Is IFCfiles really free?

Yes. The viewer and all six tools are free with no account, no file-size cap imposed by us and no watermark. The free tier is funded by non-intrusive display advertising. A paid Premium tier with permanent share links is planned; the free tools will stay free.

Do you ever see or store my IFC files?

No. Every tool parses your file with WebAssembly inside your browser tab. There is no upload endpoint on this site — you can confirm it in your browser's Network panel. When you close the tab, the model is gone.

What software powers the viewer?

The 3D viewer is built on the open source That Open Company components (MIT license), which run the web-ifc parser compiled to WebAssembly and render with Three.js. The converters and the validator use web-ifc directly plus our own STEP-level serializer.

Can I suggest a tool or report a bug?

Please do — the roadmap is driven by what people ask for. Use the contact page and tell us the browser, the file size and the IFC schema (IFC2X3 or IFC4) if it is a bug report. You do not need to send us the model.

About IFCfiles

Free IFC tools, built by people who open IFC files for a living

ifcfiles.com is an independent, free online IFC viewer and toolbox for architects, engineers, BIM coordinators and students. Everything on this site — the 3D viewer, the converters, the validator — runs entirely inside your browser. Your model files never leave your device.

Who we are

IFCfiles is run by the small team behind a network of free resource sites for the AEC industry: LibreriaCAD (CAD blocks and details), Library Revit (Revit families), SKP Viewer (online SketchUp viewer), BIM Viewer and Libreria Ingeniero. Together these sites serve hundreds of thousands of designers and engineers every month, and they all follow the same rule: useful, free, no account required.

We are not a software vendor and we do not sell BIM consulting. We build small, focused web tools for the file-format problems we kept running into ourselves — an IFC that will not open, a model that is far too heavy to email, a schedule that has to be rebuilt in Excel because the model came from another authoring tool.

Why we rebuilt IFCfiles to run 100% in the browser

The first version of ifcfiles.com was a cloud viewer: you uploaded a model, a server converted it, and you viewed the result. That architecture had two problems. It depended on a third-party conversion service that eventually became paid, and — more importantly — it required people to upload building models that are often confidential to a server they did not control.

In 2026 we rebuilt the site from scratch on a different principle: the file is parsed and rendered on your machine, using WebAssembly. There is no upload endpoint on this domain at all. The consequences are the ones we wanted:

Privacy by architecture. We cannot see, store or leak your models, because they never reach us.
No limits imposed by us. The only cap is your device's memory — the viewer opens a 67 MB Tekla structural export on an ordinary laptop, and the data tools handle models with close to a million entities.
Speed. There is no queue and no upload time; a 118,000-element model is parsed and turned into an Excel workbook in about eleven seconds.

What you can do here

IFC Viewer — open one or several IFC files in 3D, browse the spatial tree, read properties, section the model, measure and save snapshots.
IFC to Excel — export every element with its property sets and quantities to an .xlsx workbook.
IFC Properties — search and inspect properties without opening a 3D scene.
IFC to glTF — convert geometry to .glb/.gltf for game engines, web pages and AR.
IFC Compressor — shrink IFC files losslessly (or with controlled precision) so they can actually be emailed.
IFC Merge — federate several IFC files into one.
IFC Validator — get a readable report of broken references, orphaned entities, missing geometry and corrupt files.

The guides and the What is an IFC file? pillar page cover the questions we get most often: opening IFC without Revit, IFC2X3 vs IFC4, exporting from Revit, and choosing a viewer.

How we test

Every tool is verified before it ships against real, publicly available IFC models — the buildingSMART Duplex apartment, the KIT FZK Haus and Institute models, and large exports from Tekla Structures, Revit and ArchiCAD — plus deliberately corrupted files. Outputs are cross-checked in third-party software: workbooks are opened in desktop Excel, glTF files in the Khronos reference viewer, compressed and merged models in BIMvision. The benchmark figures quoted on the site are numbers we actually measured, on the models named next to them.

Open source credit

The viewer is built on the That Open Company components and web-ifc, both released under the MIT license, rendering with Three.js. Spreadsheets are generated with SheetJS. We are grateful to those projects; without them a free, private, browser-only IFC viewer would not be possible.

How the site is funded

The free tools are supported by display advertising, kept out of the way of the viewer canvas and the tool workspace. We are preparing an optional Premium tier — permanent share links and batch processing — for teams that need the one thing a browser-only architecture cannot do alone. Nothing that is free today will move behind the paywall.

Editorial policy

Articles are written by the IFCfiles team and reflect our own testing, not vendor material. Each guide shows the date it was last revised; when a workflow changes (a new Revit release, a new IFC schema version) we update the article rather than publish a duplicate. If you spot an error, tell us and we will fix it and credit the correction.

Contact

Questions, bug reports, tool ideas and partnership enquiries: contact page or hello@ifcfiles.com. Privacy requests go to privacy@ifcfiles.com. We usually reply within two business days.