Wow, this looks promising. Although the deadline to develop 30 apps with a core team of 4 within one year seems a bit... optimistic. Will be a nice crash test for how "vibe coded" technical apps actually bring value to the OSS environment. Will keep an eye on it. Cheers
Wow, this looks promising. Although the deadline to develop 30 apps with a core team of 4 within one year seems a bit... optimistic. Will be a nice crash test for how "vibe coded" technical apps actually bring value to the OSS environment. Will keep an eye on it. Cheers
That sounds great! Could someone give me a brief history of what OpenAEC is?
Is there a connection to IfcOpenShell or OSARCH? Do they develop their own software?
I didn't know about Open CAD Studio for example, is that more advanced than LibreCAD?
Thanks
@RaphaëlVouilloz said:
That sounds great! Could someone give me a brief history of what OpenAEC is?
Is there a connection to IfcOpenShell or OSARCH? Do they develop their own software?
I didn't know about Open CAD Studio for example, is that more advanced than LibreCAD?
Thanks
Yeah I would be interested as well. To me it seems they have been developing for some time in private and have now opened the repos, which is why we don't know them.
From their statistics page it looks like they have started developing in 2018 (repos per month) but really got running 12/2025
I might as well share the insight I got from asking Claude (Do your own research, I asked it to be as objective as possible, but I think this is a good overview after a bit of digging on my own).
My own insight :
To be perfectly honest I'd like a little more insights into how it works and people actually using it before trying it myself. Got a weird alert after downloading one of the executables. It might just be a packaging problem, it might be something else. Great thing is since it's OS anybody can delve into the source code and find potential problems. Proceed with caution. Cheers
OpenAEC Foundation — Summary
OpenAEC Foundation (currently "i.o." — a Dutch foundation in formation) is a Netherlands-based open-source initiative led by Maarten Vroegindeweij, an engineer with a long track record in open-source BIM tools. Its mission is to develop, support, and promote open-source software across the entire AEC chain (architecture, engineering, construction, plus civil/infrastructure work), with a stated goal of making the sector's software open source by end of 2026. All tools are licensed under LGPL-3.0. Architecture. The technical approach is consistent and modern: a single codebase per tool runs as web, desktop, and mobile apps. The stack is Rust (core logic: IFC parsing, validation, calculations) + Tauri 2.0 (lightweight desktop/mobile runtime, sub-10MB binaries) + WebAssembly (same Rust logic in the browser) + a lightweight HTML/CSS/JS frontend with Three.js for 3D. Interoperability centers on IFCX, an open format derived from buildingSMART's IFC standard. The design is explicitly "AI-ready," with MCP servers planned per tool. It builds on mature open-source projects (That Open Engine, Blender/Bonsai, IfcOpenShell, PDF.js) rather than reinventing them. Ecosystem. Around 30 "Studio" tools span the full AEC chain — geotechnics, structural calculation, BIM viewing/validation, energy, documents, CAD, planning, and ERP — at varying maturity (alpha to beta). Notable examples include Open Geotechniek Studio, Open PDF Studio (their most popular repo), Open CAD Studio, and Monty IFC Viewer. Assessment. Strengths: coherent, future-oriented architecture; commitment to open standards and no vendor lock-in; reuse of proven foundations. Caveats: it's an early-stage, highly centralized effort (small board, founder-driven, foundation not yet formally established). Many "products" have very few commits and look more like project pages than usable software, and development is heavily AI-assisted, raising the usual questions about long-term code quality and maintainability. The focus is also strongly Dutch-market-specific (BRO, NEN, NL-BIM standards), with roughly 427 GitHub stars across 51 public repos. Bottom line: a serious, technically thoughtful, and genuinely active initiative — but a young and ambitious one whose breadth currently outpaces product maturity. Best viewed as a promising emerging ecosystem to watch rather than a production-ready toolset, with a few tools (e.g., Open PDF Studio, Open Geotechniek Studio) further along than the rest.
@RaphaëlVouilloz said:
That sounds great! Could someone give me a brief history of what OpenAEC is?
Is there a connection to IfcOpenShell or OSARCH? Do they develop their own software?
I didn't know about Open CAD Studio for example, is that more advanced than LibreCAD?
Thanks
It doesn't seem so.
I think "Linescad" is a personal project by Yorik and "OpenCadStudio" by HakanSeven.
Too many personal projects rowing in the same direction or reinventing the wheel.
It's always been said that there's strength in numbers.
OpenCadStudio; Open2DStudio; Linescad; Freecad; 2D Cad for Gnone; Librecad.............
I hope they don't all end up at the bottom of the pool.
