Autodesk Vault Basic vs Vault Professional – What’s the Difference?

If you design in Autodesk Inventor, you already have access to Autodesk Vault Basic. Autodesk also offers a more comprehensive Vault Professional edition. Here’s a look at what Vault Basic and Vault Professional so, and how to decide which option is right for you.

At a glance:

Check out a full comparison chart here: Vault Basic vs Vault Professional Comparison Chart

Vault Basic

Vault Basic is entry-level data management built for individuals and small workgroups. It gives you a single, central place to store and organise your design files, so everyone works from the same up-to-date data instead of chasing scatters copies on local drives.

Everyday tasks get quicker: fast, metadata driven searching helps you find the right file in seconds, data reuse (Copy Design) saved you rebuilding work you’ve already done, and concurrent design (check-in, check-out) lets several people work on the same project at once without overwriting each other.

It fits neatly into the tools you already use, with a dedicated Add-in in Inventor, AutoCAD and Microsoft Office.

It is quick to deploy and easy to configure and administer, so there’s very little overhead to get up and running.

Vault Basic is included at no extra cost with a subscription to the Product Design and Manufacturing Collection, Inventor or AutoCAD.

Vault Professional

Vault Professional is comprehensive product data management built for teams and organisations. It builds on everything in Vault Basic and adds the control, automation and connectivity that larger teams require to manage design data at scale.

On the productivity side, advanced Copy Design and automatic part numbering take the manual effort out of everyday drawing and documentation work. The Job Processor automatically publishes PDF, DXF and STEP files in the background too, saving administrative overhead that the engineers would otherwise be responsible for.

Collaboration steps up too. Customisable permissions and data classification govern who can see and change what, while item and BOM management, revision history, lifecycle states, engineering change orders (ECOs) and design review and markups give you a complete, auditable record of how each design evolves.

It’s built to grow with you, adding data archiving and multisite support to keep performance steady as your data expands.

It connects the wider toolchain – Fusion Manage (PLM), Revit, Fusion, Forma, Vault Data APIs, ERP integrations – so Vault sits at the centre of how your organisation designs, reviews and releases work.

Which one should you choose?

If you are working solo or in a small team and mainly need to organise and find your design files, Vault Basic covers those needs, and is already included with your subscription. If you are managing data across a team or organisation, with formal revision control, engineering change orders, or linked to PLM and ERP systems, Vault Professional is the upgrade worth making.

Not sure which edition fits your workflow? Get in touch and we’ll help you decide.

In my next blog, I will be focussing on some of the Vault Professional functionality we have highlighted here, including managing CAD files directly within the CAD application, searching and reusing existing CAD data, and managing files throughout the design lifecycle.