Pirros versus Content Management Tools
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.
Storage vs self-sustaining system
AVAIL, Kinship, Hive and CMS tools store standards. Pirros builds and maintains them.
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Pirros is a system that learns from real project work.
It shows what’s actually being used, what meets standards, and what should be reused—automatically.
CMS tools are static libraries
You decide what goes in. You keep it updated. If it’s not manually approved, it doesn’t exist.
An incomplete library vs everything you need
Details and families—found instantly, even if no one tagged them or named them perfectly.
CMS tools let you search only pre-approved standard content
Everything else is invisible.
Pirros lets you search across all project content, past and present, in a controlled way
With no extra work. Plus, reference-only checks and balances to prevent blind copy & pastes.
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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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Traditional CMS tools aren’t built for modern firms
Traditional CMS tools like AVAIL, Kinship and Hive were built to host your design content, period. Not to help you standardize and reuse it. They require curation, manual upkeep, and typically can’t keep up with the design production velocity your projects require.
Pirros is natively built to learn from every Revit project, surfacing what works, what meets standards, and what should be reused—so your team builds smarter, not harder.
Modern Content Intelligence
Fueled by next-gen intelligence.
Computer vision, AI, and optical character recognition automatially maintain assets.
Traditional Content Management
Fueled by manual maintenance.
Manual tagging and naming convention adherence required to maintain assets.
The adoption hurdle:
We’ll clear it together
We hear, time and again, from firms frustrated with low adoption rates of traditional CMS tools.
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.
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“We’re not trying to get you to click a button so we don’t have to talk to you next month. We’re here to make sure you’re actually successful with the platform.”
—Talar Grace, Former Designer & Pirros Head of Customer Success
👉 Get the practical guide on AEC software enablement
Nitty-gritty comparison:
Pirros vs CMS tools
(AVAIL, Hive, Kinship)
*Real quotes from real customers and community members who have spoken with us over the past year. Names redacted for privacy.
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
Traditional CMS Tools
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 a traditional CMS tool to Pirros.
Don't take our word for it
"After more than a year of evaluating tools including Pirros, 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
Here’s what else we've heard across calls with hundreds of architects and engineers who have experienced both traditional CMS tools and Pirros:
“Candidly, your UI is leaps and bounds better than other tools. The interactions in Pirros are better for our users at the end of the day. The other tools we tested were a little too clunky for our user base.”
“The firms getting value from digital tools these days are the ones doing the boring work: organizing information, structuring workflows. Pirros helped us do all this where others did not. When we have a question now, they’ll hop right on to a call with us.”
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“If you know what the things are named and tagged in AVAIL, then you can find stuff quickly. Most people don't know exactly what things are named, and so it takes them a while to poke and prod around various places to find things.”
“AVAIL to me, is the jack of all trades but master of none. It does some pretty good stuff. Just nothing as well as Pirros does it.”
“Kinship is missing the feedback loop that Pirros has built-in between production staff and BIM staff. Our users cannot request or rate content within Kinship, we’ve had to build workarounds with Zapier and Microsoft Forms.”
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“AVAIL, actually, is not cloud-based. Pirros being cloud-based, AVAIL is not (causes clunkiness)
"We have Kinship but haven’t had the time to curate it like we had hoped."
“Everybody here hates Hive. That’s the feedback we’ve gotten from our users. I can see that only 6% of the people in our office are actually getting their stuff from Hive. Everyone else, they're sneaking around it and going back to past projects.”
Accelerate design production. Without quality loss.
FAQs
What is the difference between Pirros and tools like AVAIL, Kinship and Hive?
AVAIL, Kinship and Hive are content management tools that store and organize the content you manually add to them. Pirros is a content intelligence platform that learns from your actual project work, automatically surfacing what is being used, what meets standards, and what should be reused—without manual tags and curation.
Why do firms abandon traditional CMS tools in favor of Pirros?
Low adoption is the most common reason. Traditional CMS tools require significant manual curation and ongoing administration that teams simply do not have time to maintain, leading to workarounds where staff bypass the tool entirely, severely limiting its ROI. Pirros eliminates this by automating the organization layer with AI, and partnering with firms on enablement from day one, so adoption becomes habit rather than effort.
Can non-Revit users collaborate using Pirros?
Yes. Traditional CMS tools limit sharing within the platform and offer static, low-quality previews with no markup capability. Pirros allows any team member, Revit user or not, to view, mark up and share content as a universal PDF, improving cross-team collaboration and new hire onboarding.
How quickly can a firm get started with Pirros?
Within 24 hours of connecting your Autodesk Construction Cloud account, your firm can have thousands of details and families accessible and immediately searchable, with no upfront tagging or naming convention work required. Firms can also choose to upload an RVT file, and even an individual detail.
What makes Pirros's search better than other Revit content management tools?
Most tools rely on manual tags and naming conventions, so if content was not labeled correctly it is effectively invisible. Pirros uses a proprietary blend of AI, computer vision and OCR to find content based on what it actually is, not what someone named it, making it possible to search across all past and present projects instantly. Pirros limits unwanted downloads from all past projects through “reference only” details.
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.