Pirros versus Content Catalog
Instead of relying on manual organization, Pirros works differently.
Pirros analyzes your firm’s real project content—automatically organizing and surfacing what designers actually need, and helping firms build and maintain a standards library without months of manual administration. The secret? Pirros leverages AI and computer vision to understand the geometry and composition of content, plus usage patterns across projects, providing firms a living system that improves over time.
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AI-enabled search—no tags required
Pirros applies AI and computer vision to automatically ingest, analyze the composition and geometry of details and families, identify duplicates and similars, and organize them. Designers can instantly find what they need, despite imperfect knowledge or tagging.
Tags required
Content Catalog depends on robust tagging and perfect knowledge of what content exists and how it’s named. Imperfectly labeled content is invisible.
Heavy setup
Content Catalog takes significant setup before teams can rely it. No setup support is offered.
Set up in days, not months
Pirros is designed to work immediately. Upload your projects directly from Revit and Pirros automatically organizes content, making everything instantly searchable. Combined with hands-on implementation support, most firms roll out Pirros in days.
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A system that builds your standards library
Pirros helps your firm build and improve its standards library automatically. By analyzing how details are used across projects, Pirros surfaces commonly reused content and recommends what should become a standard. Teams can review, vet, and approve those suggestions directly in the platform.
Outside vetting
The entire standards vetting process occurs outside of Content Catalog versus inside of Pirros, putting more admin burden on your team.
Pirros is the AI operating system for AE firms.
We help thousands of firms around the world connect their project data, teams, and workflows to turn past design work into living systems for faster, higher-quality documentation deliverables.
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"Free" isn't free if it costs time and quality
Autodesk’s Content Catalog, formerly UNIFI Labs, is now included with your ACC subscription. But manual storage of an incomplete library furthers firm productivity loss and risk. Are those savings worth the risk? We don’t think so.
Nitty-gritty comparison:
Pirros vs Content Catalog
(Formerly UNIFI)
"The search only works if someone tagged it perfectly. Half the time we just redraw things because it's easier than searching."
"The search only works if someone tagged it perfectly. Half the time we just redraw things because it's easier than searching."
“In UNIFI, we have a holding folder for things ready for review. The theory is that we will review and then move, but that never happens in practice.”
“In UNIFI, we have a holding folder for things ready for review. The theory is that we will review and then move, but that never happens in practice.”
*Real quotes from real customers and community members who have spoken with us over the past year. Names redacted for privacy.
The adoption hurdle:
We’ll clear it together
We hear, time and again, from firms frustrated with low adoption rates of content management tools like Content Catalog.
They often take the blame themselves, saying it’s their firm’s “biggest failure.”
But it is not their fault.
Software in AEC fails when enablement is treated as secondary, optional, or entirely outsourced to already overextended teams. At Pirros, enablement is built into our product and partnership for all customers.
After more than a year of evaluating tools including Pirros, Content Catalog, AVAIL and Hive, Lake Flato chose Pirros because of its strengths in detail intelligence and usability. Lake Flato designers reported their experiences with Pirros were faster, easier to trust, and “hard to go back” from. So they moved to roll out Pirros firm-wide.
👉 Read more about Dan Stine, Director of Design Technology at Lake Flato, and his journey to firm-wide adoption of Pirros
Real-world productivity impact
Productivity loss is the most extreme when teams are searching for content. Inaccessible or unapproved content turns simple tasks into time-consuming hunts across files, folder, and models.
A larger, accessible pool of vetted content mitigates this risk.
What percentage of the content your teams are hunting for can be found immediately within the application, versus spending time hunting elsewhere?
of content needed is accessible in-platform
of content needed is outside
of content needed is accessible in-platform
of content needed is outside
*Based on aggregate data from across hundreds of customers who have moved from UNIFI or Content Catalog to Pirros.
Accelerate design production. Without quality loss.
FAQs
What is the difference between Pirros and Autodesk Content Catalog?
Autodesk Content Catalog is a static library that requires manual tagging, naming conventions, and ongoing upkeep to function. Pirros is an operating system that automatically indexes your Revit details and families using AI and computer vision—no manual organization required.
Is Autodesk Content Catalog really free?
Content Catalog is included with your ACC subscription (now called Autodesk Forma), but the hidden costs are real: Manual upkeep, low adoption rates, and lost productivity from incomplete search results. Firms consistently report that the time and cost of maintaining Content Catalog outweighs its price advantage.
How does Pirros’s search compare to Autodesk Content Catalog?
Pirros searches across all project content—past and present—using AI, computer vision and OCR, finding details and families based on what they actually are, not how they were tagged or named. Content Catalog relies on manual tagging and precise keywords, meaning anything outside the approved library is completely invisible to your team. Pirros’s built-in search across all projects notably allows the firm to specify content as reference-only to prevent unwanted downloads and uses.
Can non-Revit users collaborate using Pirros?
Yes. Pirros lets you mark up and share Revit details as universal PDFs, making collaboration possible with colleagues, partners who don't use Revit. Content Catalog has no equivalent feature—usage is limited to Revit users only.
How does Pirros handle standards library maintenance compared to Content Catalog?
Content Catalog requires manual upkeep and offline committee reviews that happen outside the tool itself. Pirros automatically surfaces content for review based on real project usage. Pirros also has built-in workflows for users to flag content for standard consideration, vet, approve or reject, and notify others once standards change.
Is it secure for my firm to upload our project content to Pirros?
Yes. Pirros is fully SOC2 Type II certified—the gold standard of cloud security compliance. SOC2 certifies that robust controls are in place regarding data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. Pirros operates on AWS infrastructure; the same cloud-based infrastructure that Autodesk uses to host Revit models.
Does my project content remain private to my firm once hosted on Pirros?
Yes. When firms connect their Revit content to Pirros, that content remains with a workspace private to that firm only, never shared with other firms, and never used by Pirros to train models.