Revit can no longer be used (interactively) on more than one computer simultaneously.
FYI: This limitation appears to have been temporarily disabled by Autodesk until they figure out why some users are experiencing stability issues.
Autodesk recently implemented a new method of ensuring licensing compliance. Many are unhappy that this was not messaged more clearly, and some have experienced stability issues (both very good points/concerns).
In this post, I will share the obvious reason Autodesk implemented this and how it is intended to work (which worked as intended in my tests).
Autodesk stated the following on the forum post linked below (2/13/2025):
"We have identified an issue affecting a small group of users running Revit on certain versions of Windows. This issue causes Revit to freeze when the “device limit reached” alert appears. We are prioritizing this issue and working to resolve it as quickly as possible. Until we have fixed this issue, we have temporarily changed the device limit for Revit users to two concurrent devices."
The Problem
The obvious problem is that it is possible to have two people share a username and password, allowing multiple people to use Revit or AutoCAD at the same time on two separate computers. This is a violation of Autodesk's EULA and (from the perspective of customers playing by the rules) could give some people/firms an unfair competitive/financial advantage.
It will not affect our designers, at Lake Flato, as we work 100% in a VDI environment. They only have access to a single computer powerful enough to run Autodesk products.
You can learn a little more about our technology strategy in this Dell blog post: Dell - Designing From the Home Office
I tripped up on the new device limitation because I have a more powerful local computer on which I often run tests and provide support. My main problem was I did not understand how it was supposed to work since it was not messaged well by Autodesk (it was posted on a forum and not the official Revit blog).
I think it would be great if Autodesk allowed firms with a certain number of licenses to have a small percentage of users allowed to be designated as "support staff" (like "Admin" users) and allow them to have multiple sessions running at once (e.g., side-by-side performance or model corruption testing).
How it Works
I will share the back-and-forth dialogs I saw on two computers where I attempted to run Revit on both.
I opened a very large Revit project on Computer A that takes about 15 minutes to open with all the worksets turned on, and load all the links (thus, a good way to test the idea that one computer can be processing and not get interrupted - doing a rendering or other time-consuming process would be similar).
Then, on Computer B, I tried opening Revit and received the dialog... I clicked Pause product.
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| Computer B |
Switching back to Computer A, we see the Revit user interface is locked, but Revit is still running just fine... nothing is closed, no data is saved or lost, and the rest of the computer can still be used normally. Notice the dialog states this Revit session is paused, and the other computer/Revit session is listed and can be paused.
I needed to interact with the "Opening worksets" dailog, so I clicked Pause product to pause Computer B and be able to interact with Computer A.
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| Computer A |
Back on Computer B, we now see that this computer is paused... the model is still open and Revit is running fine, I just cannot interact with the user interface.
Since Computer A is still crunching on opening the large model, I click Pause product so I can resume working on Computer B.
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| Computer B |
Back on Computer A, we see that Revit is passed but, again, still processing just fine.
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| Computer A |
Finally, I close Revit on Computer B and then clicked Check Again on Computer A and the device limit dialog goes away.
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| Computer B |
So, for most typical users this is a reasonable solution as it is not possible to literally be using the Revit UI on two computers at the same time.
Related info by Autodesk:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/installation-licensing/remain-license-compliant-with-new-autocad-and-revit-access/td-p/13301292
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/installation-licensing/remain-license-compliant-with-new-autocad-and-revit-access/td-p/13301292
If anyone is seeing their system or Revit hang when the Device Limited Reached
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