The Complete Guide to Deploying Revit Add-ins Across a Firm (2026)

Building a Revit add-in got easy. Getting it onto eighty machines across three offices, on four different Revit versions, without IT filing a ticket about you: that stayed hard. A user on the pyRevit forums put it plainly while trying to roll out tooling to their firm: "the deployment process for this is wild (for an AEC firm, in my opinion)." Another, fighting SCCM, asked "what hope do I have of automating the install?" This guide covers every real method, including the ones that don't involve us, with the tradeoffs the vendor pages skip.

First, the thirty seconds of theory you need

A Revit add-in is a .NET assembly (one or more DLLs) plus an .addin manifest file that tells Revit to load it. Revit looks for manifests in two places: per-user (%AppData%\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\<version>) and per-machine (C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\<version>). Note the <version> in both paths. Every deployment method below is ultimately a way of getting the right DLLs and manifest into the right one of those folders, per user, per machine, per Revit version. That version dimension is why firm-wide deployment is a matrix, and the matrix is why everything hurts.

Method 1: Email plus "install this"

You zip the files, email the office, and hope. Cost: zero. Control: zero. Within a month you have four versions in circulation, no idea who runs what, and a support burden that arrives as screenshots. This is the most common deployment method in the industry, which tells you everything about the state of the tooling layer. Fine for a two-person experiment; negligent past that.

Method 2: The network share

Point the .addin manifest at DLLs sitting on a shared drive, and every user loads the same binaries. One update location. It feels elegant until the first deadline day when the file server hiccups and Revit hangs on startup for the whole office, or Windows locks the DLL because someone has Revit open while you are trying to update it. Loading executables over the network is also exactly the pattern modern security tooling flags. Workable for small, single-office firms with a patient IT person; brittle everywhere else.

Method 3: pyRevit and the pyRevit CLI

If your tooling is Python-based, pyRevit is the community's answer, and it deserves respect: the project shipped five releases in the first half of 2026 and supported Revit 2027 within weeks of its April release, faster than several paid vendors. The CLI supports clone-based deployments for teams, which real firms use successfully.

The honest costs. pyRevit is interpreted scripting inside Revit, so IT sees an unsigned runtime executing arbitrary code: users report antivirus tools (SentinelOne, by name, in the project's own issue tracker) blocking it until IT grants exceptions, Autodesk updates occasionally break or remove installs, and installing via SCCM without admin rights on locked-down Windows 11 machines is a documented struggle. A 300-400 person firm evaluating exactly this asked the forum how to deploy pyRevit at company scale; the maintainer's honest answer included the phrase "get IT comfortable... Not fun." Add the sustainability question: the project that thousands of firms depend on runs on volunteers and roughly $3,000 a year in donations, per its public Open Collective. Superb for technical teams with an owner; a governance conversation waiting to happen at enterprise scale.

Method 4: SCCM or Intune

The enterprise-correct answer: package the add-in as an MSI, push it silently through the endpoint management IT already runs. Silent installs, version targeting, uninstall on command. This works, and large firms do it. The catch is friction and cadence. Every add-in update becomes an IT ticket, a repackaging job, and a deployment window. When your BIM team ships fixes weekly and IT deploys monthly, the tooling calendar loses. In practice, SCCM deployment reserves internal tools for the annual big-bang update, which quietly kills iteration.

Method 5: Autodesk's own admin tooling

Revit 2025.4 added an Admin Add-ins Manager that gives IT some centralized control over which add-ins load. It manages what is already installed; it is not a distribution pipeline, it only helps on recent Revit versions, and it does nothing for versioning or telemetry. Worth knowing about, not a strategy. Autodesk's new Design and Make Marketplace, previewed at DevCon 2026, is a commercial distribution channel for vendors, which is a different problem from deploying your firm's private internal tools.

Method 6: A managed deployment platform

This category (Conduit is one) treats internal tools the way modern software teams treat software: a central place where tools are versioned, and a lightweight runner on each workstation that installs, updates, and reports. Deployment becomes a decision instead of a project: pick the tool, pick the team, and it appears in everyone's ribbon, with per-version builds handled by the platform, one-click rollback, and runtime errors flowing back to whoever owns the tool instead of dying in a user's screenshot folder.

The honest tradeoffs here too: you are introducing a vendor into your toolchain, which means a security review (ask us, or any vendor, where the code runs and what leaves your network, in writing), and platforms generate and manage well-understood tool patterns; genuinely exotic builds still belong with specialists.

The maturity checklist

Whatever method you pick, firm-grade deployment answers yes to these seven questions. Score your current setup:

Email scores zero of seven. A well-run SCCM setup scores four. If you scored five or better with any method, you are ahead of roughly the entire industry, and we mean that literally: in the surveys we have seen and the hundred-plus conversations behind this guide, "email plus shared drive" remains the default.

Choosing by firm profile

Under 20 people, one office: a network share plus discipline is defensible. 20-100 people with a technical owner: pyRevit CLI if you are Python-native and IT is friendly; a managed platform if you want out of the maintenance business. 100-500 people, multi-office: this is where the matrix (users × offices × Revit versions) breaks every manual method, and where either serious SCCM investment or a platform stops being optional. Enterprise: you already have SCCM; the question is whether your BIM team's iteration speed survives it.

Conduit deploys compiled Revit add-ins and ACC apps to your whole team with versioning, rollback, and runtime telemetry built in. See how deployment works, or start with the tool you already wish was on everyone's machine.