Accubid vs IntelliBid vs McCormick
A sourced comparison of the five platforms electrical estimators actually shortlist — plus the ownership, pricing and packaging facts that are hard to find anywhere else.
Every figure on this page comes from vendor documentation — product pages, datasheets, install guides, release notes, help centres and acquisition announcements. Where a vendor does not publish something, this page says so rather than repeating a number from an aggregator. Several widely circulated figures for these products are directory fields or algorithmic estimates, and some are demonstrably wrong.
Aginera makes one of these products. We have tried to be straight about where the incumbents are genuinely stronger, because a comparison that does not admit that is not worth reading.
Start here: none of the incumbents is independently owned
This is the fact most buyers do not have, and it changes how you read every other row. The electrical estimating market has consolidated into four holding companies.
| Parent | Products | Acquired |
|---|---|---|
| Trimble | Accubid Classic, Accubid Anywhere, LiveCount | Aug 2010 |
| JDM Technology Group | ConEst IntelliBid, Electrical Bid Manager, JOBPOWER | Feb 2017 and Jan 2017 |
| Foundation Software (Thoma Bravo) | McCormick, The EDGE | May 2021 |
| Valsoft / TAG Software Group | Countfire | Jun 2026 |
If you are comparing IntelliBid against Electrical Bid Manager, you are comparing two products with the same parent company. JDM acquired Vision InfoSoft on 31 January 2017 and ConEst on 28 February 2017, four weeks apart. Both still operate as separate brands, from Carlsbad, California and New Hampshire respectively, and JOBPOWER — listed as an accounting integration for both — is a third JDM company.
Consolidation is not automatically bad. JDM publishes a stated policy that it does not end-of-life acquired products, and ConEst has itself kept acquiring, buying Cert-In Software Systems in October 2025. Valsoft runs a long-term hold model and said Countfire will continue operating autonomously. But it does mean the roadmap question — will this product still be invested in five years from now? — is a question about a holding company, not about the vendor whose name is on the software.
The comparison
| Platform | Owner | Published price | Takeoff | Deployment | Labor units | Drawing formats |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Trimble Accubid Classic · Anywhere · LiveCount | Trimble (acquired Aug 2010) | Not published | Included (LiveCount) | Windows desktop; hosted virtual desktop; Anywhere is cloud | Documented NECA update path; six labor columns | PDF, TIFF |
ConEst IntelliBid IntelliBid · SureCount · CE Cloud | JDM Technology Group (Feb 2017) | Not published | Separate product (SureCount) | Windows desktop; CE Cloud is hosted desktop | “Industry standard” units; NECA not claimed | PDF, JPG, TIF, BMP, CPC |
McCormick McCormick · Design Estimating Pro | Foundation Software, Thoma Bravo–backed (May 2021) | Not published | Included | Windows on-premise or hosted | NECA, PHCC, MCAA referenced | PDF, DWG, DXF |
Electrical Bid Manager EBM Standard · Plus · Pro | JDM Technology Group (Jan 2017) | $1,549 / $2,749 / $4,549 | Not included — paid plug-in | Windows desktop only | NECA MLU 2023–2024, six columns | Via plug-in: PDF, JPG, TIFF, CAD |
Countfire Takeoff · Estimate | Valsoft / TAG Software Group (Jun 2026) | Not published | Is the takeoff product | Browser-based, PC and Mac | Bring your own price list | PDF only; no auto-count on scans |
Aginera DesignOps Takeoff · BOM · Estimating | Kamna Ventures, LLC — independent | Free tier · $299/user/mo · credit packs | Included | Cloud; private/self-hosted for Enterprise | Rate engine and price library; no NECA MLU | PDF (vector and scanned), DWG, DXF |
Aginera row highlighted for disclosure, not ranking.
The question that changes the price: is takeoff included?
Estimating platforms and takeoff tools are sold as if they were one category, and they are not. Two of the products here require a second purchase before you can count anything on a drawing.
- Electrical Bid Manager includes no on-screen takeoff. Its takeoff modules are structured quantity-entry screens. Digital takeoff requires PlanSwift, On-Screen Takeoff or eTakeoff, plus a premium add-on plug-in — a third-party licence and a plug-in on top of the $1,549–$4,549 published price. Neither the plug-in nor the Audit Trail module is priced publicly, so the published figures are not the all-in cost.
- ConEst sells SureCount separately from IntelliBid. It is not bundled into Standard, Plus or Pro. SureCount is genuinely good — its patented Auto Count is the only one here that counts every symbol type on a drawing simultaneously rather than one at a time — but it is a second product, a second application, and a second line item.
