AutoCAD’s Hidden Costs: Why AV Professionals Are Overpaying
March 5, 2025 | LAST UPDATED ON March 5, 2025 BY VIBHAV SINGH
Selecting the right software for AV projects is crucial for maintaining efficiency, reducing costs, and ensuring seamless project execution. Many AV professionals turn to AutoCAD because it is widely known across the industry, but they fail to consider the real AutoCAD pricing involved in its application. From steep licensing fees to the extensive training needed, AutoCAD can be an enormous cost factor for AV companies.
Besides the initial cost, there are some hidden expenses that AV integrators need to be mindful of, which are the expenses that impact productivity, collaboration, and even project timelines. In this blog, we will look into the AutoCAD expenses that are often overlooked and explore other affordable options.
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How Much Does AutoCAD Upfront and Recurring Cost Your AV Business?
One major drawback of AutoCAD is its high subscription pricing, which can be a burden for AV firms.
- Expensive Licenses: A single AutoCAD subscription costs $175/month or $1,394/year. If an AV team needs multiple licenses for designers, engineers, and project managers, costs can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars annually.
- Limited Scalability: Many AV firms struggle with scaling their CAD designs with team collaboration due to these high costs. Buying additional licenses for collaboration can be a major expense.
- Cost-Effective Alternative: XTEN-AV provides AV-specific features at a lower price, saving on unnecessary expenses while still delivering automation, AI-assisted design, and pre-built AV libraries specifically for AV professionals.
For AV professionals seeking an even more budget-friendly, purpose-built solution, XTEN-AV can be a breakthrough.
Here is a price comparison table for AutoCAD and XTEN-AV’s pricing to provide you with clarity:
Features | AutoCAD | XTEN-AV |
Pricing model | Subscription Based | Subscription Based |
Monthly Cost | $175.96 per user | Basic: $66 per user Business: $72 per user |
Annual Cost | $1394.12 per user | Basic: $49 per user Business: $54 per user |
Free Trial | Available for 15 days | Available for 15 days |
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Why Learning AutoCAD Is a Costly Mistake for AV Professionals?
When it comes to AV system design, many professionals turn to AutoCAD for creating signal flow diagrams. While it’s a powerful tool, its steep learning curve and high training costs make it a challenging choice for AV professionals. As AutoCAD users can take weeks to learn the designing, however, XTEN-AV users can start designing within hours.
The Challenge of Learning AutoCAD
AutoCAD wasn’t built with AV professionals in mind. It’s a general-purpose CAD tool, which means you have to learn complex engineering concepts and design functionalities before applying them to AV layouts. Understanding layers, blocks, and intricate commands often requires formal training, an investment often through costly certification programs or self-paced learning that consumes valuable time.
Why AV Professionals Face an Even Tougher Learning Curve?
Unlike architects or engineers, AV designers don’t just need CAD knowledge; they need specialized AV skills. Signal flow, device connectivity, and AV-specific layouts require an understanding that goes beyond what typical CAD training covers. This means additional training and ongoing support costs, making the transition even harder.
A Smarter Alternative: XTEN-AV
In contrast to AutoCAD, XTEN-AV is the best AutoCAD alternative which is designed specifically for professionals with built-in AV functionalities for diagramming and proposals, along with AI capabilities that do away with the need for extensive CAD training. With AV workflows in mind, it enables users to produce professional signal flow diagrams without months of learning or costly training programs.
By choosing XTEN-AV, AV designers can focus on their projects rather than using multiple tools to design the schematic layouts. Turning to this solution will result in faster workflows, reduced training costs, and more time spent on actual AV design instead of learning how to use a complicated CAD tool.
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Why AutoCAD Isn’t Built for AV Projects?
AutoCAD is a popular CAD software, but it does not have industry-specific features for AV system design. AV professionals find it difficult to use it for their requirements, which results in extra time, effort, and expenses.
