When I waited too long for that upgrade. . .

This month, Jo's column starts differently: we set AI loose on CAD community forums — Autodesk's community boards, RevitForum, CADmunity, and others — looking for how practitioners are talking about the software version they know they should have left behind by now. The research and draft both came out of that process; we took it from there. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, we found an overall consensus. Staying put can be a plan to stay sane and keep drawings and data clean, until most bugs are worked out or clients are ready to upgrade. Here's what practitioners had to say about what caused them to finally take the plunge.

Image source: Selim/stock.adobe.com.

A user on CADmunity SOLIDWORKS forum who runs a one-person shop, and until last week he saw no reason to think too much about his software upgrades. He's been renewing his subscription every year on autopilot, working with versions from 2012 and 2020 — a thirteen-year-old release and a six-year-old one, running side by side, while 2026 sits quiet. Nothing really forced the upgrade issue for him until his reseller stopped offering one-year renewals. Suddenly he was faced with 2- or 3-year terms instead and he had to ask himself what he was even paying for.

Don’t Get Burned!

Some users are having a similar reckoning because their answer to "why are you behind" is "I got burned once." One Revit user on Autodesk's forum shared that he used to upgrade immediately after every release, until a schema issue in an earlier version caused serious problems. Now he waits — on the current release until year-end, at least, unless something pushes him to the update.

Not everyone gets to choose their painpoint, though. In the same thread, a consulting engineer described having active projects stuck on Revit 2021 because at his firm, they can't upgrade until the architect they're working under upgrades. He called maintaining templates and libraries across every version he's forced to support "an administrative nightmare." If you're following someone else's schedule, "how many versions behind are you" isn't a question you can really answer — it's not your decision to make.

Patience Policy

Some firms have made the delay itself into policy. One user in that same conversation said his office deliberately starts using each Revit version in the calendar year matching its number — Revit 2026 in 2026, not before. While this is technically a year behind, it’s a clear decision to wait for the technology to work out the kinks, which can be a safe place to stand.

Ready, Set, Go!

And then there's what actually happens when someone finally pulls the trigger. Not everyone gets relief, and not everyone gets disaster — it can be anticlimactic for many. One user in the Revit 2027 thread reported back after upgrading: "Upgraded today, just for the sake of being up to date." The verdict: one minor feature worth having, MEP workflows that now take more clicks for the same result, and nothing else worth the change.

Put it together and sometimes the reason users put off the upgrade can be that the cost of staying put is smaller than the cost of finding out what's broken in the new version. Going by what's in these threads, that bet pays off — right up until a billing term changes or a consultant relationship forces your hand.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

It wasn't all holdouts and horror stories, though. A few accounts cut against the caution. One SOLIDWORKS user on CADmunity skipped an entire release — jumping straight from 2023 to 2025 — and reported it's been stable, with no more crashes than the version they left behind. Another, on the same thread, admitted that simply holding at the older version "hasn't been so bad, actually" — the delay itself causing no damage worth mentioning. On the Revit side, one long-time user on Revit Forum pushed back hard on the idea that models need to be stepped through one version at a time at all, describing having jumped a model forward more than a decade in a single move without incident. And on Autodesk's forum, one office reported running Windows 11 across AutoCAD versions 2022 through 2025 with, in their words, no issues.

None of these are guarantees — they're anecdotes, same as the cautionary ones — but they're a reminder that "we finally did it and it was fine" is also a real outcome.

Jo Suggests. . .

So, how do you actually do this well? Watch for the warning signs the practitioners in these threads kept naming: a fast follow-up patch after a release (more than one person read that as "they didn't nail it the first time"), a version whose schema changed a lot, or legacy files that misbehave under the new version. None of those are reasons to panic, but they ARE reasons to test before you commit. Protect yourself by keeping a real record of what's tying you to the old version and why and be sure to test on a detached copy before you work on live projects.

None of this matters if you're not also paying attention to your clients and collaborators. Several people in this research weren't stuck by choice — they were locked to whatever version a client, architect, or consultant was using, sometimes for years. If someone else controls your upgrade plans, find out who they are and check in with them at the start of every project — don't wait to discover it mid-migration.

This week's Just Tell Jo newsletter is sponsored by:  Vectorworks.