- Trimble bundles LiveCount into Accubid Anywhere and Accubid Classic Estimating Essentials, with a live bi-directional link so counts and lengths flow both ways without an import step. That link is the most substantive technical advantage in this comparison.
- McCormick includes takeoff in one platform and markets that against ConEst directly. Its patented Auto Home Run, which automates homerun circuit routing, is repeatedly singled out by its own users as the standout feature.
Pricing transparency
Of the six platforms here, two publish a price. Everything else requires a sales call.
- Electrical Bid Manager publishes $1,549 Standard, $2,749 Plus and $4,549 Pro. The Audit Trail module is quoted separately. Genuinely unusual in this market, and worth credit.
- Trimble publishes no software price for any Accubid product. It does publish training course prices, from $695 to $3,065 per course — and the existence of dedicated database-management courses tells you something about setup effort.
- ConEst publishes no pricing, only periodic discount promotions.
- McCormick has never published pricing — a check of its site history back to 2001 returns no pricing page at any point.
- Countfire redirects its pricing page to a contact form and blocks it from crawlers in robots.txt.
- Aginera publishes a free Starter tier, credit packs from $50 for 1,000 credits that never expire, and Professional at $299 per user per month.
A warning about the numbers you will find elsewhere. Aggregator listings for these products contain errors we could verify: one lists a Windows-only desktop application as available on “Web, Android, iPhone/iPad”, another shows a starting price of $1.00, and a third renders a perpetual licence as a monthly per-user fee. Algorithmic pricing estimates for the same product contradict each other across pages of the same site. If a price for Accubid, IntelliBid or McCormick appears anywhere without a vendor source, treat it as unverified.
How much of the counting is actually automated
“AI” is doing heavy lifting in this category’s marketing. Here is what each vendor documents.
Trimble LiveCount — real, but narrow
Two separate mechanisms. Auto Count is a patented user-seeded pattern search: you select a symbol, it finds similar ones. Separately, LiveCount ships genuine pre-trained detection — but the documented classes are receptacles, switches, fire alarm devices and automatic scale detection. It is also licence-gated to named-user and hosted subscriptions, so legacy perpetual on-premise seats are not covered. Conduit runs, feeders and equipment schedules remain manual.
ConEst SureCount — template matching, done well
Branded as symbol recognition rather than AI, and that is accurate. Its distinguishing feature is counting all symbol types simultaneously. ConEst announced an AI assistant in December 2025 but explicitly declined to publish specifications or timelines.
McCormick — announced, not shipped
McCormick’s own AI statement places AI-assisted symbol detection in development, three to eight months out at the time of writing. Today’s shipping automation is deterministic symbol counting plus the patented Auto Home Run. Worth separating the two: users praise Auto Home Run specifically while criticising generic auto-count reliability.
Countfire — explicitly not AI, and it says so
Countfire matches PDF vector geometry against a symbol you select. Its own documentation states the algorithm will not automatically match symbols that are rotated, use different line widths or different colours, and that you should expect four to five selections per symbol description. Most importantly: automatic counting does not work on scanned or image PDFs at all — there is no OCR and no raster fallback, and manual counting is the documented workaround.
Electrical Bid Manager — none in product
Vision InfoSoft claims no auto-count or symbol recognition in EBM itself. Any automation comes from whichever third-party takeoff tool you license alongside it.
Where Aginera fits
Aginera is a different shape of product. Rather than accelerating a manual takeoff, it classifies every sheet in a plan set individually and extracts each one against a schema written for that specific drawing type — 86 drawing types plus an explicit unknown fallback, so a sheet that doesn’t match a known type is flagged rather than force-fitted.
Where it is genuinely different
- • Reads scanned raster sheets through vision — Countfire cannot auto-count these at all
- • Accepts DWG and DXF natively, alongside vector and scanned PDF
- • Covers trades the others do not: steel grating and fabrication, refrigeration, structural schedules, fire alarm and sprinkler, ductwork
- • Free tier and credit packs that never expire — buy against projects, not seats
- • Private, self-hosted deployment for Enterprise, so drawings never leave your network
- • Custom model training on your own drawing conventions as an Enterprise engagement
Where the incumbents are stronger
- • Labor units. Aginera has a rate engine and price library but no licensed NECA Manual of Labor Units. If your bidding is built on NECA, PHCC or MCAA units, Accubid, McCormick and EBM have decades of that data
- • Bid-day closing tools. Accubid’s live extensions, labor-to-material ratios and cost-per-system breakdowns are mature in a way newer tools are not
- • Supplier pricing feeds. TRA-SER, EPIC and NetPricer integrations represent real vendor-owned pricing operations
- • Downstream workflow. Accubid and McCormick carry an estimate into purchasing, change orders and project management
The honest summary: if your estimating process is built around NECA labor units and a mature bid-day workflow, the incumbents earn their position. If your bottleneck is the hours spent counting devices and reading schedules off a large plan set — particularly a scanned one, or a multi-trade one — that is the part Aginera automates, and it will feed quantities into whatever you price with.
