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Newforma alternatives for architecture firms
Newforma built the category of project information management for architects, and its strength is still the one it started with: every email, filed to its project, searchable years later, in a tool most firms have already run for a decade. Firms look for an alternative when the bill is sized for a 300-person practice, when the Outlook add-in is the only part anyone uses, or when the problem they actually have is the drawing set rather than the inbox.
Conor McMichael · Architect. Founder, LODE
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What Newforma is, and what it is not
Newforma Konekt is the cloud successor to Newforma Project Center, and the two share a thesis: the record of a project is its correspondence, so file the correspondence. The Outlook add-in files email to projects, turns an email into an RFI or a submittal, and makes all of it searchable with its attachments. The CA Track package adds RFI and submittal workflows and a Procore connector. For a firm whose pain is finding the email from 2023 in which the owner approved the change, it is the right tool. In 2026 it added a Microsoft Teams connector and announced Bluebeam, AWS and Egnyte integrations with modular licensing, which widens the record it files without changing what it is.
What it is not is a drawing set tool. Konekt links drawings, models and decisions into one record, but the set itself, which revision of which sheet is current and which issuance put it there, is managed the way it always was: in folders, by whoever is careful. The RFI knows which email it came from; it does not know that the sheet it asks about was superseded.
The three alternatives, and who each is for
TonicDM is the closest like-for-like: email filing and large-file transfer inside Microsoft 365, with a CA tier for RFIs and submittals, at a published per-user price. Part3 is a construction administration tool rather than a PIM: submittals, RFIs, change orders and field reports, with a Procore sync. LODE is construction project management built on the drawing set: the set compiled from every issuance, with bidding, CA, pay applications and closeout run on it. What LODE does, phase by phase.
None of the three files inbound email the way Newforma does. TonicDM comes closest. LODE deliberately does not: notifications stay in the app, the contractor works from a link, and what leaves LODE leaves on the record, as a transmittal with per-recipient tracking or a share link with an access log. The firm-wide record Newforma is known for exists in LODE as the Hub, with firm files, lessons learned, the companies and contacts every project draws on, QA/QC and a firm-wide schedule, and DOC answers questions across every project the firm has in it.