Why we built a web-based takeoff tool when Bluebeam already exists

The first time we sat next to an electrical estimator doing a real bid, three things stood out. He was running Bluebeam in a Parallels VM on a Mac because his shop didn’t own a Windows machine. He was tabbing between Bluebeam and an Excel spreadsheet every thirty seconds because his counts had to live in Excel to do anything useful with them. And he’d just renewed a per-seat license his shop couldn’t reuse — they hire seasonal estimators, and the licenses never came with them.

The job he was doing — count fixtures, measure runs, group by circuit, hand off a bill of materials — has been a job since before computers. The software he was doing it with hadn’t kept up.

The state of the art

The three serious takeoff tools in 2026 are still Bluebeam Revu (2002), PlanSwift (2008), and On-Screen Takeoff (1996, originally MS-DOS). All Windows-only. All designed to be bought by general contractors and tolerated by everyone else.

These are all good products. Bluebeam in particular is a great PDF tool that estimators happened to stretch into takeoff. Tool sets, calibration, quantities — every feature is there, technically. It’s just that “technically there” and “fits a small electrical shop’s actual workflow” are different bars.

The web-based alternatives we found split into two groups. The lightweight ones were missing core features (per-page scale, real linear measurements, exportable BOMs). The serious ones were enterprise SaaS — heavyweight, with onboarding and minimums that didn’t make sense for a five-person shop.

There was nothing built for the small contractor who works on a Mac, hires seasonal estimators, and bids fifteen jobs a year.

What we wanted instead

When we started, we wrote down what a takeoff tool would look like if you started from scratch today. The list was short:

Runs in a browser. Mac, Windows, Linux, your sister’s Chromebook. No installer. No VM. No license server. Open a URL, sign in, do the work.
Transparent, per-user pricing. Monthly or annual, priced per user, with volume discounts as your team grows — and a calculator on the pricing page so there are no surprises.
Built around the property-and-grouping workflow estimators actually use. Not retrofitted on top of a PDF markup tool. Every annotation knows its template; every template defines its own properties; the BOM rolls up the way the estimate needs it without a separate spreadsheet.
Real collaboration. Two estimators on the same plan in the same browser session, seeing each other’s cursors. No “are you in the file right now?”
Honest about what’s missing. No imaginary integrations. No vaporware. Public roadmap, public changelog, public field notes.

What’s actually different

The thing that’s hard to convey from a feature list is the property model. Bluebeam’s tool sets are great for visual markup but flat as data — a symbol is a symbol. PlanSwift’s assemblies are closer but still tied to a fixed symbol catalogue.

In TakeOn, a Lighting Fixture template has whatever properties you say it does — type (value list), wattage (number), voltage (value list), circuit (sticky text), mount (value list). Drop ten fixtures on the page, vary their properties, and they automatically group by whatever combination you’ve given them. Type A 277V on circuit L-1? That’s one group with one count. Type B 120V on circuit L-2? Different group, different count. The BOM is the rollup; the plan is the source of truth; nothing lives in Excel.

We’ve seen estimators move their entire workflow off Bluebeam tool sets in fifteen minutes once they get this. It’s not a feature; it’s the spine of the product.

What’s not different (yet)

We don’t have everything Bluebeam has, and we’d rather say that out loud than pretend.

Imports from existing Bluebeam files. On the roadmap, not shipped. Today you re-create tool sets as TakeOn templates (often faster than you’d expect).
Mobile field-edit. Read-only on phones works fine; touch markup isn’t there yet. On the roadmap.
A deep library of pre-built electrical content. TakeOn is template-first, not catalogue-first. The trade-off is you build (or import) the symbols your shop actually uses instead of getting a thousand you don’t.
Custom report generation. Excel and PDF exports cover the basics; bid- package output with cover sheets and submittal pages is a future ask.

We list these on the features page roadmap so you can hold us to it.

Who this is for

If you’re a small or mid-size electrical contractor — five to fifty bids a year, one or two estimators, who want a takeoff tool built for how you actually work — TakeOn is built for you. If you’re at a big shop with a deeply established Bluebeam workflow, you can still use TakeOn alongside it, and we’d love your feedback, but we won’t pretend the migration math is the same.

If that sounds right, schedule a demo and we’ll walk you through it on a real plan set. There’s nothing to install — it all runs in the browser.