Free BCF editor in the browser
Bimlyte is a free, browser-based BCF editor and manager: create, edit and organise BCF issues, then export them as PDF or Excel reports.
Run your BCF workflow without installing desktop software — and share results with people who don't have BIM tools.
What is BCF?
BCF (BIM Collaboration Format) is an open standard from buildingSMART for exchanging model-based issues — questions, clashes and tasks — along with comments and saved viewpoints. It lets teams coordinate without sending whole models back and forth.
The file stays small because it references the model rather than containing it: instead of emailing a 500 MB model to point at one column, you send an issue that says which column, seen from where, and what is wrong with it.
Manage your BCF workflow
- Create, edit and organise BCF issues, individually or in batches.
- Add comments to keep the conversation in one place.
- Work with viewpoints tied to your model, and draw markups on their snapshots.
- Add your own attribute values, or custom fields beyond the standard BCF set.
BCF 2.1, BCF 3.0, and moving between them
Different tools on the same project rarely agree on a version, so converting is an ordinary chore rather than an edge case. What you need to know:
- BCF 2.1 was released in October 2014 and BCF 3.0 in June 2021. BCF 3.0 is a stricter, more structured evolution — not a different format.
- Bimlyte reads and writes both, and treats them the same internally. The version only matters at export, which is what makes converting simply a matter of exporting in the version you need.
- Because some fields differ between the two, an export may first ask you to fill in what the target version requires — rather than silently dropping or inventing data.
- The filename tells you nothing: both use the .bcf extension, and a bcf.version file inside the archive declares the schema.
What happens to your data when Bimlyte writes a BCF file
The real test of a BCF tool is not what it can open, but what survives when it saves. Round-trip fidelity is why Bimlyte implements the BCF standard in its own code instead of depending on a general-purpose BCF library:
- Files another application wrote into the archive that Bimlyte does not interpret — the vendor extensions tools like Revit, Solibri or BIMcollab add — are kept byte for byte and stay attached to their issue through import, merging and export. Losing these is the usual way a round trip quietly damages a file.
- Anything the standard has no field for, such as your custom fields, goes into a separate companion file inside the archive instead of into the standard XML.
- The writer only emits fields the specification defines, so a file exported from Bimlyte stays valid in every other BCF tool — the companion file is ignored by anything that does not know about it.
- Conversion between 2.1 and 3.0 runs in both directions rather than only forwards, so a 3.0 file can go back to a partner still working in 2.1.
What the PDF and Excel exports actually produce
Reports are a first-class feature here rather than a print view, and you control what goes in:
- Pick exactly which fields appear — standard BCF attributes and any custom fields you have added.
- Set how many recent comments to carry into the report, so an action list does not become a transcript.
- PDF: choose A4 or US Letter, for the whole project or a selection of issues.
- Excel: split the workbook into separate sheets grouped by a field such as status or type.
- Excel: turn attribute cells into drop-down lists of your project's own values, so a recipient picks a value instead of typing a new one.
Merging issues from more than one source
When the same issues pick up different comments or viewpoints in different tools, Bimlyte can merge them: it matches issues across the sources and shows you a preview of what will be added, updated or skipped before anything changes.