Archicad Pricing 2026: Studio ($201/mo), Collaborate ($237/mo) & Real Costs

Every price on this page is per seat. Graphisoft calls the monthly figure "starting from" on both plan pages and pairs it with the phrase "with upfront payment of" the annual total — there is no separate, cheaper way to pay by the month.

Graphisoft keeps the plan lineup deliberately short. There is no middle tier and no top-of-the-range "Ultimate" plan the way SketchUp or many rendering vendors ship — every Archicad subscription is one of these two, and the difference between them is narrower than a three-tier ladder would suggest.

Archicad Studio — $201/mo

The entry plan: full Archicad for Windows and macOS, BIMx Pro for client-facing 3D walkthroughs, and BIMcloud Basic for local teamwork on an in-house server. It includes the built-in rendering engine, the AI Assistant, and the AI Visualizer, plus access to third-party add-ons. It does not include MEP modeling, cloud-hosted collaboration, or the International language version — only local-language builds ship with Studio.

Graphisoft's own feature list for Studio breaks down to:

• Architectural modeling and documentation — the full parametric BIM toolset, not a cut-down version.
• Local Teamwork with BIMcloud Basic — real-time collaboration for a team sharing one in-house server, with no cloud hosting fee.
• Floating licences within the team — seats can move between machines inside the same firm rather than being locked to one computer.
• OPEN BIM interoperability, including BCF import and linked modules, which is what lets Studio hand a model to a structural or MEP consultant working in a different tool.

The two things Graphisoft lists as explicit limitations of Studio are worth repeating verbatim, because they are the two reasons a firm upgrades: no cloud-based collaboration beyond the AI Visualizer, and no MEP feature set — Studio users can trial MEP, but using it for real work means moving to Collaborate.

Archicad Collaborate — $237/mo

Everything in Studio, plus architectural and MEP modeling in one licence, Graphisoft-hosted BIMcloud Software as a Service instead of a self-hosted server, portable licences for teams that span more than one company, a direct connection to Autodesk Forma, and free upgrade training with a discount on Graphisoft Learn courses. Graphisoft markets Collaborate as its "most popular" plan, and it is the default option Graphisoft steers existing perpetual-licence holders toward when they convert.

The practical difference between BIMcloud Basic and BIMcloud SaaS is where the server lives. Basic runs on hardware your firm owns and maintains; SaaS is hosted by Graphisoft, which removes the IT overhead but adds it to the subscription instead. For a firm that already runs its own file server, Basic is not a missing feature so much as a deliberate cost trade-off Studio makes on your behalf.

Graphisoft does localize Archicad pricing, and — like Autodesk — it bills some Latin American markets in US dollars at a lower rate than the United States itself. These are the published prices in each country's own store, in the currency that store bills in:

Argentina is the row worth reading twice. It is billed in US dollars at $1,808 a year for Studio — the same currency as the United States, for the same product, at 25% lessthan the US price of $2,414. That gap is arithmetic on Graphisoft's own published figures ($2,414 − $1,808 = $606, or 25.1% of the US price), not an exchange-rate artifact, since both figures are quoted in the same currency.

Until recently, Archicad was one of the last major BIM tools you could buy outright. That is over. Graphisoft phased out new perpetual licences at the end of 2024, and stopped selling upgrades for existing perpetual licences at the end of 2025 — after that date, a perpetual seat keeps running on whatever version it last upgraded to, but it stops receiving new releases.

Graphisoft's conversion program is the bridge for existing owners: switch to Studio or Collaborate, and Graphisoft leaves you the last perpetual build (Archicad 25, as of this writing) as a fallback licence, which it says preserves compatibility with projects up to 15 years old. There is no published price for converting, because it depends on which perpetual licence and how many seats you are converting — this is the one number on this page that genuinely requires talking to Graphisoft or a reseller, and no source we found states it publicly.