1. Lack of Industry-Specific Features
AV system planning needs accurate solutions for rack plans, cable paths, and speaker placement, but AutoCAD lacks all of these features. As these factors are crucial to AV professionals, they have to develop in-house solutions or use third-party plugins, which complicates the procedure and makes it less effective.
2. The Challenge of Customization
In AutoCAD, designers need to invest additional time and effort in customizing it. This involves:
- Creating special templates for AV plans.
- Applying third-party plugins to introduce lacking capabilities.
- Studying AutoCAD customization to make it AV-friendly.
- All this extra customization not only involves specialized expertise but also delays project schedules.
3. Why This is Expensive for AV Projects
The absence of embedded AV functionality in AutoCAD leads to:
- Increased expense from additional tools, software, and training.
- Extended project durations as designers need to adjust the software prior to application.
- Greater complexity, involving both AV CAD drawing expertise and AutoCAD proficiency.
- All these issues render AutoCAD less effective for AV professionals.
Although AutoCAD is a powerful and capable tool, it does not have built-in features specifically designed for AV designing, and because of this, AV designers have to spend more time and money to complete their projects.
XTEN-AV offers an AV-specific, custom-built solution that does away with the process of customization, which makes AV cad drafting more economical and efficient.
AutoCAD’s Ongoing Maintenance & Update Fees: The Unnecessary Expense for AV Firms
When selecting AV design software, it is critical to go beyond the initial cost and examine long-term maintenance fees. Programs such as AutoCAD, though powerful, include frequent updates and underlying costs that AV professionals may not require. A clear understanding of these ongoing fees can enable AV companies to make wiser investments.
Such updates can be useful for businesses that need the latest CAD innovations. Still, AV professionals tend to have established workflows to which they stick, so changes in software are not always necessary. Nevertheless, AutoCAD users still have to pay for these updates, even if they do not necessarily affect their day-to-day activities. AutoCAD requires high-performance hardware, which makes it very costly; however, with XTEN-AV, this cost is reduced as it has a cloud-based platform.
However, since AutoCAD is on a one-size-fits-all basis, AV professionals are charged for features and updates they don’t need, which adds up to overall costs without contributing substantial value to their workflows.
With XTEN-AV, professionals do not have to worry about the update as this cloud-based platform automatically gets updated without asking for any extra charges or maintenance fees which makes it easy for the user to provide better results.
AutoCAD vs. XTEN-AV: The Collaboration Features That Save Time & Money
Collaboration is a critical factor in AV system design, yet traditional CAD tools like AutoCAD fail to support real-time teamwork, leading to inefficiencies and costly errors. While AutoCAD’s $1394/year subscription includes cloud access, it lacks simultaneous multi-user editing, forcing teams into sequential workflows that delay project timelines and increase coordination challenges.
1. The Limitations of AutoCAD for AV Collaboration
As per the reviews on Capterra and G2, AutoCAD has the following limitations:
- No Real-Time Editing: Members of the team have to work on files separately, resulting in version conflicts and mismatches in design updates.
- Reliance on Outside Communication Devices: AV techs tend to use Slack or email for teamwork, putting them at a higher risk for miscommunication. In one incident, a company lost $14,000 from improperly applied amplifier specs from an email exchange.
Limited Mobile Usability: 73% of AV technicians need laptops on-site since AutoCAD’s mobile editing features are still limited, and on-the-spot adjustments are not easy.
2. How XTEN-AV's X-DRAW Solves These Pain Points
XTEN-AV’s X-DRAW platform is designed for AV professionals, providing a seamless, real-time collaborative environment with key advantages:
- User Access Levels: Teams can seamlessly collaborate on projects by sharing designs with different members within the organization. With role-based access controls, including Super Admin, Admin, General User, Technical User, and Sales, users can assign permissions to ensure the right level of access for each team member. This structured approach enhances security, streamlines workflows, and enables efficient project management.