Open CAD Studio was previously (for 4 months) know as H7CAD and is developed by @HakanSeven12 . It has been renamed and taken under the OpenAEC umbrella just recently. It is not a BIM software, but a generalist CAD software. It is an equivalent to AutoCAD - it's native format is DWG. From what I was able to observe, Hakan prefers to create features first and refine them later :). The development is AI assisted. For interested users I would recommend to test it out, the application workflow is very similar to AutoCAD. Hakan is fixing reported bugs and missing features at lightning speed.
What is interesting is that it is using new open source DWG read/write library acadrust . From my testing it is quite impressive how it can handle DWG files for such a young project. Lots of bugs and limitations still, but quite impressive neverthless.
LinesCAD is a new project by Yorik van Havre. It aims to be a BIM software based on native IFC modeling base (IfcOpenShell). The project is has a strict non-AI policy.
Open CAD Studio is one of the so called "AutoCAD clones", I guess the main aim is to be fairly close to AutoCAD in terms of features and workflow.
There are many such products out there, most of them commercial payed and relatively well known (BricsCAD, ZCAD GStarCAD etc), some few are open source but typically very limited and as far as I'm aware always DXF based. OpenCAD studio is the first attempt at a full featured open source clone of the "industry standard" by Autodesk that natively uses DWG file format, not DXF, and claims to do ACIS Solid based 3D modelling.
I've been playing with some of the betas and it is still very janky and somewhat unusable for anything serious, but is very early days and it has been improving daily. It is tagged as "community" in the link, so I assume it is not "officially" part of OpenAEC, but likeminded.
LibreCAD is a fork of QCAD and by design far simpler, no 3D stuff, no DWG, and workflow and UI wise while similar doesn't aim to copy AutoCAD.
Linescad is a FreeCAD based application focused on AEC by the great Yorik, who also works in the AEC features of FreeCAD itself (I think). Probably with the aim of gaining more freedom to do what AEC specifically needs.
But yeah, with the emergence of AI there is so much going on right now it is hard to keep up. There also seems to be a lot of redundancy and duplication of efforts sadly, but that is also the strength of open source. Great news still, not all is grim about AI I supposed.
One thing I don't see pop up much though, is end-user facing BIM authoring like Bonsai does. That is still unique to OSArch and one of our strengths. I'd love to see it valued more and invested in. ;)
As far as I know LinesCAD is not FreeCAD based. It being build on top of some of the similar libraries as FreeCAD (Qt, Coin3D, IfcOpenShell, but it is being created from scratch.
@semhustej said:
As far as I know LinesCAD is not FreeCAD based. It being build on top of some of the similar libraries as FreeCAD (Qt, Coin3D, IfcOpenShell, but it is being created from scratch.
Right you are, my mistake, must have misread it somewhere.
I know two of the core team (also the founder) and have seen some things of them and talked with them. Super great initiative, only thing it can crash on is funding. Open source foundations are difficult to start and keep going, people are not used to donation based usage somehow. They have a very strong base with a very driven and idealistic founder.
@Gorgious said:
I might as well share the insight I got from asking Claude (Do your own research, I asked it to be as objective as possible, but I think this is a good overview after a bit of digging on my own).
My own insight :
To be perfectly honest I'd like a little more insights into how it works and people actually using it before trying it myself. Got a weird alert after downloading one of the executables. It might just be a packaging problem, it might be something else. Great thing is since it's OS anybody can delve into the source code and find potential problems. Proceed with caution. Cheers
OpenAEC Foundation — Summary
OpenAEC Foundation (currently "i.o." — a Dutch foundation in formation) is a Netherlands-based open-source initiative led by Maarten Vroegindeweij, an engineer with a long track record in open-source BIM tools. Its mission is to develop, support, and promote open-source software across the entire AEC chain (architecture, engineering, construction, plus civil/infrastructure work), with a stated goal of making the sector's software open source by end of 2026. All tools are licensed under LGPL-3.0. Architecture. The technical approach is consistent and modern: a single codebase per tool runs as web, desktop, and mobile apps. The stack is Rust (core logic: IFC parsing, validation, calculations) + Tauri 2.0 (lightweight desktop/mobile runtime, sub-10MB binaries) + WebAssembly (same Rust logic in the browser) + a lightweight HTML/CSS/JS frontend with Three.js for 3D. Interoperability centers on IFCX, an open format derived from buildingSMART's IFC standard. The design is explicitly "AI-ready," with MCP servers planned per tool. It builds on mature open-source projects (That Open Engine, Blender/Bonsai, IfcOpenShell, PDF.js) rather than reinventing them. Ecosystem. Around 30 "Studio" tools span the full AEC chain — geotechnics, structural calculation, BIM viewing/validation, energy, documents, CAD, planning, and ERP — at varying maturity (alpha to beta). Notable examples include Open Geotechniek Studio, Open PDF Studio (their most popular repo), Open CAD Studio, and Monty IFC Viewer. Assessment. Strengths: coherent, future-oriented architecture; commitment to open standards and no vendor lock-in; reuse of proven foundations. Caveats: it's an early-stage, highly centralized effort (small board, founder-driven, foundation not yet formally established). Many "products" have very few commits and look more like project pages than usable software, and development is heavily AI-assisted, raising the usual questions about long-term code quality and maintainability. The focus is also strongly Dutch-market-specific (BRO, NEN, NL-BIM standards), with roughly 427 GitHub stars across 51 public repos. Bottom line: a serious, technically thoughtful, and genuinely active initiative — but a young and ambitious one whose breadth currently outpaces product maturity. Best viewed as a promising emerging ecosystem to watch rather than a production-ready toolset, with a few tools (e.g., Open PDF Studio, Open Geotechniek Studio) further along than the rest.
