Autodesk, best known for its AutoCAD line of products, purchased Revit Technology Corporation for US $133 million in 2002.

With their Revit platform, Autodesk is a significant player in the BIM market together with Tekla Structures, Trimble, Bentley Systems and the Nemetschek group (owner of Graphisoft's BIM application ArchiCAD, plus solutions including Allplan and Vectorworks), among others.

Two key differences in Revit were that users created parametric components in a graphical "family editor" rather than a programming language.

[4] For example, moving a wall updated neighboring walls, floors and roofs, corrected the placement and values of dimensions and notes, adjusted the floor areas reported in schedules, redrew section views, etc.—so that the model remained connected and all documentation was coordinated.

The concept of bi-directional associativity[5] between components, views and annotations was a distinguishing feature of Revit for many releases.

The software progressed rapidly, with version 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 4.0 and 4.1 released in August 2000; October 2000; February 2001; June 2001; November 2001; and January 2002, respectively.

Licensing was controlled by an entirely automatic process, an innovation at a time when human intervention and manual transmission of authorization codes was required to buy other types of design software.

[9][10] In 2011 Dynamo[11] was released in beta form allowing first glimpses of directly programming the behavior of hosted components through a drag and drop node interface.

Revit is available in multiple language localizations: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

These fall into three groups: An experienced user can create realistic and accurate families ranging from furniture[17] to lighting fixtures,[18] as well as import existing models from other programs.

This lets users modify a given component by changing predefined parameters such as height, width or number in the case of an array.

The workflow is similar to the use of a version control system in software engineering, that allows multiple developers to reliably collaborate on a common code base.

Since Revit's 2010 release, the software came with a plethora of predefined materials, each of which can be modified to the user's desires.

Revit models may also be linked directly into Autodesk 3ds Max (release 2013 and later) for more advanced rendering and animation projects with much of their material and object information maintained.