This matters more than a routine pricing-page footnote, because it changes what "is Archicad a one-time purchase" actually means going forward. A firm still running a perpetual Archicad 26 or 27 seat can keep using it — Graphisoft is not switching off software people already own — but it will not receive further version upgrades, and Graphisoft's own community forum has threads from long-time perpetual owners working out whether converting now or waiting is the better financial call. There is no universal answer: a firm that upgrades every release is already paying close to subscription-equivalent money in upgrade fees, while a firm that skipped several versions on a perpetual licence was getting a genuinely cheaper deal that no longer exists for new purchases.

One licensing detail survives the transition either way: Archicad can open a project regardless of whether it was authored under a perpetual licence, a cloud subscription, or a physical key-based licence. Licensing controls who can run the software, not which files that copy can open, so a mixed studio — some seats still perpetual, some converted to Studio or Collaborate — can work on the same model without a compatibility tax.

Four CAD tools that architects choose between, and four different pricing models — this is not an apples-to-apples comparison so much as a map of how differently each vendor charges for a seat:

Rhino is the outlier: a single $995 payment with no expiration, against three subscriptions that all bill annually or monthly. Over three years, Rhino stays at $995 (plus an optional ~$595 upgrade to the next major version, released roughly every two years) while three years of Archicad Studio runs about $7,242 and three years of Revit runs about $9,015 — but Rhino ships with no BIM object model and no built-in photorealistic renderer, so that comparison only holds if you do not also need what BIM software provides. AutoCAD is the other asterisk: it is $319 a year cheaper than Archicad Studio, but it is a 2D/3D drafting platform, not a parametric BIM tool with walls, floors, and schedules that update themselves — comparing its price to Archicad's without that caveat overstates the saving.

Where Archicad genuinely wins the comparison is platform and rendering bundled together. Revit has no macOS build at all, and AutoCAD's Mac version drops several toolsets that ship on Windows, so Archicad and Rhino are the only two of the four that run the same way on both operating systems. Pair that with Archicad including a renderer where Revit includes Twinmotion (also free, but a separate application) and Rhino includes nothing, and the honest read is: Archicad is not the cheapest licence in this table, but it is the one that asks you to buy the fewest additional pieces to get from a model to a client-ready image.

None of this changes what each tool is actually for. Revit remains the coordination standard on projects where a BIM deliverable is contractually required across a large consultant team; Rhino remains the tool of choice for complex, non-standard geometry that a rectilinear BIM object model fights against; AutoCAD remains the default where the deliverable is still 2D drawings rather than a 3D model. Archicad's pitch sits between Revit and SketchUp: full parametric BIM, at a lower price than Revit, with a renderer Revit does not price into its own subscription.

Verified students, educators, and eligible institutions get a free, full-featured Archicad EDU licence, valid for one year and renewable at no cost for as long as eligibility holds. Files carry a permanent "Educational" watermark that cannot be removed, which is how Graphisoft keeps the distinction from coursework to paid project work enforceable rather than honour-based.

Not for commercial work, but there are two legitimate ways to run Archicad without paying a seat price:

• The free trial of the full Studio or Collaborate toolset, which converts to a paid subscription with the same account.
• The EDU licence, free for a renewable year to verified students, educators, and institutions, for coursework and research only.

If all you need is to look at a model rather than edit it, neither applies, and a native PLN file will not open outside Archicad. Export it to GLB, GLTF, or OBJ first; our architectural rendering tool opens the result in a browser and renders it, without installing Archicad at all.

The subscription is the floor, and Archicad's floor already includes more than most CAD tools bundle in. Three line items still sit outside it.

Rendering software

Credit where it is due: Archicad is the rare BIM tool that does not make you buy rendering separately. Both Studio and Collaborate ship a built-in photorealistic rendering engine and an AI Visualizer at no extra cost. That is a genuinely different starting point from SketchUp, where rendering is a $460/yr plan upgrade, or Revit, where it depends on a separate Twinmotion licence Autodesk happens to include. Most studios still add a dedicated real-time engine on top, usually for faster iteration or a look their clients already expect:

One gap is worth naming: Chaos has never built a V-Ray edition for Archicad — V-Ray ships for Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, and Blender, but not Archicad, so a studio standardized on V-Ray elsewhere cannot carry that choice into Archicad. Enscape, Lumion, and D5 Render all do support it.