Hi all.
Dutch builder here, so this hits close to home. Went through the whole roadmap and two things stood out.
One: there's no clash detection in the lineup. BIM Validator covers data validation (IDS/ILS), BCF Manager covers the issue round-trip, but nothing in between actually finds geometric clashes. I build ClashControl (free, open source, clash detection in the browser — BCF 2.1/3.0, IDS, NL Basis ILS checks www.clashcontro.io), so I'm obviously biased, but it does make me wonder whether detection is considered out of scope or just not built yet. Happy to compare notes either way — we hit a lot of the same walls they're about to hit with WASM geometry in the browser.
Two: the "MCP server per tool" plan is the part I'd watch. We shipped exactly that for ClashControl a while back and the lesson was that the hard part isn't the protocol, it's deciding which operations are safe to expose to a non-deterministic caller. Curious how they'll handle that across 30 tools.
Comments
Wow, this looks promising. Although the deadline to develop 30 apps with a core team of 4 within one year seems a bit... optimistic. Will be a nice crash test for how "vibe coded" technical apps actually bring value to the OSS environment. Will keep an eye on it. Cheers
@Gorgious
..all in IFCX :))
That sounds great! Could someone give me a brief history of what OpenAEC is?
Is there a connection to IfcOpenShell or OSARCH? Do they develop their own software?
I didn't know about Open CAD Studio for example, is that more advanced than LibreCAD?
Thanks
I think Open CAD Studio is Linescad ?
Yeah I would be interested as well. To me it seems they have been developing for some time in private and have now opened the repos, which is why we don't know them.
From their statistics page it looks like they have started developing in 2018 (repos per month) but really got running 12/2025
I might as well share the insight I got from asking Claude (Do your own research, I asked it to be as objective as possible, but I think this is a good overview after a bit of digging on my own).
My own insight :
To be perfectly honest I'd like a little more insights into how it works and people actually using it before trying it myself. Got a weird alert after downloading one of the executables. It might just be a packaging problem, it might be something else. Great thing is since it's OS anybody can delve into the source code and find potential problems. Proceed with caution. Cheers
OpenAEC Foundation — Summary
OpenAEC Foundation (currently "i.o." — a Dutch foundation in formation) is a Netherlands-based open-source initiative led by Maarten Vroegindeweij, an engineer with a long track record in open-source BIM tools. Its mission is to develop, support, and promote open-source software across the entire AEC chain (architecture, engineering, construction, plus civil/infrastructure work), with a stated goal of making the sector's software open source by end of 2026. All tools are licensed under LGPL-3.0.
Architecture. The technical approach is consistent and modern: a single codebase per tool runs as web, desktop, and mobile apps. The stack is Rust (core logic: IFC parsing, validation, calculations) + Tauri 2.0 (lightweight desktop/mobile runtime, sub-10MB binaries) + WebAssembly (same Rust logic in the browser) + a lightweight HTML/CSS/JS frontend with Three.js for 3D. Interoperability centers on IFCX, an open format derived from buildingSMART's IFC standard. The design is explicitly "AI-ready," with MCP servers planned per tool. It builds on mature open-source projects (That Open Engine, Blender/Bonsai, IfcOpenShell, PDF.js) rather than reinventing them.
Ecosystem. Around 30 "Studio" tools span the full AEC chain — geotechnics, structural calculation, BIM viewing/validation, energy, documents, CAD, planning, and ERP — at varying maturity (alpha to beta). Notable examples include Open Geotechniek Studio, Open PDF Studio (their most popular repo), Open CAD Studio, and Monty IFC Viewer.
