Every issue is a new revision
Documents are append-only. Superseded revisions stay readable and stay marked, so nobody builds from a drawing that was replaced last Thursday.
Document control · ISO 19650-aligned
Prove what you issued, to whom, and when.
Issue.Prove.Hand over.
aptEDMS keeps controlled documents straight: every revision, review, transmittal and retention rule in one register. Built for engineering and capital projects, and for any organisation that has to answer an auditor with more than a shared drive and a good memory.
Live demo · no sign-up · a sample EPC project with documents, reviews and transmittals in it
DRAFT
WORK IN PROGRESS
Document
…-DR-P-0412
Type
Drawing
Rev
P01
Suitability
S0
ISO 19650 numbering & suitability
ISO 19475 storage policy
CFIHOS handover
Append-only audit trail
Checksums on every file
The lifecycle
Six states, one document, and a trail that only ever grows.
Every issue is a new revision, never an overwrite. The register knows which state a document is in and who is holding it; the audit trail records how it got there and cannot be edited afterwards.
- P01 Draft
- P02 Issued for review
- P03 Issued for HAZOP
- P04 Issued for approval
- C01 Issued for construction
- C02 As-built
DRAFT
WORK IN PROGRESS
Document
…-DR-P-0412
Type
Drawing
Rev
P01
Suitability
S0
The author's own copy. Nobody outside the originating team can see it, and no revision has been issued yet.
Audit trail
- 04 MAR 2026 · 09:12 Created at revision P01 A. Rahman · Process
Not only drawings
A controlled document is anything you would have to defend.
If it carries a revision, an approval and a record of who received it, aptEDMS handles it the same way, whether it is a general arrangement or a calibration certificate.
-
Drawings & models
General arrangements, P&IDs, isometrics and 3D models, viewed and marked up in the browser.
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Specifications & reports
Datasheets, calculations, method statements and studies, with the text itself indexed for search.
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Procedures & policies
Operating procedures and management-system documents, with retention rules and periodic review.
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Certificates & records
Test, calibration and inspection records: the evidence a handover pack or an audit is built from.
Capabilities
Built for the register, not the demo.
Reviews that chase themselves
Named reviewers, due dates counted in working days, automatic reminders, and cover for anyone who is away. Comments come back consolidated into one response.
Issue you can prove
Issue a set as a transmittal against a distribution matrix, sealed as a ZIP with a hash over the manifest, so what arrived can be checked against what was sent.
Search that knows a document number
Full-text search across numbers, titles, disciplines and extracted text, weighted so a document number matches first. Saved views and bulk edit for the rest.
Review without a desktop viewer
Revision clouds, callouts, stamps, layers and calibrated measurement and take-off, in the browser. Markups are saved against the revision they were drawn on.
Reports without a data request
Build a report by dragging fields, schedule it, and export to PDF or Excel. Overdue reviews, progress by discipline and issue history come as standard.
Keep it as long as you must, then dispose of it
Retention rules, legal hold, and a companion-PDF rule so a file is still openable years later. Checksums are verified on a sweep, not just at upload.
Permissions you can defend at audit
Per-project roles enforced by the database itself, not just the interface. Single sign-on, SCIM provisioning and two-factor authentication.
What it looks like
The register, the revision, the proof.
Three screens from the demo that is linked at the top of this page, not a rendering and not a concept.
Every revision, and why
Rev B, IFC, 3.1 MB, uploaded by name and date, against the change that caused it: “Incorporated client comments from review cycle 2.” The integrity column carries the checksum.
A register, not a folder
Discipline, type, revision and status are columns you filter, not a naming convention you have to remember and a folder tree you have to trust.
Markup that stays with its revision
Comment, measure and stamp in the browser. Markup is anchored to the revision it was made against, so it never silently reattaches to a drawing nobody reviewed.
Assurance
Measured against the standards, and honest about the score.
Most systems in this market say “compliant” and leave it there. aptEDMS publishes the clause-by-clause assessment instead, including the clauses it does not meet yet, in the same voice as the ones it does.
A claim you can check is worth more than a claim you have to believe.
- ISO 19650
- Numbering and naming, suitability codes and revision codes, so a document is legible to anyone who has worked to the standard.
- ISO 19475
- A written storage policy and risk assessment, and an assessment of every clause: six areas conformant, three partial, seven not yet built.
- CFIHOS
- Reference data, facility tree and tag register, so the handover package is assembled as the project runs rather than at the end of it.
Against the field
Marked the way we mark everything else.
Every other comparison table uses filled and empty circles. We control documents for a living, so this one is marked in review codes, and the same hand marked us.
- Does it, as specified
- Does it with conditions
- Does not do it
| Capability | aptEDMS | Aconex | Asite | FusionLive | Procore | ACC | e-Builder |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status transitions enforced in the database The database refuses an illegal transition; it is not a rule in application code | A | C | C | C | C | C | C |
| Append-only audit trail No UPDATE or DELETE policy for any role, administrators included | A | B | B | B | B | B | B |
| Reviewers and recipients cost nothing You pay only for the people who upload, issue and approve | A | B | C | B | A | C | B |
| Price published A figure anyone can read, without a sales call. B means it is published only on a government framework, not by the vendor. | A | B | A | B | C | B | C |
| SHA-256 integrity on every revision | A | B | B | B | C | B | C |
| ISO 19650 naming validation Not built. The standards section says so too. | C | A | A | A | B | A | B |
| Desktop CAD sync agent Not built. | C | A | B | A | B | A | B |
| Virus scanning on upload Not built. | C | A | A | A | A | A | A |
Three of those C’s are ours. We would rather you found them here than three weeks into an evaluation. The reasoning behind every mark is on the comparison page.
