Compare · The status quo
The drawing says 47 cameras. The spreadsheet says 44.
For most teams the real competitor is not another platform — it is AutoCAD or Visio plus a stack of spreadsheets. That combination has genuine advantages, and one structural weakness that gets more expensive the bigger the job gets.
Why the stack persists
It deserves credit before it gets criticised. A DWG or an XLSX opens on any machine your consultant, your client or the authority having jurisdiction happens to own. It works with no connectivity. Your drafters already know it, so there is no learning curve and no adoption risk. A subcontractor needs no account to help. And Excel will bend into whatever BOM or purchase-order format a customer insists on, which no structured product does as gracefully. Those are the reasons the stack has outlasted a decade of tools built to replace it, and they are all still true.
The structural weakness
The drawing and the bill of materials are two separate documents that a person keeps in agreement. A symbol on a plan is an icon: it has no lens, no radio, no power draw, no distance to the closet. So moving it changes nothing except the picture. Revision by revision the artifacts drift, and the drift is discovered at the worst possible moment — at submittal, at procurement, or on site with a technician on the clock.
We are not going to attach a fabricated percentage to that. We looked for a defensible published figure for what the drift costs and did not find one worth citing. The mechanism is the argument.
| What you are deciding | CAD or Visio + spreadsheets | SiteOps Command |
|---|---|---|
| Opens on any consultant, AHJ or client machine | Universal — DWG, PDF and XLSX go anywhere | Exports PDF, DXF and XLSX for handoff; the live model is native |
| Your team already knows the tool | ✓ | — |
| Works with no connectivity | ✓ | — |
| Files remain readable if the vendor disappears | ✓ | Exports are yours; the live model is platform-native |
| Onboarding a CAD-only subcontractor | Trivial — they already have it | They need platform access |
| Total layout freedom, no schema | ✓ | — |
| Any custom BOM or PO format a client demands | Excel adapts to anything | Structured exports |
| Moving a device updates the bill of materials | — | ✓ |
| Physics behind a placed symbol | A block is an icon | RF, optics and acoustics computed from datasheets |
| Camera coverage that accounts for the rack in the way | — | ✓ |
| Wi-Fi coverage from your real wall materials | — | ✓ |
| Cable length that includes rise, service loop and slack | Measured by hand | Computed and checked against TIA-568 limits |
| PoE budget and circuit sizing from the placed load | — | ✓ |
| Revision consistency across drawing, BOM and submittal | Three artifacts, updated by hand | One model, one source |
| Seeing what a moved wall affects downstream | — | ✓ |
| Standard named on each computed number | — | ✓ |
| As-built without a second manual redraw | — | ✓ |
| Cross-discipline handoff (coverage informing power) | — | ✓ |
One model
The symbol knows what it is
A device placed on the model carries its datasheet — lens and sensor, radio and antenna pattern, power draw, protocol and cable type. That is what lets the same placement produce coverage, a cable run, a power budget and a bill of materials at once, instead of four documents someone reconciles later.
- Move a wall and the affected coverage, cable routes and materials re-compute together.
- The bill of materials is derived from the devices on the plan, so the count cannot disagree with the drawing.
- Every computed number cites its standard — TIA, BICSI, ITU-R, IEC, AVIXA, NEC.
- True-scale DXF on US National CAD Standard layers, so the drawing still goes to whoever needs a drawing.
Frequently asked questions
Honestly — what does the spreadsheet do better?
Several things, and they are not trivial. It opens everywhere, it works on a plane, your drafters already know it, a subcontractor needs no account, and it will produce literally any format a client demands. Those are real advantages and they are why the stack persists. If your projects are small enough that the drawing and the BOM never drift apart, the honest answer is that you may not need this.
So what actually goes wrong?
The drawing and the bill of materials are separate artifacts that a human keeps in sync. Move a camera and nothing else knows. The classic symptom is the count: the drawing says 47 cameras, the spreadsheet says 44, and nobody can say which is right until someone recounts by hand. Then the same drift happens again at revision, at submittal, and at as-built — where the drawing is typically redrawn from field notes rather than derived from anything.
Is there a number for what that costs?
Not one we are willing to publish. We looked for a citable industry figure for drawing-versus-field discrepancy cost and did not find one we could stand behind, so we are not going to invent a percentage to make the argument look sharper. The mechanism is the argument: three artifacts kept in sync by hand will drift, and the drift is found late.
What does the incumbent stack cost today?
Microsoft publishes Visio at $5 per user per month for Plan 1 and $15 for Plan 2, paid yearly. AutoCAD LT — the 2D seat most low-voltage drafters actually hold — reported around $500 to $520 a year across resellers and pricing trackers in April 2026. We deliberately do not quote a single figure for a full AutoCAD seat: published prices ranged from about $1,865 to $2,310 across sources inside a four-month window, and any one number would be misleading. These are what teams spend today, not our pricing.
Do we have to give up CAD?
No. The model exports a true-scale DXF on US National CAD Standard layers, plus print-ready multi-floor plan sets and schedules. Design and compute here; hand a drawing to whoever needs a drawing. The point is not to take CAD away — it is to stop the drawing, the BOM and the as-built being three separate things maintained by hand.
Try it against a job you already drew
Bring a floor plan you have already designed the old way and see what the model computes differently. Talk to us about what your team needs.