Bentley View — The Complete Guide: Free Viewing of DGN, DWG and IFC Files

On road, rail and infrastructure projects, drawings often arrive in MicroStation’s DGN format. Bentley View is the free viewer from Bentley Systems that opens them — along with more than 50 other formats — without a MicroStation licence. It installs on Windows from Bentley’s software downloads site.

Bentley View

Bentley Systems

Free CAD viewer for DGN, DWG, DXF, IFC and iModel files — view, search, measure and print drawings and models.

Get it from the vendor

What you get

DGN and more — DGN, DWG and DXF, IFC and iModel in one viewer.
Point clouds and reality meshes — viewing scans and photo-based models.
Navigation and search — moving through the model and finding elements and their properties.
Measurement — distances and areas directly on the drawing or model.
Printing — producing sheets from the files you received.

Who it suits

Engineers, inspectors and reviewers who receive drawings from infrastructure and transportation projects and only need to look, measure and print. It is a viewer only, with no editing, and runs on Windows only. Paid enterprise licensing with support exists, but the viewer itself is free.

Related tools

For viewing AutoCAD DWG files — DWG TrueView. For IFC models with checks and properties — BIMvision. For cloud viewing of dozens of formats — Autodesk Viewer.