Vectorworks 2025 today boasts industry-leading features that its BIM competitors, including market-leading Autodesk Revit, are still working on implementing, such as its advanced viewport graphics sophistication. Now, in the upcoming Vectorworks 2026, the Architect version of the tool will support advanced Door and Window Assemblies.
Vectorworks Ease of Use
Of all the globally leading BIM authoring platforms, Vectorworks leads in ease of use of its software. Only Trimble’s SketchUp, which is not a true BIM authoring application, rivals Vectorworks’ highly regarded ease of use. So the AEC industry shouldn’t be surprised if the Vectorworks team hits it out of the park on making the creation of custom door and window assemblies relatively easy as compared to its primary competitors, in and outside of the Nemetschek Group’s family of products.
Vectorworks 2026 is coming soon with industry-leading new features and best-in-class viewport graphics for a BIM authoring tool.
This new upcoming feature alone will make Vectorworks Architect an even better tool for architects doing BIM workflows in the high-end custom residential market, along with other bespoke building types, such as retail, hospitality, museums, and other high-end and more crafted and custom building types.
Jason Pletcher, Vectorworks’ new CEO writes:
At Vectorworks, we believe that creativity should drive business results, not be hindered by software limitations. Designers are ambitious, and Vectorworks 2026 offers the tools to transform their big ideas into reality.
“Our latest version allows designers to work more efficiently, break free from busywork, automate manual processes, and unleash their design freedom, so their best work can move forward,” he continues.
Automated Depth Cueuing and More
Vectorworks 2026 will feature automated depth cueuing for cuts through BIM and 3D models, so ‘linework’ elevation views, section views, and 3D views appear as they should based on their distance.
Vectorworks 2026 promises more leading-edge features and smart integrations with its Vectorworks Cloud Services. The direct connection between its Windows and Mac desktop-based main application and Vectorworks Cloud Services will enable users to benefit from the computational power in the cloud.
Worksheets will gain the ability to be smartly sliced and linked at will, so they can spread across page layouts. There is also a new File Health Checker palette—not quite the performance checking or Vectorworks benchmark this publication has been arguing is not just useful for a stealth marketing trick. Every computer enthusiast who benchmarks knows about Vectorworks’ sibling company, Maxon, whether they do 3D or not.
Outside of Architecture other industry vertical products will gain interesting and useful new tools and features. You can read more here.
Architosh Analysis and Commentary
Recently I had a good read over at our friends at AEC Magazine regarding Revit’s future, information that came out of the June conference event in London. Martyn Day was kind enough to bring it to my attention prior to going to print. Both Day and I did the lion’s share of the most critically received journalism about both Open Revit Letters (in 2020 and 2022) (see, Architosh: “The Revit Open Letter Through the Lens of QWERTY-Nomics,” 20 Oct 2022).
So what does all of this have to do with Vectorworks and the upcoming version?
In the latest AEC Magazine issue, the future of Revit is discussed with some particular attention to Autodesk’s One Graphics Subsystem (OGS) and new graphics capabilities coming soon to upcoming editions of Revit. Of all the major BIM authoring platforms competing with each other, Revit’s viewport graphics are the most basic and furthest behind in graphics sophistication. Vectorworks, on the other hand, are arguably the most advanced and can operate across both Mac and Windows platforms. That means, the teams at Vectorworks intelligently navigated APIs and graphics technologies from Microsoft, Apple and the Khronos Group to architect a graphics pipeline that is at once leading-edge and flexible enough to navigate to new opportunities across both Mac and Windows versions.
Martyn Day’s article, “The Future of Revit: Take 2” says that the Autodesk OGS will add things like shadows, depth queuing, line thicknesses in time, but are not present yet in the Accelerated Graphics Tech Preview (the preview technology name in front of OGS). It looks like Vectorworks will deliver the bulk of these features in early Fall, ahead of industry competitors. The most compelling ones will be the depth queuing and the automated line thicknesses based on distance from the camera cut plane.
Revit is Pinned to a Sick Company
While we will certainly applaud Revit’s OGS features when they fully bloom in the application for users, Day’s article makes a key point of Revit’s reliance on Windows, and specifically it is Windows on Intel’s X86/64 chip architecture. Intel, for its part, is a company in search of a life-support machine as it continues to hemorrhage billions. (see, Reuters, “Intel gets $2 billion lifeline in the form of SoftBank equity investment,” 19 Aug 2025).
Perhaps it isn’t fair to say Intel is on a ventilator machine yet, but when the Trump administration desperately discusses the unprecedented move to take a government-backed stake (taxpayer funded) in Intel to help rescue the ailing (sick) chipmaker, I think it is fair to say that Revit’s leadership has to be watching this development nervously. And this is especially so since industry analysts have already quipped that AMD could not hold up the X86/64 architecture without Intel. At least not indefinitely as companies like Nvidia, Apple, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, all design and have produced ARM-chips for either data centers or end-devices. Even Intel’s future foundry plans included partnering with ARM to optimize ARM cores for Intel’s 18A process node. So Intel is essentially building partnerships with ARM itself to build ARM chips on advanced nodes to compete with TSMC, yet has no ARM chip design experience (unlike AMD).
So as Day noted, (reader must enter digital edition of latest issue), the OSG graphics goodness coming to Revit (after Vectorworks arrives with most of those best features) likely buys Revit time to address its many market and internal challenges. In the meantime, the Nemetschek daughter company Vectorworks is operating across the performance-leading chip platform (ARM) today, has young or new graphics code and flexibility in its veins, and also boasts a world-class modeling kernel in Parasolids. As such, it is really hard not to be enthusiastic for Vectorworks’ position within the AEC market and larger technology trend lines.