Hardware and platform

Archicad runs natively on both Windows and macOS, which is a real advantage over Revit's Windows-only requirement — a Mac-based practice does not need a virtualization licence just to open the model. That advantage is one of the reasons Archicad has a strong following in markets with heavier Mac adoption among independent architecture practices, where a Windows-only BIM tool means budgeting for a second machine before buying any software at all.

Whatever real-time renderer you add on top still wants a discrete GPU, and that requirement does not go away just because the base engine is included — Archicad's built-in CineRender engine is CPU-based and slower than a GPU-accelerated real-time engine, which is exactly why studios add Enscape, Lumion, or D5 Render rather than rely on the bundled renderer for fast client iteration. That GPU is the machine-shaped cost an AI renderer running in a browser removes entirely. For real numbers on what that hardware needs, the Blender system requirements page puts figures on GPU and VRAM that apply to any GPU-bound real-time engine, Archicad's included, and the Revit system requirements page shows how much RAM a large BIM model itself wants regardless of which authoring tool produced it.

Training

Archicad's modeling tools are not the steep part of the learning curve — the MEP toolset in Collaborate and BIMcloud teamwork setup are. Budget training for both in the first year of a new Collaborate seat, and again if a studio adds a real-time renderer on top of the built-in engine.

Putting those together, here is what a year actually costs at three common setups. Licence figures are Graphisoft and Chaos list prices; the training numbers are estimates and are marked as such.

The gap between the first and second rows is almost entirely headcount, not features — Studio to Collaborate at three seats is the whole jump from about $2,400 to $10,000 a year. Adding a real-time renderer on top of Collaborate moves the number by roughly 17% more, a smaller jump than the same decision costs on SketchUp or Revit, because the base renderer is already free.

With only two plans, the decision is narrower than Revit's four-way licence split, but it still has a clear line.

• Stay on Studio if you work solo or with a small team on one server, do not touch MEP, and never need to hand a project to a firm outside your own network.
• Move to Collaborate the moment MEP modeling enters the scope, or a consultant outside your firm needs access to the live model over the cloud rather than a file hand-off.
• Neither plan is the cheap optionif all you need is documentation without BIM — Rhino's $995 one-time licence or AutoCAD's $2,095/yr drafting subscription both undercut Archicad, at the cost of the parametric BIM model itself.

For BIM authoring on a Mac-friendly toolchain, yes — Archicad is one of the only BIM platforms that runs natively on macOS at all, and bundling a real rendering engine into the base price is a genuine differentiator against SketchUp and Revit's unbundled approach.

The soft spot is the same one every BIM tool has: the built-in renderer is competent, not fast, and most studios that need client-ready stills on a deadline still reach for a dedicated real-time engine or an AI renderer on top of it. You can keep Archicad and render the exported view instead. Render a House takes an exported Archicad view, a BIMx export, or an OBJ or GLB file, and returns a photorealistic image without a render engine or a GPU. It is free to start — 3 renders a day — and paid plans are $39/mo, or $312/yr, a fraction of the $426/yr gap between Studio and Collaborate, and it runs the same way on Windows and macOS. Full plan details are in the pricing docs.

Pricing a different CAD seat at the same time? Revit pricing and SketchUp pricingcover the same ground for Autodesk's and Trimble's licences, and if you are comparing rendering engines directly rather than CAD seats, Enscape pricing, Lumion pricing, and KeyShot pricing run the same numbers for the renderer side of the budget.

A few things this page deliberately does not claim. Graphisoft does not publish a conversion price for existing perpetual-licence holders moving to a subscription, so that number is missing here rather than guessed. Graphisoft also does not publish a true month-to-month rate without an annual commitment — every figure on this page is the monthly-equivalent of a one-year term paid up front, and treating it as a cancel-anytime price would misrepresent what Graphisoft actually sells. And this page prices seats, not outcomes: it does not tell you how long the built-in renderer takes to learn, or whether Collaborate's cloud teamwork will suit your firm's IT policy — those are workflow questions a price list cannot answer.