- Embedded Chatter Tool: Includes an in-built communication system attached directly to target device blocks, automatically marking cable length differences and design discrepancies for greater precision and coordination.
- Optimized for Mobile Use: Enables AV teams to adjust rack elevations and update layouts directly from tablets, eliminating the need for a laptop.
- Automatic Version Control: Unlike AutoCAD, X-DRAW’s semantic difference algorithm tracks all changes and auto-merging updates and maintains revision histories that are critical for ISO audits and compliance.
For AV professionals who value speed, accuracy, and effortless collaboration, XTEN-AV’s X-DRAW offers a better solution at a lower price than AutoCAD while offering unparalleled cloud-based collaboration features.
AutoCAD’s Manual Workflows: How Much Time Is Your AV Team Losing?
Manual editing of AutoCAD files of system layouts, wiring diagrams, and rack elevations is a time-consuming process for an AV professional. Every part within the AutoCAD files used for AV system design must be set with precision, signal flows have to be carefully mapped, and careful documentation is necessary to have a smooth installation. These operations are time-consuming and involve lots of effort, which can generate more opportunities for errors and delays in the project.
Traditional CAD methodologies are likely to lead to inefficiency, as the designer wastes time in making adjustments to layouts, assigning names to connections, and verifying accuracy.
Any mistake or oversight can result in time-consuming revisions and debugging at implementation time. These delays not only impact project schedules but also reduce overall productivity, leading to bottlenecks in the AV design process.
With automation integration, XTEN-AV streamlines the lengthy tasks of diagram design, AV equipment selection, proposal building, and project management with seamless team collaboration. It automates the signal flow diagram, rack elevation, BOM generation, and more, which saves a lot of time and reduces errors.
Since XTEN-AV automates these processes, AV professionals no longer have to make frequent manual adjustments at every stage of the project, reducing errors and saving time. The process is less labor-intensive, error-prone, and faster in terms of project fulfillment.
AV experts are free from monotonous CAD adjustments and focus on tweaking the system to better performance, as well as providing high-quality solutions in shorter periods and with precision.
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How AutoCAD hidden opportunity costs Holding Back Your AV Business?
Manually designing AV systems doesn’t just waste time but also prevents AV professionals from focusing on business growth and strategic opportunities. AutoCAD does not have built-in AVIXA standards compliance, which means that users have to manually implement AVIXA guidelines for system design, documentation, and performance criteria.
Without AV-specific automation, AV professionals using AutoCAD spend more time ensuring designs meet AVIXA standards, such as signal flow integrity, room acoustics, and display size calculations. These manual processes increase the risk of errors, requiring rework that delays project completion. This wasted time translates into opportunity costs, as integrators could be focusing on more strategic aspects of their business.
XTEN-AV is specifically tailored for AV professionals and integrates AVIXA guidelines into its automated processes. Auto-generated signal flow diagrams, rack layouts according to standardized norms, and auto-selection of products are in line with AVIXA-recommended best practices. Rather than manually checking for compliance, AV professionals can use XTEN-AV to make sure their designs meet industry standards, saving both time and resources.
By moving away from a one-size-fits-all tool such as AutoCAD, AV professionals are able to reduce inefficiencies, cut out manual compliance work, and get projects out faster.
With automated AVIXA-aligned templates, XTEN-AV frees AV integrators up to concentrate on innovation, client relationships, and business expansion instead of spending hours on repeat design tasks.
Conclusion
While AutoCAD is an impressive design platform, its true costs render it less than ideal for AV pros. From excessive licensing fees and training expenses to workflow inefficiencies and integration difficulties, these costs mount rapidly.
For AV professionals who need to cut costs and increase efficiency, XTEN-AV presents a wider choice. With automation designed specifically for AV, smooth integrations, and a user-friendly interface, XTEN-AV assists in streamlining design, documentation, and project delivery without surprise expenses.
