About once a quarter someone asks me on a call whether Specifi replaces D-Tools. The honest answer is no. The longer answer is that the question itself is doing too much work, because "AV system design" means three different things depending on who is asking. Here is how I think about the layers and where we sit inside them.
Three layers, not one product
AV design output, on a real job, lives in three layers:
- Layer 1 (proposal-embedded design): Room layouts, the bill of materials, cable schedules, basic wiring schematics. The drawings a homeowner sees and signs against. The drawings a residential install crew works from on day one.
- Layer 2 (engineering CAD): Rack elevations, line drawings, conduit routing, plate-by-plate wall plans, structural calculations. The drawings an architect, a GC or a commissioning engineer reviews. The drawings a commercial integrator has to produce.
- Layer 3 (programming and commissioning): Control code, room calibration, system test reports, sign-off documentation. Different tools again.
Specifi owns Layer 1 inside the proposal. We do not own Layer 2 and we have no intention to. We help with Layer 3 through the project management surface but we are not the programming tool either.
What Specifi actually produces inside a proposal
When you build a proposal in Specifi, the design output is generated alongside the line items, not after them. Specifically, you get:
- Room-by-room layouts with the products dropped into the right space, so the client sees a TV in the family room and a multi-room audio block in the kitchen, not just a flat product list.
- A cable schedule built from the products and rooms, so the installer knows the run lengths and the cable types before the first wire is pulled.
- Wiring schematics for the system block diagram, generated from the same data the bill of materials is built from.
- A bill of materials tied to live supplier pricing through the product catalogue, so the proposal reflects the actual cost of the actual SKUs on the actual day you sent it.
That is enough drawing output for the vast majority of residential AV jobs. It is not enough for a commercial bid where an architect needs a rack elevation. For that, you use a Layer 2 tool. That has always been the architecture.
How the two tools work together
The integrators we work with who run both Specifi and a Layer 2 design tool tend to follow the same workflow. The system designer drafts the engineering drawings in their CAD tool, exports the bill of materials, and the operations side imports that BOM into Specifi as the starting point for the proposal. Specifi then owns the rest: the client-facing document, the project, the inventory pull, the invoice, the accounting sync.
The drawings stay with the design tool because that is the system of record for them. The business workflow stays with Specifi because that is the system of record for everything else. Neither tool needs to pretend to be the other.
Specifi owns the proposal layer of design. D-Tools owns the engineering layer. The integrators who run both are the integrators who have stopped trying to make one tool do every job.
Matthew, Founder
When you can use Specifi alone
Plenty of residential integrators run Specifi on its own without a Layer 2 tool, because the work is mostly retrofit, mostly single-family-home, and the architect-grade rack drawings just do not need to exist. The cable schedule, the wiring schematic and the room layout that Specifi produces are enough to scope the job, win the job, and install the job.
The line I draw with people is: if you need a drawing that has to satisfy a third party (an architect, a GC, a city inspector, a structured-cabling spec doc), use a Layer 2 tool. If the drawing only has to satisfy the client and the installer, Specifi handles it.
Where this is going
The roadmap is to keep deepening Layer 1 (more layout templates, richer cable schedules, better mobile-first drawing review through the field app) and to keep doing nothing about Layer 2. The category is well served. We are not in it. If your business needs both, run both. If you only need Layer 1, we can show you ours and you can decide.