IFC & BIM guides

IFC — Industry Foundation Classes — is the open, vendor-neutral file format that lets a model authored in Revit, ArchiCAD, Tekla or Allplan be opened, checked and reused by anyone else on a project. That flexibility is also where the friction starts: an IFC that will not open, geometry that looks wrong after import, property sets that vanish on the way to Excel, files far too heavy to send. Every guide here starts from one of those real problems and ends with a workflow you can repeat.

How these guides are written. Everything is tested by the IFCfiles team on real, publicly available models — the buildingSMART Duplex, the KIT FZK Haus and large Tekla and Revit exports — with the software named in the article, and the free tools on this site are used only where they are genuinely the simplest option. Each article shows the date it was last revised; when a workflow changes we update the existing guide instead of publishing a near-duplicate. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.

What you will find. Fundamentals (what an IFC file is, IFC2X3 vs IFC4, IFC vs RVT vs DWG), everyday workflows (opening IFC without Revit, exporting from Revit correctly, converting IFC to Revit or DWG) and tooling reviews such as our comparison of free IFC viewers. New guides are added regularly — the newest are listed first.