Free BCF manager: run the whole issue loop in your browser
Bimlyte is a free BCF manager that runs in your browser: import, merge and edit BCF 2.1 and 3.0 issues, triage and assign them, track progress on a dashboard and report to PDF or Excel — with no plug-in, no account and no upload.
It needs no host application such as Revit and no cloud space: the issues live in a project on your own device and leave it as standard BCF files, PDF reports or Excel workbooks.
What a BCF manager does
BCF (BIM Collaboration Format) is the open buildingSMART standard for exchanging model-based issues — questions, clashes and tasks — with their comments and viewpoints, without sending the model itself. The file stays small because it references the model instead of containing it.
A BCF viewer shows the issues it is given. A BCF manager also answers them: it edits, assigns, comments on and closes issues, and writes standard BCF back for the next tool in the chain.
The issue loop, from import to hand-back
- Import: drop one or several .bcf or .bcfzip files into a project. Keep them as separate files or merge them into one list — a difference preview shows, issue by issue, comment by comment and viewpoint by viewpoint, what will change, and duplicate issue identifiers are resolved explicitly.
- Triage: work in a card view or a table view, with quick filters that count every value or advanced rules built from a field, an operator and a value — including has value / has no value — and save any filter by name.
- Assign and update: set status, type, priority, stage, assignee, labels or custom fields across every selected issue in one action, including selected issues a filter currently hides.
- Discuss: comment on issues, and link documents from the project's library — a specification, a drawing, a photo — to as many issues as they concern.
- Raise new issues from the 3D model: the viewpoint captures the camera, what is visible, the colours and the section state, with a snapshot you can mark up.
- Track progress on the project dashboard, and report to PDF or Excel for the people who do not use BIM software.
- Hand back standard BCF 2.1 or 3.0 — the whole project, several files merged into one, only the selected issues, or the original file byte for byte.
Your project's own vocabulary
- Define the project's statuses, types, priorities, stages, labels and users, each with its own colour; mark which statuses count as closed and how priorities rank, which is what the dashboard is calculated from.
- Before a value is renamed or deleted, Bimlyte shows how many issues the change affects; duplicate people such as J. Smith and j.smith@example.com can be merged into one user without rewriting the authorship of existing comments.
- Add custom fields in five types — text, number, date, single-select and multi-select — with a record of who changed each value and when. Elsewhere they are often kept for paid plans; here they are part of the free tool.
- Custom data goes into a separate companion file inside the archive, so the exported .bcf stays valid for every other BCF tool.
A dashboard for the coordination meeting
- Overview: status, open-versus-closed, type and priority breakdowns, project metrics, the latest comments, a due-date calendar of upcoming and overdue issues, and a table of the issues that need attention.
- Analytics: issues created, closed and created-versus-closed over a week, a month or your own range; issues by status, type, priority and stage; how long open issues have been open; workload by assignee; activity by person; a cross-tab of any two BCF fields.
- A data-completeness radar: how many issues actually have a description, a due date, an assignee and a viewpoint.
- Click a chart segment to open the issue list filtered to exactly those issues, and copy or download any chart as an image for the meeting slides.
Reports people can read without BIM software
Reports are a first-class feature here rather than a print view, and you control what goes in — a recipient needs no BIM software to read them:
- 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.
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.
Where the issues live
Issues live in a project in your browser, on your device: no account, nothing uploaded, and the installed app keeps working offline. The issue list and the table work on Android and iOS phones and tablets, including the iPad, as well as on a desktop.
To hand over a whole project — models, issues, saved views, documents and settings — export a .bimlyte package, optionally password-protected; the recipient opens it in a browser with no BIM software and no account.
What the BCF manager does not do
- It does not detect clashes. Clashes found in a model checker are tracked here as BCF issues, not discovered here.
- There is no collaboration server: no real-time multi-user editing and no email notification when an issue is assigned — teams exchange standard BCF files or .bimlyte packages instead.
- It is made for model-based coordination issues, not for defect management on site drawings.