published, non-gated pricing is also a rarity in this category. The honest gap is customer proof: Qonic's own site shows a "supporting partners" logo band rather than a dedicated case-studies page with confirmed customer outcomes, so firms evaluating it should ask directly for reference customers rather than assuming the partner logos represent production deployments. For a firm already comfortable with IFC/openBIM concepts and willing to pilot a newer platform on a real (not just a test) project, Qonic's combination of published pricing, a working free tier and an award-recognized AI layer makes it one of the more worthwhile browser-based BIM tools to actually trial rather than just read about.

Qonic's learning curve benefits from a deliberate design choice: because the underlying data model is native IFC rather than a proprietary format bolted onto an open-standard export, users who already understand IFC concepts (classifications, property sets, spatial structure) find the platform's data model more legible than Revit's, where the same concepts exist but are one layer removed from what the software natively stores. For teams coming from a pure CAD background with no BIM/IFC experience, there's still a real conceptual jump to make -- understanding assemblies, classifications and the database-driven collaboration model -- but the direct/intelligent modelling tools (push/pull geometry) are designed to feel closer to familiar 3D modeling than to Revit's parametric family system.

Because Qonic runs in the browser and as native cross-platform apps rather than requiring a heavyweight desktop install, initial setup friction is low, and the free tier lets a team genuinely test real modeling and collaboration workflows before committing budget or migration effort. The steeper part of the ramp-up is less about the software itself and more about planning a migration from an existing Revit or Rhino production pipeline: firms should expect to treat the Revit/Rhino import-export interoperability as the actual bottleneck to evaluate carefully on a real project file before assuming a smooth transition, since the vendor doesn't publish a broader migration-tooling story beyond those two named connectors and IFC.