Who it is for
Wherever a document has to be controlled, not just stored.
Energy & process
Oil, gas, petrochemical and renewables, from FEED through commissioning to operations.
Water & utilities
Asset owners running long capital programmes alongside a live operational estate.
Transport & infrastructure
Multi-party projects where the question is always which revision the contractor built to.
Manufacturing & life sciences
Plants where a procedure, a change record and a calibration certificate are all controlled documents.
Public sector
Organisations with statutory retention and a duty to produce records on request.
Engineering consultancies
Firms issuing to many clients at once, each with its own numbering and distribution rules.
Pricing
Priced per project. Everyone on it signs in.
One price per project, however many people work on it. Controllers, reviewers, the client’s engineers, the supply chain: everybody gets a login, because a common data environment with people missing from it is not one.
The meter follows our costs, and our costs move with documents, not people: storing a drawing costs something; a reviewer opening it costs close to nothing. A price per seat taxes the exact behaviour the product is sold on. Worse, it invites shared logins, and a shared login quietly breaks the one thing an audit trail is for: knowing who did what.
A project
From £400 a month
Unlimited users · 1 TB of documents · invoiced, purchase orders welcome
- Monthly or annual; annual takes two months off. No contract term, cancelled by telling us
- Beyond the first terabyte (laser scans, model histories, programme-scale registers), storage is priced per terabyte and agreed up front, never per person: start a conversation
- Someone who only needs to verify a sealed transmittal never needs an account at all: verification that required our cooperation would not be verification
Every project includes all of it
There is no Professional edition and no Enterprise edition. The price moves with the project; the product does not move at all.
- Unlimited users, on both sides of the contract
- Unlimited documents and revisions within the storage allowance
- Viewer, markup, measurement and stamps
- Workflows, transmittals, distribution and the full audit trail
- SSO / OIDC, API access and custom workflow definitions
- Choice of data residency
And before any conversation: the demo opens without a sign-up and stays open, with every feature switched on and nothing kept back for a sales call.
This market prices three ways. Per seat, everyone billed: Asite publishes £15–£60 a user; FusionLive’s G‑Cloud filing runs £35 down to £19 with a 25‑licence minimum. Per project: Trimble’s filing runs £300 to £5,000 a month by project value, unlimited users. And quote‑only: Aconex, Autodesk and Bentley publish no price at all. We price the second way, because that is where the costs actually are — and we publish it.
Competitor figures are each vendor’s own published rate card: Asite’s pricing page, Idox’s G‑Cloud filing (May 2024) and Trimble’s G‑Cloud filing (December 2025). We have quoted them rather than characterised them, as at the dates shown; if one has moved, this page is wrong until we fix it, and we would like to know.
Bentley ProjectWise
£44,364 a year
Minimum, per data centre, before a single named user. A “Validate” seat is £1,670 a year on top.
Autodesk Construction Cloud
15–30% dormant
Assigned seats are billed whether or not the person ever signs in.
aptEDMS
£400 a month
One project, everyone on it. No seat floor, no data-centre floor, no implementation fee, no dormant-seat bill: a seat cannot be dormant, because seats are not the meter.
Billed per project, month to month, with setup included. If you leave, your register exports to CSV and your documents download as they went in: originals, revisions and the audit trail. Nothing you issued stops being provable because you stopped paying.
Worth checking against whoever else you are considering. FusionLive’s published terms reserve “a reasonable fee for the retrieval and delivery of the Licensee’s data”; Trimble’s Viewpoint For Projects lists end-of-contract extraction at £1,750 per project. Leaving is a priced event almost everywhere in this market. It is not here.
Questions we get asked
Where it runs, who can read it, and what happens if you leave.
Do reviewers need a licence?
Nobody needs a licence individually. A project is priced as a project, and everyone working on it signs in under it: controllers, reviewers, the client, the supply chain. And someone who only needs to verify a sealed transmittal needs no account at all, ever: verification that depended on our cooperation would not be verification.
We have big 3D models and laser scans. Will 1 TB last?
Probably not, and the price is built for that. A laser-scan campaign on one offshore platform can run past a terabyte on its own, and a federated design model republished weekly for two years leaves a long revision history, which we keep, all of it, because a register that quietly discards old revisions is not a register. The first terabyte is included and is sized for the controlled register itself: drawings, documents and published models. Beyond it, storage is priced per terabyte and agreed before you commit to anything, never per person, and never as a surprise on an invoice. Tell us what you are storing and we will put a number on it.
Who can read my documents?
Access is enforced in the database, not the application. Every query runs under PostgreSQL row-level security tied to your identity, so a bug in the API cannot return a document you are not entitled to — the database refuses before the application gets the chance.
Is the audit trail really immutable?
Revisions and workflow actions are append-only at the database level. There is no UPDATE or DELETE policy on those tables for any role, administrators included. An override is a new row recording who overrode what and why, never an edit to the old one.
What happens if I stop paying?
Export the register to CSV and download every document, revision and audit entry. Both are free, and neither waits on a final invoice.
Is it ISO 19650 compliant?
Partly, and the standards section says exactly which clauses are not met yet. Naming validation is not built. We would rather you knew now.
Try it
Open the register and look for yourself.
The demo runs on a sample project with documents, revisions, reviews and transmittals already in it. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.
No sign-up · nothing to install