A free Bluebeam alternative for plan markup

Bluebeam Revu earns its $360 a year when you need takeoff, measurement, and Studio collaboration. But if a seat is mostly opening plan sets, pulling sheets, marking up, and passing PDFs around, Nanodoc handles that for free. It also does one thing Revu does not: stitching multiple sheets onto a single canvas, with white backgrounds stripped, to build one combined plan sheet.

No sign-up required • No watermark • Files never leave your device

Use Nanodoc for

  • Combining, splitting, and reordering plan set sheets
  • Stitching sheets onto one canvas to build a single combined sheet
  • Markup: text, highlights, stamps, and drawn signatures
  • Seats that view and annotate but do not do takeoff

Keep Bluebeam Revu for

  • Measurement and takeoff with scaled drawings
  • Studio sessions for real-time multi-user markup
  • OCR and searchable scanned plan sets
  • Tool sets, custom columns, and construction-specific workflows

Both columns are honest. If the right column is your daily work, Bluebeam Revu is worth its price and we would rather say so than have you find out after switching.

Common questions

Can Nanodoc do takeoff or measurements?

No. Nanodoc has no scale or measurement tools. For takeoff, keep Revu or use a dedicated takeoff product. Nanodoc covers the page management and markup side: combining sheets, extracting pages, annotating, and stitching sheets onto one canvas.

What is sheet stitching?

Nanodoc's Stitch tool places pages from one or more PDFs onto a single canvas. You can strip white backgrounds so only the linework imports, erase individual elements, then arrange, resize, rotate, and export everything as one PDF sheet. It is built for plan sets that arrive split across sheets that belong together.

Is Nanodoc really free, or is there a catch?

Really free. There is no premium tier, no trial clock, no daily task limit, no watermark, and no account. The project is supported by optional donations.