Five questions worth asking any vendor here
- Is takeoff included, or is it a second licence? Two of these require a separate purchase, and the published price is not the all-in price.
- What exactly does the automated counting recognise? Ask for the list of trained classes, or whether it is template matching against a symbol you select.
- What happens on a scanned drawing set? Several of these tools degrade to fully manual counting on raster PDFs.
- Is “cloud” a browser application or a hosted Windows desktop? For most products here it is the latter, which carries different bandwidth and device requirements.
- Who owns the company, and what is the roadmap commitment? Every incumbent here is inside a holding company, and one vendor’s own datasheet describes a different product as the future of its estimating line.
Frequently asked questions
Is IntelliBid or McCormick better for electrical estimating?
They differ most in how takeoff is packaged. McCormick includes digital takeoff in the same platform as the estimate, with a patented Auto Home Run feature for homerun circuit routing. ConEst IntelliBid sells takeoff separately as SureCount, whose patented Auto Count is unusual in counting every symbol type on a drawing simultaneously rather than one at a time. McCormick publishes labor units referenced to NECA, PHCC and MCAA; IntelliBid ships what it calls industry-standard labor units and does not market a NECA licensing relationship. Neither publishes pricing. Both are Windows applications with hosted-desktop options rather than browser-native products.
Who owns Accubid, IntelliBid, McCormick, Electrical Bid Manager and Countfire?
None of them is independently owned. Trimble acquired Accubid in August 2010. JDM Technology Group acquired Vision InfoSoft, maker of Electrical Bid Manager, on 31 January 2017 and ConEst, maker of IntelliBid, on 28 February 2017 — so those two competing products share a parent. Foundation Software acquired McCormick in May 2021, and Foundation is itself a Thoma Bravo portfolio company. Valsoft, via its TAG Software Group subsidiary, acquired Countfire on 5 June 2026.
Which electrical estimating software publishes its pricing?
Almost none. Vision InfoSoft publishes list prices for Electrical Bid Manager: $1,549 Standard, $2,749 Plus and $4,549 Pro, with the Audit Trail module quoted separately. Trimble, ConEst and McCormick publish no software pricing at all — McCormick has never had a pricing page in its site history. Countfire actively blocks its pricing page from crawlers via robots.txt. Figures circulating on aggregator sites for these products are directory fields or algorithmic estimates, not vendor-confirmed, and several are demonstrably wrong.
Does electrical estimating software include takeoff, or is that a separate purchase?
It varies, and it is the most consequential thing to check. Trimble bundles LiveCount into the Accubid Anywhere and Accubid Classic Estimating Essentials subscriptions. McCormick includes digital takeoff in its platform. ConEst sells SureCount as a separate product from IntelliBid. Electrical Bid Manager includes no on-screen takeoff at all — it links to PlanSwift, On-Screen Takeoff or eTakeoff through a premium add-on plug-in, meaning a third-party licence plus the plug-in on top of the published price. Countfire and Aginera are takeoff-first products.
Which of these tools actually uses AI, and how much of it is automated?
Less than the marketing suggests, and the distinctions matter. Countfire is explicit that it is not AI: it matches PDF vector geometry against a symbol you select, and its documentation states it cannot automatically match rotated symbols, different line weights or different colours, and cannot count on scanned image PDFs at all. ConEst SureCount is template-based symbol recognition. McCormick has announced AI symbol detection but its own AI statement places it in development, three to eight months out. Trimble ships genuine pre-trained detection in LiveCount, but the documented classes are receptacles, switches, fire alarm devices and automatic scale detection, and it is licence-gated to named-user and hosted subscriptions. Everything beyond those classes is manual or user-seeded pattern search.
What does Aginera do differently from these platforms?
Aginera classifies each sheet in a plan set individually and extracts it against a schema written for that specific drawing type — 86 drawing types plus an explicit unknown fallback, covering electrical, mechanical, HVAC and ductwork, plumbing, structural, steel grating, refrigeration, fire alarm and sprinkler. It reads scanned raster sheets via vision rather than requiring vector PDFs, accepts DWG and DXF natively, publishes its pricing, offers a free tier and pay-per-project credit packs, and can be deployed inside a customer’s own infrastructure for Enterprise accounts. What it does not have is a licensed NECA Manual of Labor Units database, which is exactly what the incumbents on this page have spent decades building.
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