Assessment. Strengths: coherent, future-oriented architecture; commitment to open standards and no vendor lock-in; reuse of proven foundations. Caveats: it's an early-stage, highly centralized effort (small board, founder-driven, foundation not yet formally established). Many "products" have very few commits and look more like project pages than usable software, and development is heavily AI-assisted, raising the usual questions about long-term code quality and maintainability. The focus is also strongly Dutch-market-specific (BRO, NEN, NL-BIM standards), with roughly 427 GitHub stars across 51 public repos.
Bottom line: a serious, technically thoughtful, and genuinely active initiative — but a young and ambitious one whose breadth currently outpaces product maturity. Best viewed as a promising emerging ecosystem to watch rather than a production-ready toolset, with a few tools (e.g., Open PDF Studio, Open Geotechniek Studio) further along than the rest.
It doesn't seem so.
I think "Linescad" is a personal project by Yorik and "OpenCadStudio" by HakanSeven.
Too many personal projects rowing in the same direction or reinventing the wheel.
It's always been said that there's strength in numbers.
OpenCadStudio; Open2DStudio; Linescad; Freecad; 2D Cad for Gnone; Librecad.............
I hope they don't all end up at the bottom of the pool.
That is not correct.
Open CAD Studio was previously (for 4 months) know as H7CAD and is developed by @HakanSeven12 . It has been renamed and taken under the OpenAEC umbrella just recently. It is not a BIM software, but a generalist CAD software. It is an equivalent to AutoCAD - it's native format is DWG. From what I was able to observe, Hakan prefers to create features first and refine them later :). The development is AI assisted. For interested users I would recommend to test it out, the application workflow is very similar to AutoCAD. Hakan is fixing reported bugs and missing features at lightning speed.
What is interesting is that it is using new open source DWG read/write library acadrust . From my testing it is quite impressive how it can handle DWG files for such a young project. Lots of bugs and limitations still, but quite impressive neverthless.
LinesCAD is a new project by Yorik van Havre. It aims to be a BIM software based on native IFC modeling base (IfcOpenShell). The project is has a strict non-AI policy.
Open CAD Studio is one of the so called "AutoCAD clones", I guess the main aim is to be fairly close to AutoCAD in terms of features and workflow.
There are many such products out there, most of them commercial payed and relatively well known (BricsCAD, ZCAD GStarCAD etc), some few are open source but typically very limited and as far as I'm aware always DXF based. OpenCAD studio is the first attempt at a full featured open source clone of the "industry standard" by Autodesk that natively uses DWG file format, not DXF, and claims to do ACIS Solid based 3D modelling.
I've been playing with some of the betas and it is still very janky and somewhat unusable for anything serious, but is very early days and it has been improving daily. It is tagged as "community" in the link, so I assume it is not "officially" part of OpenAEC, but likeminded.
LibreCAD is a fork of QCAD and by design far simpler, no 3D stuff, no DWG, and workflow and UI wise while similar doesn't aim to copy AutoCAD.
Linescad is a FreeCAD based application focused on AEC by the great Yorik, who also works in the AEC features of FreeCAD itself (I think). Probably with the aim of gaining more freedom to do what AEC specifically needs.
But yeah, with the emergence of AI there is so much going on right now it is hard to keep up. There also seems to be a lot of redundancy and duplication of efforts sadly, but that is also the strength of open source. Great news still, not all is grim about AI I supposed.
One thing I don't see pop up much though, is end-user facing BIM authoring like Bonsai does. That is still unique to OSArch and one of our strengths. I'd love to see it valued more and invested in. ;)
As far as I know LinesCAD is not FreeCAD based. It being build on top of some of the similar libraries as FreeCAD (Qt, Coin3D, IfcOpenShell, but it is being created from scratch.
Right you are, my mistake, must have misread it somewhere.
I know two of the core team (also the founder) and have seen some things of them and talked with them. Super great initiative, only thing it can crash on is funding. Open source foundations are difficult to start and keep going, people are not used to donation based usage somehow. They have a very strong base with a very driven and idealistic founder.
Hi all.
Dutch builder here, so this hits close to home. Went through the whole roadmap and two things stood out.
One: there's no clash detection in the lineup. BIM Validator covers data validation (IDS/ILS), BCF Manager covers the issue round-trip, but nothing in between actually finds geometric clashes. I build ClashControl (free, open source, clash detection in the browser — BCF 2.1/3.0, IDS, NL Basis ILS checks www.clashcontro.io), so I'm obviously biased, but it does make me wonder whether detection is considered out of scope or just not built yet. Happy to compare notes either way — we hit a lot of the same walls they're about to hit with WASM geometry in the browser.
Two: the "MCP server per tool" plan is the part I'd watch. We shipped exactly that for ClashControl a while back and the lesson was that the hard part isn't the protocol, it's deciding which operations are safe to expose to a non-deterministic caller. Curious how they'll handle that across 30 tools.